1. Lighting up the Conversion Funnel
The newly-assembled BI team’s first task was to identify the cause of enrollment challenges. Without proper insight
into what was happening, the marketing and enrollment staff relied on long held beliefs and other theories not
backed by data. Once key stakeholders had access to their data using UQube’s self-service dashboards and reports,
management uncovered a conversion problem.
Key Challenges:
 Undefined conversion funnel issues
 Limited insights into the prospective student pipeline
 Difficulty integrating CRM system with student
information system
 Limited ability to attribute new enrollments to the
marketing activity that drove them
 Disconnect between Enrollment Management and
Marketing departments
Outcomes:
 UQube was a catalyst for change in moving to a
data-driven culture within the Strategic Enrollment
Management function
 UMUC’s stateside campuses increased new student
enrollment by 10%+ in fiscal year 2015
 Ability to more easily analyze historical period-over-
period trends
 Moved from measuring marketing using cost-per-
impression to cost-per-enrollment
 Reduced cost-per-enrollment
 Increased collaboration between enrollment
management and marketing departments on
marketing strategies
Customer Success Story
The University of Maryland University College (UMUC) is
one of 11 accredited, degree-granting institutions in the
University System of Maryland (USM). UMUC has been a
pioneer in distance education since 1947 and focuses on
the unique educational and professional development
needs of adult students. As an open access university,
UMUC is driven by a unique mission in the state of
Maryland.
UMUC’s marketing department found it challenging to
attribute enrollments to marketing campaigns and to
determine the effectiveness of their marketing activities.
Competitive pressures and a need to optimize marketing
spend prompted the university to actively address its ability
to measure marketing campaign performance and improve
collaboration across departments.
The university invested in new business intelligence (BI)
staff to bolster their existing data reporting and analytics
processes. Upper Quadrant was brought in to help
aggregate marketing, student, application, and enrollment
data to glean marketing-campaign insights in the enrollment
funnel.

2. UMUC found that a timely response to prospective student inquiries and
new applicants was very important. In addition to analyzing conversion
trends, the team analyzed time to convert and the impact of various
outreach activities.
Marketing and enrollment teams could now easily analyze and report on
newly combined campaign, application, and enrollment data all in one
place using UQube. As a result, marketing and enrollment management
teams kicked off a series of key initiatives that ultimately improved overall
conversion rates and increased new student enrollments.
Moving from Cost-per-Impression to Cost-per-Enrollment
At the onset of this project, UMUC’s internal marketing team partnered with
its agency to optimize marketing spend based on cost-per-impression
(CPI) metrics. This enabled them to drive down the cost of reaching their
target audience, but did not help them to understand the overall ROI and
impact of marketing spend on applications and enrollments. As UMUC
proactively shifted to a data-driven culture and gained new insights from
UQube, the marketing team was able to attribute enrollments to specific
marketing efforts, thereby shifting to an ROI-based strategy and decision
making process.
By tracking how prospects interacted with multi-channel marketing touch
points, the university evolved into using cost-per-applicant (CPA) metrics,
and eventually cost-per-enrollment (CPE) metrics as prospect students
enrolled in classes.
With the new ability to track marketing campaigns by CPA and CPE,
UMUC could now guide the marketing agency with better understanding of
ROI on specific campaign types, channels, and geographic locations.
The insights gained surrounding time-to-convert and cost-per-enrollment
combined with newly implemented business process changes, drove down
the marketing investment required to meet enrollment targets.
Ushering in New Data-Driven Culture
Over the last two years, improved business processes coupled with
UQube’s data insights have helped UMUC move from limited operational
reporting to data-driven decision-making. These changes resulted in a
10% increase in new student enrollments. Management now uses a
variety of marketing strategies and measures their impact to ensure
results.
About UQube
UQube is a cloud-based workflow, data aggregation and analytics application suite. It helps companies of all sizes to
effectively and easily manage, collaborate, and measure their business performance by putting actionable information
in the hands of business users. UQube enables users to rapidly funnel data hidden across organizational silos (CRM,
ERP, Website, Call Center, Operations, Social Media, Third Party Vendors), and perform analytics, providing the
insights required to run their business.
www.upperquadrant.com | 703.476.1992 | sales@upperquadrant.com
“Upper Quadrant
provided a solution
that UMUC could
implement quickly to
understand our
marketing metrics.
They solved a key
issue in our reporting, while my
team focused on other areas.
They are easy to work with,
dedicated to results, and I truly
value our partnership.”
- Darren Catalano,
VP of Analytics