Success Stories
The Ohio State University College of Arts & Sciences: Salesforce CRM & Marketing Cloud Success Story
Summit implemented Salesforce CRM, integrated Marketing Cloud, and trained OSU ASC’s team to unify data, launch multi-channel journeys, and improve prospect-to-enrollment outcomes.
Meet The Client
About The Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences
The Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences (ASC) consists of 38 Departments and Schools, 20+ Centers and Institutes, 2,000 Faculty and Staff, 81 Majors, 100+ Minors, $284 Million Budget, and $86 Million Research Expenditures. They provide instruction in 30 Languages. The ASC Marketing Department provides creative solutions to help staff connect with their audience and successfully promote their department, center, initiative, program, or event.
The Challenge: Managing Student Data and Engagement Across Systems
The ASC Marketing Department is responsible for marketing to prospective students with the goal of encouraging them to apply to OSU and major in one of the majors offered by ASC. However, the ASC marketing and admissions teams faced multiple challenges:
Limited visibility into the full prospect-to-enrollment journey. ASC Marketing sought the ability to track their results within the prospecting and recruiting cycles, as well as across multiple academic years. They wanted to establish an analytics platform that included reports and charts to visualize their prospecting and admission funnels, and track the efficacy of their efforts.
“Summer melt” risk: After a student applies and has been admitted, ASC Marketing is also challenged with ensuring an admitted student pays their fees, attends orientation, pays tuition and ultimately enrolls in classes. The reality is that a certain percentage of students who are admitted never enroll for classes, thus creating a problem referred to as “Summer Melt”.
Manual, disconnected systems that made campaign execution and analysis cumbersome. They wanted an enterprise-grade multi-channel marketing solution connected to a CRM to create marketing content and engage prospects and admits intelligently and dynamically through multiple channels, including SMS and email, using a journey builder.
No unified reporting or dashboards to track performance over time.
ASC needed more than tools; they needed a partner who could bridge data, process, and people—and transfer knowledge so the internal team could run with it. To overcome these issues, ASC turned to Summit as a trusted Salesforce Implementation Partner for help building an integrated CRM and marketing automation solution designed for higher education.
The Solution: Salesforce CRM and Marketing Cloud Integration
Summit implemented a unified Salesforce Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud solution for The Ohio State’s College of Arts & Sciences to streamline data, automate engagement, and improve visibility across the student lifecycle.
CRM Data Model & Configuration
Architected Salesforce Sales Cloud to manage prospects as Leads and admits (with application details) as Contacts and Opportunities, added hundreds of custom fields, and created custom stages to track progress through recruiting and admit processes.
Data Transformation & Loading
Because Admissions provides flat files and a full ETL isn’t feasible, Summit built an automated Excel Power Query workflow to transform files, then used the Apex Data Loader CLI so staff could load data with just a couple of commands.
Salesforce Reporting & Dashboards
Built 15+ Salesforce reports and charts to visualize funnels by gender, in-state vs. out-of-state, and regions of the world, among other criteria—making trends easy to spot and act on.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Integration
Connected Sales Cloud with Salesforce Marketing Cloud, configured a branded sending domain, and set up Journey Builder campaigns that deliver personalized messages based on each student’s stage and engagement level.
Salesforce Training & Enablement
Trained ASC staff on the CRM solution, the data-loading process, and introduced Email Studio and Journey Builder for ongoing, self-managed campaigns.
Summit’s approach unified Salesforce CRM and marketing systems into a single platform, empowering ASC to analyze trends, engage prospects dynamically, and reduce administrative effort.
The Results: Measurable Improvements in Engagement, Visibility, and Efficiency
The Ohio State University ASC Marketing Team now has a scalable Salesforce CRM and Marketing Cloud platform that unifies prospect and admit data in one place.
Multi-channel journeys enable engagement through email, SMS, and other touchpoints—driven by data and automation.
Decision points built into each journey enable the team to adapt messaging in real-time as students progress through stages.
Dynamic content personalizes every communication, ensuring prospects and admits receive messages tailored to their status and interests.
As each student’s status changes, message frequency and content automatically adjust, creating personalized, behavior-based journeys that strengthen engagement and reduce “summer melt.”
Real-time Salesforce dashboards and reports give marketing staff visibility into performance, surfacing opportunities and challenges early enough to act on them.
Historical data stored within Salesforce allows year-over-year comparisons to uncover trends and measure campaign effectiveness.
In addition, The OSU ASC Marketing Department also now has a platform that can be extended to other departments and schools within the College. This allows them to share department-specific data about recruiting and admissions with others within their College who would like to better understand the current status and engage with admitted students prior to their enrollment.
With a connected platform in place, ASC can explore predictive analytics, engagement scoring, new journeys, and broader adoption across the university.
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