Who are Portland Training?

Portland Training is a leading provider of educational courses and training across the construction & safety sectors.

Offering everything from jobseeker courses on how to get into construction, through to advanced NVQs, Portland’s qualifications list is large. Meaning learners need to be able to discover and access relevant courses through the website.

Yet with many courses funded via industry or government grants, Portland also need to ensure that applicants meet eligibility criteria.

We sat down with Head of Marketing at Portland Training Craig Shaw to identify how Leadoo has helped drive more enquiries and revenue, whilst also enabling new levels of qualification and efficiency.

Why did Portland Training need Leadoo?

Because of Portland Training’s varied course offerings, their site visitors’ needs and requirements vary dramatically. So it’s important for them to be able to find where they need to go as quickly as possible. 

The first thing you’ll see when on Portland Training’s website is a big Visual Bot asking why you’re there. From there, you can choose the type of training you’re looking for and be sent to the right destination in seconds.

Yet that initial signposting only kicks off the conversion journey. Imagine you’re a learner looking for more information on a particular course before you enroll.  

After being signposted to your relevant course, you are met with an InPage Bot neatly embedded within the course page, providing you with the info you need to make an informed decision, or helping you to get in touch with the team.

Leadoo began working with Portland in January 2023. And these quick, simple and interactive conversion journeys have helped supercharge website lead generation. 

Comparing Q4 of 2023 against Q4 of 2022 (the three months before Leadoo went live), there was a 216% increase in website leads year-on-year.

In fact, across 2023, Leadoo bots accounted for 37% of all leads received by Portland Training. So it’s clear that serving your site visitors with interactive and helpful experiences can be extremely beneficial to your bottom line.

Delivering Higher Quality Leads

But remember that it wasn’t just about lead quantity for Portland. They also needed help qualifying leads, especially around eligibility for different grants and funding.

Even before Leadoo, Portland Training already had a steady level of web traffic and inbound leads. But they were seeing a high level of irrelevant enquiries. Which was especially worrying since they were investing in paid advertising.

Actually, up to 50% of website leads they were previously receiving were unfit to move forward with.

So for Craig, having a tool that could pre-qualify those leads and save their engagement team vast amounts of time and effort in having to reach out and qualify themselves was a no-brainer. 

“We actually don’t see Leadoo primarily as a sales platform. We mostly use Leadoo to help with our inbound lead qualification.”

“We get a healthy amount of leads, but they aren’t always relevant. We have a lot of criteria our leads need to meet before we can sell. Leadoo as a tool enables us to pre-qualify these leads. So we’re now a lot more confident that if someone does complete a website enquiry, they have a good chance of ending up as an enrolled learner.”

“This, along with the ability to capture responses to Leadoo bot questions, means the leads we get from Leadoo are of much higher quality.”

With lead quality up, Craig and his team have also been confident that their traffic acquisition efforts will be rewarded. Which is important since they increased website traffic significantly across 2023, with increases from both organic and paid sources.

Unlocking Time Efficiencies

Craig explains that lead pre-qualification has been key to saving time and resource within the business.

“We have an engagement team whose job is solely to ensure that the course is right for the person applying. They check that the course is right for them and their eligibility status.”

“Before Leadoo, our team used to be swamped with ineligible enquiries. With Leadoo as a qualification tool, our engagement team only gets qualified leads. Meaning they now have more time to help & interact with learners, making sure they feel comfortable and offering a better level of support.”

What’s Next for Portland Training? 

Things are looking up for Portland Training after a full year with Leadoo onsite. Lead quantity and quality is up, the team is growing, and overall engagement across the site is high.

On Inpage bots specifically, it is consistently around 40%.
With that in mind, it’s only natural that Portland Training explore the other tools and features that Leadoo has to offer. They’re currently looking at Live Chat for online customer service purposes, and even internally, it is changing marketing process as Craig explains: 

“I’ve started to use Leadoo’s Website Analytics a lot more because it’s easier for me to pull up the stats than using GA4. And internally within my team, we’re always talking about how we could use Leadoo for this or that new thing.”

Tripling year-on-year website leads while increasing lead quality is a testament to the work Craig and his team have done.

And with Leadoo’s help, it has set Portland up in a great position for future success. 
It is also an excellent reminder that even if your product offering is technical, you can still create simple yet highly effective buying journeys for your site visitors.

Who are D-Tech and TWI

We interviewed Andrew Butcher, Head of Digital at The Write Impression, as well as Abbie Baisden, Senior Customer Success Manager at Leadoo to find out how D-Tech’s journey with Leadoo AI has gone so far, and how we managed to achieve such a significant increase in conversions.

