Emeritus Insights is Helping Learners Upskill from Bite-Sized Insights with Storyly

Emeritus Insights is Helping Learners Upskill from Bite-Sized Insights with Storyly

Founded in 2015, Emeritus is a global leader in online education, offering short courses, degree programs, professional certificates, and senior executive programs to individuals, companies, and organizations looking to upskill leadership, business, communications, and more. As part of their focus on making top-quality education opportunities more accessible and affordable than traditional university programs, Emeritus Insights creates a subscription-based outlet for online learning with bite-sized video lessons from business best-sellers, subject matter experts, global thought leaders, top faculty, and Harvard Business Review. Users can learn from 5000+ video lessons across 50+ in-demand skills such as leadership, strategy, communication, data science, marketing, finance, and others.

Challenge #1: Email and Push Notification Blind Spots

Like many brands, the Emeritus Insights marketing team found that push notifications were easily disabled and often ignored by users and email campaigns had low success rates. The sheer volume of communications, especially emails, received daily by most users meant that Emeritus Insights email campaigns didn’t have much opportunity to cut through the noise, and only subjects and previews were reaching their audience. Emeritus Insights needed another touchpoint in their ecosystem- a way to engage with users that felt both familiar and fresh. 

Challenge #2: Showcasing Subscription Value (without Revealing too Much)

The vast majority of Emeritus Insights content is behind a paywall. However, it’s still necessary to show potential subscribers the value of their content and the ease of navigating their courses. Emeritus Insights has a higher price point than many of its competitors, so it’s essential to be able to show users the quality of its offerings. The marketing team at Emeritus Insights needed a way to show individuals who had recently downloaded the app that a subscription would grant them access to top-quality content and insights in an easy-to-digest format to streamline conversion and build their subscriber base. 

Challenge #3: Few Engagement Opportunities 

The backbone of app success is audience engagement, but online learning is inherently biased toward user-facing communications. Emeritus needed to create dialogue opportunities with users to make their content offering more effective and engaging and gather insight from their in-app audience. 

And then they found Storyly.

Solution #1: Use Stories as a Touchpoint in their Marketing Ecosystem

The mobile native nature of the Story format made it a perfect medium for reaching Emeritus Insights' customer base. Users are immediately familiar with Stories and can navigate them with ease. Soon after its launch, it became clear that business professionals appreciated the clarity, brevity, and interactivity of Stories. Emeritus Insights now uses Stories as a key touchpoint of audience communication.

Solution #2: Stories Offer Content Previews and Support Customer Lifetime Value

With Storyly, Emeritus Insights has been able to give prospective users a “sneak peek” of their content once they download the app. Without the need for orientation, the circle row of Story entry points invites users to click through and see the highlights of top content, including interviews with industry and thought leaders, key points from best-selling books on business and leadership, and insights of the day. 

Solution #3: Opening a Dialogue with Interactive Stories

The Story format opens a world of possibilities for audience communication, and Emeritus Insights has immediately seen an improvement in user engagement since integrating them into their app. Through emoji sliders, polls, quizzes, and question stickers, Emeritus Insights users can communicate their needs and preferences directly to the marketing team, giving real-time-zero data on any topic. 

With these insights, Emeritus has been able to guide its content strategy to better suit its audience’s interests and priorities, contributing to the app’s overall success. One of the most exciting aspects of this dialogue for the Emeritus Insights team is that nearly a third of users react to Stories after viewing them and the response is overwhelmingly positive for their ease of use and ability to offer complex theories and ideas in a snack-sized, mobile optimized format. 

Results

It’s been less than three months since Emeritus Insights started partnering with Storyly, but already engagement metrics are rising and the benefits of the Story format are abundantly clear. The content team has more guidance for their strategy based on audience reactions, the subscription team is able to communicate through an effective new touchpoint, and the brand’s overall growth strategy has a new entry point to the sales funnel. 

Among their favorite aspects of Storyly, the Emeritus Insights team has cited the speed at which they were able to start publishing Stories as a chief advantage, noting that internal development would have taken much longer and come at a higher expense than partnering with Storyly. They also love the ease of use of the Storyly Studio and dashboard and have been pleasantly surprised at how little time was needed to be spent orienting their team to the new program or educating them on how to create Stories and analyze insights. With Storyly, they’ve been able to learn quickly, and implement changes right away for powerful impacts– just like their clients can through Emeritus Insights offerings. 

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