How Quick Train Canada Exceeded Enrollment Goals by 70%

Northern co-launched the net new Quick Train program for Canadian Colleges for a Resilient Recovery, building trust and brand equity from the ground up while exceeding the initiative’s enrollment goals.

17,000

Program enrollments

70%

More enrollments than targeted

78M

Ad impressions

Industry

Retail

Technology Partners

Google

Need to Know

Northern quickly launched a new Canadian Colleges for a Resilient Recovery (C2R2) sub-brand and positioning strategy to support the changing post-pandemic Canadian workforce
Supported with ad creative, email marketing, and performance media across Google, Meta, Snapchat, Reddit, LinkedIn, and YouTube
Exceeded 10,000 enrollment goal by 7,000, for a total of 17,000 enrolled students

Client

Formed in 2020, Canadian Colleges for a Resilient Recovery (C2R2) is a coalition of fourteen Canadian colleges, cégeps, institutes, and polytechnics led by the Mohawk College of Applied Arts and Technology.

The partnership aims to support the Canadian workforce in the wake of the economic downturn caused by pandemic job losses across sectors, which continue to be compounded by the impacts of the ongoing climate crisis.

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Brief

To support economic growth while addressing the outcomes of climate change, C2R2 created Quick Train Canada.

The platform is designed to give Canadians in highly impacted sectors — environment, clean tech, agriculture, construction, transportation, and natural resources — access to 80 microcredential courses that provide them with additional training and upskilling opportunities.

Northern partnered with C2R2 to help launch Quick Train, driving program enrollment through a promotional advertising campaign strategy to drive outreach and recruitment.

Their main objective was to have 10,000 learners enroll in Quick Train courses by the campaign's conclusion.

Challenge

As Quick Train was a new program, brand awareness started at zero.

But beyond the challenge of launching a new brand, there was another puzzle to solve: correctly defining its audience and where to reach them to effectively narrow a too-broad national target group.

This required a testing phase to uncover who would most benefit from the program and which channels to use to connect with them. Developing highly resonate creative and copy positioning was also critical to reach the 10,000 learner goal in such a short timeframe.

Strategy

Because the microcredential training model is unique, defining the right audiences to drive enrollment was key to unlocking the campaign’s overall messaging and targeting strategy.

The Northern team implemented a phased approach to identify the target audiences, optimize creative based on audience findings, and increase enrollment for lower-performing courses.

QuickTrain Website About Us Page on web browser

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Phase 1: Levers Pulled - Performance Creative, Strategy Formulation, Creative Testing

In Phase 1, the team needed to test messaging to generate insights that would inform subsequent phases of the campaign.

Northern created multiple campaigns targeting different audiences, A/B testing copy and creative variations to determine the most viable path forward. One of their primary goals was to generate as many insightful takeaways as possible for the subsequent phases of the campaign.

For this phase, content was created for Meta, Snapchat, and Google paid search.

The team aimed to drive qualified traffic with a campaign structure designed to focus on supporting the three following areas:

Generating awareness to effectively reach national and geotargeted audiences while maintaining a competitive cost per thousand (CPM). Top-of-funnel Performance Creative tactics were utilized primarily on social channels to generate historical data and actionable audience insights.
Driving course consideration and enrollment conversions by actively targeting people in relevant sectors aligning with the course content.
Gathering data to optimize and iterate on a broader recruitment strategy.

Through this phase, it became apparent that messaging targeting employers (rather than individuals) was the strongest-performing. The team theorized that this was because employers were most likely to be responsible for influencing numerous registrations, over individuals who would only register for themselves.

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Phase 2: Levers Pulled - Platform Testing (LinkedIn, Snapchat, Reddit & YouTube), Brand Lift Study, Lead Generation

The strategy for the second phase was to build on the momentum from Phase 1 by putting the audience and messaging learnings into action.

Northern optimized the creative to mimic the highest performing iterations and expand into additional channels, including Reddit, Snapchat, YouTube, and email. In addition to using geotargeting to bring the Quick Train message to learners, in this phase, interest-based targeted was added to target people in relevant industries.

LinkedIn was also added to the platform list to further target employers as per the findings of the first phase.

A brand lift study was conducted to determine the impact of the campaign on users who had seen the ads vs. those who had not in terms of brand recall and total lift.

The goals achieved in Phase 2 were:

Understanding Quick Train’s relative brand awareness at the campaign mid-point.
Reaching national and geo-targeted audiences while maintaining an efficient CPM by developing a broad recruitment strategy to target regionally and Canda-wide.
Targeting people in relevant sectors based on their likelihood of completing registration.
Maximizing enrollment volume as new, large-format classes started coming online.
Investing in finding high-yield employer and human resources audiences.
Communicating with high-intent leads via email.

Phase 3: Levers Pulled - Hyper-Targeted Campaigns for Employers & Learners

By the end of Phase 2, the campaign achieved the target enrollment goal of 10,000 registrants. Going into Phase 3, the budget was reduced and the focus shifted to boosting enrollment for courses with low student numbers.
As a result, the channel mix was simplified to focus on bottom funnel tactics following the learnings from the Brand Lift study conducted in Phase 2.

In this phase, the campaign was adjusted to accomplish the revised objectives by:

Lightly refreshing campaign creative to target employers and learners with a relevant background aligned to the targeted course content.
Pausing top-of-funnel tactics
Leaning heavily on email to ensure hand-raisers received an opportunity to enroll

Results

The Quick Train campaign exceeded C2R2’s initial 10,000 person goal for enrollment by 70%, with a total enrollment of 17,000 learners over the course of the program.

Throughout the campaign, the team consistently achieved high conversion rates and maintained strong KPIs. Across all channels, there were over 635,000 visits to the course landing page, and 41,000 users showed interest in registering after visiting the Quick Train hub.

Additionally, the campaign resulted in:

78M ad impressions across all target audience segments
496.1k+ ad clicks and engagements
41k on-site conversions to institution registration pages
8k email sign ups
17k course registrations from all sources
54.6% average engagement rate

Northern's collaboration with C2R2, along with the dedication and energy from C2R2's partners, led to swift, unified actions in achieving the coalition's goal of supporting a stronger national economy.

This was accomplished by creating targeted campaigns and messaging that were continuously tailored to better engage professionals in targeted sectors. Geotargeting and interest targeting were utilized to hone in further on key sectors, and employer-specific messaging was integrated into the campaign to drive higher registrations.

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