Case Study: Asahi Culture Center achieves faster course discovery and increased online enrollments with Sitecore

Asahi Culture Center uses Sitecore® to help students find their perfect course faster

Asahi Culture Center (ACC), one of Japan’s largest lifelong learning chains with 13 centers and some 10,000 courses every three months, faced fierce competition and very low online sign-ups. Their legacy CMS lacked integration with the course management system, had poor SEO and server stability, and made it hard for marketing staff to present attractive, targeted course content. To address these issues ACC selected Sitecore and the Sitecore Experience Platform as the foundation for a new digital marketing and CMS strategy.

ACC implemented the Sitecore Experience Platform on Microsoft Azure, integrating Azure Machine Learning for automated course recommendations and personalization (with support from partner Nextscape). The responsive site now ingests course data daily, updates high-priority info in real time, uses Sitecore to collect user logs and feed Azure ML for behavior-driven recommendations, and personalizes content by location. As a result—per ACC—page views and average time onsite have risen significantly, server stability and search have improved, and the percentage of course searches converting to online payment has increased. Sitecore’s platform also streamlined marketing workflows and accelerated testing of new tactics.

Asahi Culture Center

Makoto Aoki

General Manager Business Planning Department