Ask most organisations where their customers come from and you’ll get a shrug, or a spreadsheet nobody trusts. Gem-A, the world’s longest-established gemmology educator, was no different. Courses were struggling to fill, and it was hard to say which marketing was actually working.
The fix wasn’t a new platform or a huge campaign. It was a form.
This article explains how one well-built Register Interest form became the centre of Gem-A’s marketing, what it revealed, and how you can build the same thing for your own organisation.
The problem: interest that went nowhere
Gem-A teaches gemmology through its London headquarters, online distance learning and more than 40 accredited teaching centres, to students in over 26 countries. Plenty of people were interested in its courses. The trouble was what happened next.
Enquiries arrived by email, phone, social media and a patchwork of website forms. Some were answered quickly; others sat in an inbox. There was no consistent follow-up for people who weren’t ready to book, and no reliable way to connect an enrolment back to the ad, search or email that started it.
So every marketing decision was a guess. Should the budget go on Google Ads or social? Which courses needed more promotion? Which countries were worth targeting? Nobody could say for sure.
One form, everywhere
We proposed and built a simple Register Interest form for Gem-A’s courses, and put it on every channel: course pages, the homepage, email campaigns and paid search landing pages.
It asked for just enough to route the enquiry and follow up properly. Short forms get filled in; long forms get abandoned.
A form on its own is nothing special. What made the difference was what happened after someone filled it in.
It went straight into the CRM
Every submission landed in Gem-A’s membership CRM, tagged with the course, the channel and where the person came from. No copying and pasting, no enquiries lost in an inbox.
Gem-A’s CRM is a closed system with limited documentation, so this took some work. We built the connection ourselves and synced the data on to Mailchimp, unlocking more than 1,000 tags for segmentation.
It triggered a nurture sequence
Most people who register interest in a course aren’t ready to book that day. So instead of a single “thanks, we’ll be in touch”, each enquiry started a sequence of follow-up emails about the course, sent automatically, in Gem-A’s voice, while the person was still interested.
It fed Google Ads
Because every form submission was tracked as a conversion, Google Ads could optimise towards real enquiries rather than clicks. The campaigns got better at finding people who’d actually register, and the paid search budget stopped being a leap of faith.
It made the numbers traceable
For the first time, Gem-A could follow a lead from the ad or search that brought them in, through the nurture emails, all the way to enrolment. That turned marketing reporting from a list of activities into a clear picture of what was bringing in revenue.
What the data showed
In ten months, the forms took 2,070 enquiries from 1,447 people, leading to an estimated 140 new customers and around £275k of course revenue.
The lead analysis also changed how Gem-A thinks about its marketing:
- Google drove 69% of student sign-ups, across paid and organic search combined.
- The Google Ads campaign returned an estimated 6.6x on ad spend.
- Leads arrived daily from all over the world: the UK, the Gulf, Canada, France, Brazil and beyond.
- Course uptake rose 60% on the previous year, a joint effort between Gem-A’s team and ours.
Gem-A went from struggling to fill courses to running a waitlist.
Why it works: owning your pipeline
The lesson isn’t really about forms. It’s about owning your pipeline.
When enquiries come through your own website, into your own CRM, three things become possible:
- You can see what’s working, so budget goes to the channels that bring in customers, not just clicks.
- You can follow up in your own voice, at the right time, without relying on someone remembering to reply.
- You build an audience you own. Social platforms change their rules and ad costs rise, but a list of people who asked to hear from you keeps its value.
How to build your own
You don’t need Gem-A’s scale to do this. Here’s the approach we’d take for any organisation that sells courses, memberships, services or anything else people think about before buying.
1. Pick one form and make it the front door. Decide on a single enquiry or register interest form and put it everywhere people might want to take the next step. Consistency matters more than cleverness.
2. Ask for as little as possible. Name, email and the one or two things you need to route the enquiry. You can ask for more later, once you’ve built some trust.
3. Capture where people came from. Record the page, the campaign and the source with every submission. Most forms can pick these up automatically from the web address.
4. Send it straight to your CRM. Wherever your customer data lives, the form should feed it directly. If your CRM is awkward, that’s usually a solvable problem.
5. Follow up automatically. Write three to five short emails that help someone decide, and send them over a couple of weeks. Then let your team focus on the people who reply.
6. Close the loop. Mark which enquiries became customers, and feed that back into your reporting and your ad platforms. This is the step most organisations skip, and it’s the one that makes the rest pay off.
A quick test
If you can’t say where your last ten customers came from, start there. Pull the list, look at how each one first got in touch, and ask whether that journey could have been captured, followed up and measured.
It’s often simpler to fix than you’d think, and the payoff can be a lot bigger than a form. See how we connect websites, CRMs and data, or how we work with education and training providers.
