How We Helped a School Highlight Their Culture of Progress

The Chinese American International School (CAIS) is a gem in a sea of educational choice in California’s Bay Area. Offering an immersive, bilingual education in Mandarin and English for students between age 2 and grade 8, this co-ed school caters to families far beyond cultural boundaries. 

CAIS was the first Mandarin Immersion school in the US (they’ve been around since 1981) – and they’ve been evolving ever since. This progressive community of learners blends age-old traditions and cultural influences with a modern and science-backed educational approach to deliver a unique academic experience to the families of San Francisco.

THE CHALLENGE

As more and more families seek out an academic edge for their children, more and more schools with unique offerings and differentiators have been appearing in the market. The space that CAIS once uniquely owned is becoming crowded with exciting and innovative options for families looking to set their children up with greater success in their futures.

Ahead of their move to an impressive new campus – which was once spread across three locations – and with a new program that would allow non-Mandarin speakers to join for Middle School, CAIS was looking to attract a diverse pool of right-fit families, and optimize the workload that their admissions team would be taking on as a result of this growing enrollment. Ultimately, the CAIS team wanted to reach more families – and ensure that no family would fall between the cracks.

To address both of these challenges, we put our heads together to create a powerful and attention-grabbing digital campaign to attract right-fit families to CAIS. Then, we strategized a robust email plan to guide these families all the way through the admissions funnel. 

THE CAMPAIGN STRATEGY

Our journey to developing a robust campaign began as they all do — with dedicated time to build relationships with members of the CAIS administrative, marketing, and admissions teams through kick-off calls, and stakeholder interviews. Taking the time to meet with these teams to understand their pain points, families’ pain points, and to get to know the ins and outs of the school allowed us to truly understand what makes CAIS so special. 

We gathered insights based on the questions that families have about the admissions process, the academic offerings, competitors who are infiltrating the environment, and the school’s promised outcomes, to guide our primary research. We dove deep into competitive analyses and target audiences, and built a strategy that would lay the foundation for our digital campaign team to determine the best way forward.

With an understanding of what parents are looking for in one hand, and a strong sense of CAIS’ identity in the other, we set out to create a campaign that embraced the magic of what the school has to offer – an immersive, empowering way for students to see the larger world around them.

Our campaign messaging needed to resonate with families anywhere on the path between local to the Bay Area and completely new to the Mandarin language (or Chinese culture) to families who learned English as a second (or third) language. This required us to be mindful of the fact that families were entering the admissions funnel from multiple directions, and may be in need of ultra-specific information at each stage of their customer journeys.

THE EXECUTION

Our concept – Go Further – provided a powerful platform to express CAIS as an opportunity for students to be a part of a community that would allow them to go further (both literally and figuratively) than their unilingual or traditionally-schooled peers. 

Each iteration of our campaign concept packed a balance of action and aspiration, ultimately encouraging our audiences to take the first step towards CAIS.

This campaign aimed to attract families from Early Childhood all the way through Middle School, including both families who have lived around the corner for decades and families migrating from around the world to San Francisco. Once families arrived at our landing page, we provided options for them to inquire for more information or to explore opportunities to visit CAIS in person to experience the magic of their community first-hand. 

At that point, it was time for email to shine, and usher our families through each stage of the admissions process in the most efficient and educational way.

ENTER: EMAIL

To streamline the admissions process and clarify the next steps for interested families, our team enhanced CAIS's digital (but personal) touchpoints. This began with web optimizations and a clear landing page strategy to ensure that as soon as families landed on the CAIS site, they knew exactly what to do. Recognizing the diversity in the families' needs and backgrounds, our email campaigns were carefully segmented to guide each prospective family through their unique journey.

Strategizing our workflows required us to get creative and ensure that each email was crafted  to address the specific concerns and interests of different family groups, segmented primarily by the children's prospective grade levels. This ensured that the content was not only relevant but also directly applicable to the recipient and their designated application requirements. 

Each email included specific calls-to-action, guiding families to the appropriate next step in their admissions journey. This system ensured that no family fell through the cracks, attempted to yield greater registrations for on-campus events, reduced no-shows, and ultimately increased the rate at which families complete their applications.

While automation handled the routine tasks, it also freed up the admissions team's time, allowing them to make meaningful 1:1 connections with families. This balance of technology and personal interaction exemplifies CAIS’s commitment to welcoming families into their community, making the admissions process as informative and engaging as possible.

THE RESULTS

Our collaboration with CAIS on this digital and email marketing campaign underscores the power of both tailored communications in attracting and engaging the right-fit families AND the beauty in pairing campaign & email hand-in-hand. By optimizing the journey through clear, actionable digital content and precise, targeted email, we not only enhanced the efficiency of the admissions process, but also amplified the school's ability to connect with a diverse, dynamic community who may have otherwise overlooked CAIS as an option. CAIS's progressive approach in education is now matched by its forward-thinking in digital engagement, setting a new standard for educational excellence in the Bay Area. 

In our first year, we’ve seen some incredible results:

• 68% of applications for the 2024-2025 school year came from families who engaged with our campaign and/or our email workflows at some point in their customer journey.

• During the reporting period, paid advertising drove more than 3M impressions, 27K clicks, and 197 conversions.

• We drove high numbers of families to CAIS 101 and Preschool Tours.

• 37% of users who enrolled in the Request an Application > Application Submission Email Workflow were ultimately accepted to CAIS – and this new trackable form has given us a conversion in GA4 that allows us to strategically nurture these high-application-intent users.

• Overall, we’re seeing a 75% average open rate across all emails – well above the industry average.

Metric is continuing to support CAIS in Year Two of this campaign, using data from last year to optimize performance this year – as well as highlighting the new campus, where CAIS will be welcoming students in Fall 2024.

"We were drawn to Metric as our marketing partner because they have the most robust and comprehensive ability to help us not only with research and creative, but also with actually implementing complex digital campaigns and email workflows. Metric’s simultaneous buildout of our data measurement infrastructure — which informs and nimbly recalibrates these efforts — has been a huge part of the project’s success. Metric Marketing’s expertise and bandwidth boosting have been a force multiplier for our small Admission, Communications, and Technology teams, enabling us to focus on what we do best in-house and to achieve unprecedented results. Our collaborative contacts at Metric feel more like close colleagues than remote consultants, and it’s clear they are as invested in our success as we are." 

Tim Reitz, CAIS Director of Communications

Read more case studies like this:

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• The Country Day School (King, ON)

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