Our first client from Africa, our first ed-tech client. Lots lessons learnt.
Our client is among the biggest players in the ed-tech space in Tanzania, with courses tailored for the Tanzanian schools and syllabus. The company founded by Indians have a lion’s share in the market and is now expanding to other countries in the African continent.
The client had a great time, leisurely selling their product suite to schools and colleges. Just when things were looking positive till COVID hit. The B2B sales took the hit and the business went almost dormant, with schools and colleges closed. The learning app was the outcome of a pressing necessity to keep the schooling going, for kids in the K-12 age, when vaccines weren’t ready yet.
Being in the B2B space, they were struggling to get into the B2C segment and was trying everything they could to get parents to sign up for the service.
Every time a pitch was made to a parent, the client was hastily shot down with the reason that the subscription was expensive. Even with the best learning material they were trying too hard to break the ceiling.
Our team went through the course material at 2x speed and in 4 days, we completed 4 classes and we advancing to the 8th grade(despite the fact that none of us understood Swahili) The lessons were good and explained concepts to the last detail.
We had a mammoth task in hand. To plan, create, optimize and scale a product awareness/education funnel so good that parents would line up to buy.
Another challenge we had was the government planning to reopen schools that made it harder to deliver the results in a very short notice.
The sales funnel was put together in 2 days and Facebook ads was put to use, along with news mentions in the major media outlets gave it traction. The organic traffic from media mentions was retargeted and in 5 days, we had 160+ leads for the sales team to demo. The funnel had a free lesson and orientation video for the parents.
What surprised us was the closure rate. While the cost per lead stood at about INR 40, the average sale value per subscription was around INR 16000 in Tanzanian Shillings. Out of the 160 leads generated in the first week, the conversion rate hovered around 30%.
The sales run continued till schools reopened and classes went back to normal, for the next 4 months.
With education going back to normal and adjusting to the new normal in Tanzania, the collab has transformed into a regular lead generation service for their alternate products.