Discover how Blueberry transformed Artis Education's outreach with a strategic telemarketing campaign, achieving a remarkable £3.60 return for every £1 spent. In a challenging educational landscape, our approach exceeded expectations, offering valuable insights for similar organisations.

Artis Education provides specialist performing arts education in schools across the UK – working with more than 50,000 children every week.

The company sets itself apart from competitors by integrating performing arts into the core curriculum subjects.

This allows schools to offer pupils enhanced arts education without taking time away from curriculum delivery.

WHAT THEY NEEDED

Artis Education has experienced steady year-on-year growth and wanted to continue to expand their customer base. They used a range of marketing channels – from direct mail and email marketing through to exhibitions and events – to generate leads for its regional sales team; however, historically they found that telemarketing had not proved as fruitful.

Personnel changes earlier in the academic year had left Artis Education short of their new business targets for the year, and by the beginning of the spring term, they had a limited time left to generate leads. It was also a challenging time within the education sector – with the Institute of Fiscal Studies forecasting an overall funding cut of 7 per cent per pupil by 2020. In addition, recent education reforms have brought radical change to those selling to the education sector – creating new opportunities to sell to academies enjoying increased budgetary freedom, but at the same time disrupting established relationships as schools convert to academies and merge to form Multi-Academy Trusts. To help increase their lead generation capacity, Artis Education decided to give telemarketing another try.

Artis Education Marketing Manager, Sam Matthews, said: “We’d had some very negative experiences in the past working with other telesales companies; but Blueberry has been a breath of fresh air.”

WHAT WE DID

With the sector becoming increasingly outcome-driven and many schools facing a tough funding climate, we needed to emphasise the value of Artis Education to schools. We decided to focus on the curriculum-linked aspect of the service – using feedback from Ofsted to illustrate how it could help the school meet its core objectives and outcomes while enriching pupil experience. We also focussed on the funding streams that the school could use to meet the cost of the service (such as Pupil Premium and Sports Premium funding) – thereby getting around some of the objections based on the budget.

“The level of pre-planning and communication has been very high and that was particularly refreshing,” added Sam.

Getting the data right was essential – we segmented Artis Education’s existing datasets, using Freedom of Information data on the Pupil Premium funding levels, the number of pupils and type of establishment to prioritise the schools most likely to have the available budget. We also looked closely at the locations we targeted – mapping this against existing customers so that we could approach those schools which had local reference sites we could mention in conversation.

Within the education sector, decision-making power is generally held by the headteacher – any spending decisions need to be signed off at this level. However, these individuals tend to be highly guarded and hard to get hold of. We chose to engage with a range of influencers across the school, including subject and year group coordinators. Once onboard, we could sell up the chain directly to the headteacher. By doing this, we were able to arrange demo opportunities with more than 30 schools, ensuring that a member of the senior leadership team was available to sit in on each one. Given the nature of the sell, this allowed Artis Education to showcase what they had to offer in front of the key decision-makers at the school.

WHAT WE ACHIEVED

We began the campaign in the spring term, which could have been considered too late as many schools had already allocated budgets for the coming academic year. Despite this, we achieved a return on marketing spend of £3.60 for every £1 spent in the first year alone. This is forecast to rise by an additional 43 per cent.

Artis Education’s business model is built around long-term, retained revenue so the business already closed represents an ongoing residual return.

There also remains a solid opportunity for the medium and longer-term growth.

“The buying cycle for Artis Education can be a very long period. We imagine there will be more contracts generated this term as a result of meetings and demos secured and arranged at the end of last term,” said Sam.

While this campaign was intended as a short-term measure to help Artis Education meet their annual sales targets, it proved that telemarketing can work successfully for the company. They now include telemarketing in their marketing plans – using it as part of an integrated, multi-channel lead nurture and generation strategy.

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