Case Study: SAGU achieves enrollment growth and competes with larger universities with ActiveCampaign

How SAGU Competes Against Larger Universities

Southwestern Assemblies of God University (SAGU) is a small, private Christian liberal‑arts university in Waxahachie, TX facing the twin challenges of standing out among more than 5,000 higher‑education options and doing so on a constrained marketing budget. With limited brand recognition and an outdated email setup that lacked CRM and automation, SAGU needed a way to raise awareness, communicate its niche value, and time recruiter outreach to prospective students without overspending.

SAGU implemented ActiveCampaign to combine email, SMS, CRM and marketing automation—using lead scoring, site tracking, program‑based routing, and data‑cleaning automations (like zip‑code enrichment) to trigger timely recruiter outreach and deliver highly targeted messages. The result: higher ROI on marketing spend, more efficient follow‑up that surfaces students when they’re actively choosing schools, and operational gains (new automations are expected to save about 60 staff hours per week) while improving enrollment of best‑fit students.

SAGU

Roy Ching

Digital Marketing Manager