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.
