CUnet Adds Over 50 Features to Sparkroom Platform

New: Pricing Groups, Cap Alerts & Compliance Features Added to Sparkroom

With the recent mid-September release of a new online help system for Sparkroom, we thought that it would be timely to share with our readers a summary of the many improvements that have been added over the last year. There have been over 50 features and product enhancements to the Sparkroom Enrolment Marketing automation platform.  This has helped to maintain Sparkroom as the most widely- used inquiry management hub in the education space, with a rapidly growing adoption rate.

As a SaaS (Software as a Service) solution, the Sparkroom platform can be upgraded with customers doing nothing on their end. However, this seamlessness also means that some customers may not be fully aware of the feature updates, and they therefore may not be getting the most out of the product.

With that in mind, we thought we would take a moment to highlight some of the features — released over the last few quarters — that are making the biggest impact to our customers.

For Media Buyers

• Pricing Groups Give Schools More Control Over CPI
  A key challenge for media buyers is finding ways to effectively model complex media plans on their lead capture system. Buyers need to price differently for different campaigns and affiliates – by school, campus, or program, or by other inquiry attributes such as online vs. ground, military affiliation, or quality grade. Sparkroom’s new Pricing Groups feature enables buyers to define granular matching characteristics for inbound inquiries, and set the CPI for leads accordingly. This versatility enables buyers to implement their strategy with affiliates – for example, by setting a single CPI for some affiliates, while configuring different CPIs by program for others. And all pricing configuration feeds automatically into Sparkroom’s industry leading cost and conversion analytics.

• Cap Alerts Help Prevent Accidental Overcap
  Buyers need to keep close track of inbound lead volume day by day, understand which vendors are pacing to their allocation with quality leads and which are not, and adjust caps on the fly. Sparkroom’s alerting framework now supports Cap Alerts that enable buyers to receive email notifications when affiliates are pacing to exceed caps or are having their inquiries rejected because they are overcap.

• Post-delivery Rejection Alerts Allow Quicker Notification of Rejected Inquiries
  Buying media is not a simple transaction any more – as buyers implement different downstream solutions for verifying and evaluating inquiries, the definition of a ‘bad inquiry’ gets more complex. For example, inquiries can be accepted as good initially, then quickly scrubbed out by a verifying Call Center. If buyers do not want to pay for those inquiries, they need a way to quickly alert their affiliates when this occurs. Sparkroom’s alerting framework now supports email notifications that let affiliates know when recently submitted leads have been scrubbed by a downstream system or process.

For Compliance and Branding Officers

• Landing Page Compliance
  Increasingly, media buyers in the education space need an end-to-end audit trail for their sources, from landing page to submission to enrolment. Sparkroom’s integration with the PerformMatch™ platform from PerformLine, a leading campaign verification platform in the education market, enables compliance officers to:


• Automatically score the submission form for each web inquiry based on known best practices in private education marketing,
• Take and store a screen capture of each inquiry-generating web impression in a searchable repository for review and auditing, and
• Analyze lead providers’ relative compliance posture, identify clean and problematic vendors, and allocate budget accordingly.

For Finance

• Billable Inquiries
  While not an invoicing platform, Sparkroom is typically the system of record when it comes to end-of-month reconciliation with vendors. As inquiry transactions become more complex, it becomes increasingly important to track and understand which inquiries are billable and which are not, and to share this information with affiliates in a timely way. To help, Sparkroom now supports a Billable status for each inquiry that can be set manually, or tied to events in the inquiry lifecycle (e.g. overcap submissions, duplicate scrubs, downstream call center rejections). To support reconciliation, Sparkroom analytics now provide measures for tracking the ‘billable’ inquiry count, in addition to good inquiry counts and rejection rates.

Future Developments

With these latest improvements, Sparkroom continues to demonstrate why it is the leading platform in education inquiry management.  Much of the impetus for these recent changes came from customer feedback, and we welcome your suggestions for ways that we can further optimize Sparkroom's functionality.

If you are interested in learning more about how CUnet's Sparkroom Platform could help your organization to better manage and optimize your enrollment marketing efforts, please contact us.