If you’ve ever taken the SAT, ACT, or any variety of graduate school admissions exams, you’ve undoubtedly heard of The Princeton Review. It’s been one of the largest test preparation companies for years, and is almost a rite of passage for many in their teenage years.
You may be thinking, “why would a company that specializes in preparing students for high-stakes exams need an outside quiz platform?” Well, The Princeton Review prides itself on being exam-like, meaning they mimic the actual exam experiences for the particular tests for which they offer courses. And this is highly effective and desirable for those needing test prep.
However, The Princeton Review was out to solve a different problem. Millions of students and adults take admissions exams every year and many of them hit The Princeton Review website for a variety of reasons: test prep course product information, insights into the admission process, data on schools, career advice, and more. Each one of them is at a particular stage of the customer lifecycle.
The challenge was getting to know this audience more deeply; attract more of them; have them interact with The Princeton Review’s content in a more meaningful way; surface insights into their behavior and mindset to better qualify for the sales team.
The Princeton Review is well known for its amazing content—from strategic advice on high-stakes exams and how to best position yourself for admissions to school data and even the list of the nation’s Top Party Schools.
For us, the opportunities were clear. First, let’s take this great content and present it in an interactive, more engaging way for users. What’s great about The Princeton Review is that their target audience is already in “question mode.” They’re facing uncertainty about admission to college or graduate school and how they’ll achieve the test scores and create the admission package that gains them admission to their dream schools. These folks are inherently primed to want to know “What don’t I know?” and “How do I stack up against my peers?”. So, “quizifying” The Princeton Review’s content created a natural, more engaging experience for their audience. It draws new prospects in and creates an opportunity to actively engage with them.
The goals here were pretty straightforward:
The Princeton Review already had crack marketing, web, and content teams at the ready to take full advantage of the CredSpark platform. After initial training, they really took it and ran with it.
The Princeton Review team has created scores of quizzes, customized to their various product lines and target audiences. They’ve integrated them at key user entry points on their site to grab user attention and guide them through the quiz-themed funnel. In addition, they’ve harnessed The Princeton Review’s significant search, social, and email efforts to amplify awareness and drive additional traffic to the quizzes.
Most importantly, The Princeton Review had a clear vision of what they wanted to the CredSpark platform to achieve and they marshaled the appropriate people across their marketing, sales, content development, and technology teams to add their input and insights and make the effort a big success.
The Princeton Review has been bowled over by the results of integrating CredSpark interactive content experiences into their web properties.
CredSpark became a significant driver of revenue for The Princeton Review right off the bat. CredSpark has enabled us to engage our audience more effectively and conversion rates are up. Best of all, CredSpark provides an interaction with us that our customers enjoy, making the transition to leads and then purchasers feel seamless and organic.