D-Tech offers a huge host of EM, RF, RFIQ and RFID technologies for tracking, managing, protecting and forecasting demand in a number of sectors, particularly in libraries, education facilities and other businesses. Their products are designed with self-service in mind, to provide organisations such as libraries the facility to allow users to check books in and out themselves. 

D-Tech became a Leadoo AI customer through our agency partner The Write Impression (TWI). TWI is a comprehensive digital marketing agency, offering services in copywriting, PR, branding and communications, to name a few, and they work with SMEs to large international organisations. 

Initial Problems & Objectives

TWI worked alongside our Experts and the client to set out some objectives for the implementation of Leadoo:

1. To increase the number of leads received

Originally, D-Tech received around 2-5 leads a month from their site. They wanted to double this to 10 leads a month, or 120 leads a year. Most of the leads generated from the D-Tech site prior to implementation were from a static contact form. Traffic levels were good – around 2000 visitors a month, and so we’d expect to see more than 2-5 leads from this once the Leadoo platform has been implemented.

2. To be able to qualify the leads coming in

Prior to implementation, D-Tech had no way to qualify leads as they came in, and they had no way to filter out spam, from questions, from leads. This means that time was taken up in filtering through the responses that came through the static form, and then of these responses, the leads needed to be manually sent to the relevant team.

 D-Tech are a long standing client of TWI, and have recently been working with them on a whole host of improvements, including revamping their website and driving traffic to the site. They realised before too long that this wasn’t equating to more leads for D-Tech, and they realised they needed to do something more to get this client some results. In steps Leadoo AI…

Solutions Implemented

Abbie Baisden, Senior Customer Success Manager and TWI’s Leadoo expert, weighs in on the solutions implemented:

“We had a look at the site and knew a starting point would be to have something on the main page to activate and engage visitors, as well as to help and direct them,” Abbie explains, “We implemented a VisualBot on the homepage to help visitors to navigate across the site, and the bot also acts as a product selector to help visitors find what they need quickly. Originally, D-Tech had a static form on their homepage which wasn’t converting – their VisualBot is now their most converting tool on the site.”

Andrew explains their initial plan of attack: “We took the top 5 pages with the most traffic, and began with putting InpageBots on those pages to help qualify and capture leads from there.”

“In addition, we’ve implemented labelling for all visitor conversations to help sort the leads, and added flags to them to ensure they’re sent to the right teams, with the right priorities,” Abbie continues, “This was something we actually realised as a result of D-Tech having more than one domain – we were getting lots of leads via the UK site for their USA domain, and so we added these in to allow us to sort and filter the leads for the appropriate teams.”

The Incredible Results

In terms of results, D-Tech achieved some pretty astounding stuff:

The Leadoo platform was implemented in March 2021. 

In 2019 – 2020, D-Tech had 23,000 sessions, representing a significant increase in traffic from the previous years, but with very few leads being received (so few that they actually weren’t recorded for this time period!). This had still achieved their main aim at this time though, which was driving more traffic to their site.

In the 1 year prior to Leadoo  implementation, March 2020 – 2021, D-Tech had 29,698 sessions, and received 101 conversions. 

In the 1 year since implementation,  March 2021 – 2022, D-Tech has had less traffic – 28,000 sessions, yet enjoyed 653 converted leads.

That’s a 546% increase in conversions!

Of those, 211 were for their UK arm, and 316 were for their US domain. Their success for the US domain was so apparent that D-Tech have now implemented Leadoo there, too!

In their first month of implementation, they went from 2-5 leads a month, to 45, and by month 3 this had increased to 166 leads. As you can see from the numbers above, they have been able to maintain this level of lead generation without needing to increase their traffic level, which D-Tech (and TWI!) are very happy with indeed. 

At their three month check up with Abbie, D-Tech reported that their leads were continuing to rise slowly, and that they now wanted to focus on better quality. 

“We’re achieving this through changing the qualification criteria for their leads, asking more specific questions, and we also made phone numbers a mandatory field within the contact node instead of a follow-up question, for example,” explains Abbie, “Some of the leads coming through were also existing clients, so we changed the conversation pathways a bit to identify who the visitor is first – asking for their country and whether they’re a new or existing client before allowing them to proceed to the form.”

Objectives Met 

✅ To increase the number of leads received. 

Originally, D-tech received around 2-5 leads a month from their site. They’re now consistently receiving 200 leads a month, and more when you take into account those which feed into their US domain and bots. Of all the leads received in the last year, 653 converted into deals.

✅  To be able to qualify the leads coming in.

D-Tech’s leads are now labelled, sorted based on the information each lead provides and sent to the relevant team automatically. No more manual sorting of leads, and spam leads or questions are filtered out and can be dealt with appropriately.