The number of event applications quadrupled, and sales grew nearly eightfold.

Project Overview

Initiatives

Provided Business

Port Corporation operates the student-targeted media “Shukatsu-Kaigi” (https://syukatsu-kaigi.jp/) and “Career Park” (https://careerpark.jp/). These media form a population of 400,000 job hunters annually, and the company provides support for corporate recruiting and attracting customers for its human resource services.

◆Recruitment Assistance
https://careerpark-agent.jp/corporate

◆Support for Attracting Customers
https://careerpark.jp/service/

Background

We introduced LITTLE HELP CONNECT at the same time we switched from Pardot to HubSpot as our in-house MA tool, and before using LITTLE HELP CONNECT, we were using Liny, which we temporarily used together. However, we decided to consolidate our LINE operation to LITTLE HELP CONNECT because of its high degree of freedom in customization. Specifically, we liked that we could branch out the moment a student registered as a friend on LINE and send a message to each of them, and we could implement detailed automation.

There are two main purposes for using LINE. One is to send students to company information sessions, and the other is to connect them with career advisors for interviews. There are 20 people on the team in charge of sending students to company information sessions and five users of LITTLE HELP CONNECT. The remaining 15 will follow up by phone.

Utilization

To maximize the effectiveness of LINE measures, we have assigned a person in charge of each trigger design, timed distribution, and rich menu. By having a dedicated person in charge, we can quickly turn the PDCA cycle around and improve our operations.

Our previous tools could design simple segments and triggers but were not as finely customized as LITTLE HELP CONNECT. Now, we can freely create segments based on HubSpot’s CRM and even design triggers in great detail based on user actions. Not only the incoming route of friends but also page views and clicks on specific web pages can be used as triggers, so we have realized operations such as “Send a LINE to a friend 10 minutes after they click on a specific page.

We also put a lot of effort into switching rich menus. Rich menus are displayed to students and segmented by specific criteria on different days of the week. They are utilized like banner advertisements. Our designers create rich menu templates that our dedicated staff can customize at any time.

The number of LINE messages to be distributed is determined based on the number of projects requested by companies and the number of friends on the list. Since the job hunting period for students is limited, the distribution frequency maybe 5 to 6 times a day, which is much higher than the general standard. Because of the large number of deliveries, we do not send out messages indiscriminately but rather set detailed conditions and try to make the deliveries meaningful.

Unfortunately, the block rate is not low because of the large number of deliveries. However, we are working to acquire new friends at a pace that exceeds this rate, and we are not considering reducing the number of deliveries now.

What we pay attention to in our overall operations is to manage LINE in a way that is friendly to students. We value user-friendliness, so we avoid sending out messages with incendiary or vulgar content.

Benefits

Compared to email, the open rate of LINE messages is 2 to 3 times higher.

In addition, since we can send out LINE messages based on HubSpot’s CRM and workflow, once we have determined who we want to send the messages to and what kind of messages we want to send, we can put them directly into the program. As a result, the event participation rate via LINE has increased from 30% to 40%. Compared to the previous tool, the margin generated via LINE alone has increased from 1.7 million yen to 13 million yen, an almost 8-fold increase.

Another major attraction of this tool is that it is easy to measure its effectiveness. We can now check the effectiveness of each distribution and discuss daily operations while sharing our opinions as a team. In the past, we felt that it was difficult to see the effects of LINE operation, but now that we can visualize the effects quantitatively with Little Help Connect, we feel that we have expanded the scope of our efforts.

Because we achieved high LINE effectiveness through LITTLE HELP CONNECT, the number of members involved in LINE operations has now grown from one person to just under 30 people, all of whom hold concurrent positions.

Key Points of Evaluation

After introducing the system, we could link students who registered on LINE with HubSpot information relatively smoothly, enabling us to launch various measures. The introduction of LITTLE HELP CONNECT was right around October when we focused on attracting new students. Much of the students’ information already existed in HbuSpot, so we could easily link them to LINE friends using their e-mail addresses.

The post-implementation support was also very generous. We were surprised at the level of attention to detail provided by the dedicated customer support team and the regular MTG meetings. They picked up our requests through regular communication and proceeded with the modifications with a sense of speed. For example, modifying the data export format has greatly improved our man-hours.

Upcoming Initiatives

Thanks to the ability to see quantitative results on LINE, each member can now think and act independently to try out various ideas. Currently, we are working on making it possible to make reservations for information sessions from LINE.

In the future, I would like to be able to extract and analyze data from LITTLE HELP CONNECT to measure LTV. Also, it would be nice to move JSON to a visual editor. Some email tools have screens that directly manipulate code and data, and I would like to see something like that. I think non-engineers will also come into contact with code in the future, so I hope the degree of freedom to create will increase.