OET

A lifecycle program for a business that never takes an order

Lifecycle & Retention Design,
Klaviyo Migration & Strategy,
Solution Architecture

Website

oet.com

What does a lifecycle program look like for a business that never takes an order?

Picture a Klaviyo flow and most people picture the same scene: a pair of shoes left in a basket, an email arriving an hour later. It is the image the platform's best-known work has earned, but it only accounts for a fraction of what sits underneath — a customer data layer of events, profiles and properties, where an event doesn't have to be a purchase.

OET makes the case plainly. OET assesses the English proficiency of nurses, pharmacists and doctors seeking to practise overseas, and candidates sit it in dozens of countries. They aren't shopping. They're registering, booking an examination, sitting it, and receiving a result that determines whether they can work in another country.

OET's global candidate communications had been running on Salesforce Marketing Cloud — a platform that required specialist knowledge to operate, on a contract approaching its end, for a marketing team who wanted to run their own program. As Elite Klaviyo Partners, The Working Party was engaged to deliver the migration and to bring clarity to the journeys on the other side of it. Before anything could be configured, someone had to decide what a candidate's journey was actually made of.

Deciding which system gets to be right

Three systems held OET's candidate data between them — Salesforce CRM, and two booking platforms serving computer-based and paper-based examinations — and only one could be authoritative.

The intuitive approach was to integrate all three. We recommended against it. Only one of the three held the candidate record end to end; the others held fragments of it. Three integrations would have meant maintaining three versions of the truth.. Salesforce CRM was established as the single source of truth instead.

A system of record is wherever an organisation keeps the version of events that everything else defers to. For a retailer that is usually the storefront. It doesn't have to be.

That decision drew the boundary of the program in a single stroke. Booking confirmations, test-day messages and results delivery remain with the systems that own them, as transactional communications. Klaviyo carries the relationship and leaves the receipts where they belong.

Three events cross that boundary: Booking Created, Booking Status Change and Results Published, with payloads specified field by field. One characteristic of candidate behaviour shaped the design — people who book an examination do not necessarily arrive through a marketing form, so profiles are created independently of sign-up, ensuring every incoming event has a record to attach to. The Working Party defined the event model, the payloads and the development effort; OET's own data team built the Salesforce side against that specification.

Before any question of platform comes a question of authority: among the systems holding customer truth, which one governs, and which are merely passing through.

Four flows, and the one that could only exist here

Every lifecycle program is built around moments worth interrupting someone for. Here those moments are defined by a candidate's progress toward a qualification, and what rests on them is of a different order to a forgotten basket. Four flows carry them:

Destination guide nurture. Candidates who arrive through a guide to working in a particular country have already declared where they want to go, and the journey they receive reflects it.
General welcome. Candidates who arrive through a standard sign-up form are handled separately, on the reasoning that intent expressed is worth more than intent assumed.
Test preparation. Triggered on Booking Created and following up within the week, this journey reaches candidates during the period when preparation genuinely happens rather than at the point of purchase.
Writing improvement. Triggered when a doctor's writing score is recorded below the mark she requires. Within twenty-four hours she receives the criteria she was assessed against, the OET Writing Criteria and Ultimate Writing Guide, and a sample test video, worded to acknowledge that a re-mark may still be pending. A week later come graded letters written by other doctors, with the assessor's comments attached, so she can measure her own writing against the standard she fell short of. The flow is scoped to a single profession initially, and architected to extend to the others without rework.

Segmentation follows the same principle, organised on consent and country of origin rather than category and spend, with Klaviyo's reserved country field matched against a custom ISO-3 property so that segments hold when the source systems record a value differently.

Read structurally rather than literally, it is a familiar pattern in unfamiliar clothing: a milestone recorded in an operational system, a defined interval, and content that meets someone at a point of need. Applications, renewals, enrolments, claims and appointments all carry milestones of the same shape, and very few of them are being used this way.

A smaller database, and a team prepared to run it

A migration is the one occasion on which an organisation can decide what deserves to come across.

Consent had accumulated across five capture points — two booking flows, an account preferences page, an embedded form and an email footer — and could be withdrawn at two. Migrating the database wholesale would have carried every ambiguity in it straight into the new platform. Instead, a final extract was taken immediately before profile creation, reconciling account records against subscription status and retaining only those subscribers who had actively opted in.

59,720 verified profiles, running since launch at a 0.8% bounce rate and a 0.01% spam complaint rate.

A smaller database, chosen deliberately, with the deliverability to justify the choice. For an organisation communicating into dozens of markets under varying regulatory requirements, the provenance of a list is worth more than its size.

The handover was approached with the same care. Training was delivered three months ahead of go-live, so OET's marketing team learned the platform under calm conditions rather than during cutover. A master template and a library of universal content blocks gave them a system to build from, and four sets of configuration documentation covering forms, lists and segments, flows and templates were delivered at the close. OET now runs its own global program, on its own data, without specialist support.