Lorien Finance Case Study: How Himanshu Soni Improved Education Loan Lead Quality to 80% and Increased Sales Closures to 5%
The Client
Client: Lorien Finance
Industry: Overseas Education Loans / Study Abroad Financing
Engagement Model: Individual Remote Collaboration
Performance Marketing Strategist: Himanshu Soni
Project Duration: September 2024 – March 2026
Focus Areas: Meta Ads, Audience Strategy, Lead Quality Optimisation, Conversion Funnel Improvement
Project Overview: Turning Junk Leads Into Qualified Education Loan Enquiries
Generating leads is only one part of performance marketing. For businesses operating in the overseas education loan industry, the real challenge is attracting students who genuinely need financing for their international education.
Lorien Finance was facing a lead quality problem. Its advertising campaigns were generating enquiries, but a significant portion of those leads were irrelevant, including people looking for personal loans instead of education loans.
This created challenges for the sales team. Time was being spent contacting prospects who did not match the intended audience, while genuinely interested students needed to be identified more efficiently.
Himanshu Soni worked individually with Lorien Finance as a remote Performance Marketing Strategist from September 2024 to March 2026. His focus was to improve the quality of incoming leads and help align paid acquisition with the actual requirements of the education loan business.
Instead of relying only on conventional interest-based targeting, he used the brand’s existing student customer data to develop a more relevant audience acquisition strategy.
By creating a 1% lookalike audience based on existing students who had obtained education loans, he helped improve lead quality to approximately 70–80%, with the reported improvement reaching around 80%.
The work also contributed to improvements across the downstream sales funnel, including logged-in, sanction, and disbursal stages. The reported sales closure rate reached up to 5%.
This case study explains the challenge, the audience strategy, and the approach used to improve lead quality and sales funnel performance.
The Challenge: Why Was Lorien Finance Getting Junk Leads?
Lorien Finance provides financing solutions for students pursuing education abroad. Unlike general-purpose financial products, education loans are relevant to a specific audience: students planning overseas education who need financial assistance to fund their studies.
The initial challenge was that the advertising campaigns were attracting people looking for personal loans rather than education loans.
This created three major problems.
1. Irrelevant Enquiries Were Consuming Sales Team Resources
The sales team needed to identify students with genuine education financing requirements, but irrelevant enquiries were making the qualification process more difficult.
Every unqualified lead increased the effort required to identify a genuine prospect.
2. Lead Volume Was Not Enough
Generating more enquiries does not necessarily improve business performance.
For an education loan provider, the quality of each lead matters because the journey from initial enquiry to final disbursal involves several stages.
A campaign can generate a large number of leads without delivering enough students who are eligible, interested, and ready to move forward.
3. Advertising Needed to Align With Actual Loan Requirements
The objective was not simply to reduce the cost per lead. It was to attract a more relevant audience whose requirements matched the education loan products offered by Lorien Finance.
This required a shift in audience strategy, using information about existing customers rather than relying exclusively on broad targeting assumptions.
The Strategy: Using Existing Education Loan Customers to Improve Lead Quality
1. Analysing Existing Student Customer Data
Instead of starting with a completely new audience, Himanshu identified an opportunity within Lorien Finance’s existing customer data.
The business already had information about students who had obtained education loans.
These customers were more relevant to the business objective than an audience built around general interest in loans because their journey was directly connected to education financing.
The strategy was to use this existing student data as the foundation for finding more potential customers with similar characteristics.
2. Creating a 1% Lookalike Audience
Himanshu used the existing student customer data to create a 1% lookalike audience on Meta Ads.
A lookalike audience allows advertisers to reach new people who share characteristics with a supplied source audience, subject to Meta’s matching and audience modelling.
The approach was designed to help Meta identify potential prospects who more closely resembled the existing education loan customer base.
The process involved:
- Using existing student data associated with education loan customers.
- Uploading the appropriate customer data into Meta's audience system.
- Creating a 1% lookalike audience from that source.
- Using the resulting audience for prospecting campaigns.
- Evaluating lead quality and downstream sales performance.
The critical difference was the source of the audience data.
Rather than treating everyone interested in loans as a potential prospect, the strategy started with people whose previous behaviour was directly relevant to education financing.
This gave the campaigns a more focused foundation for acquiring new leads.
3. Shifting From Lead Quantity to Lead Quality
The objective was to improve the relevance of enquiries rather than optimise campaigns solely for the lowest possible cost per lead.
For Lorien Finance, a useful lead needed to have an education financing requirement, not simply an interest in borrowing money.
The new audience strategy helped the campaigns focus more closely on potential students seeking education loans.
This shift was important because the quality of a lead influences what happens after the form is submitted.
Better-matched enquiries give sales teams a stronger starting point for qualification and follow-up, although final outcomes also depend on student eligibility, responsiveness, lender requirements, and the sales process.
4. Connecting Advertising Performance With the Sales Funnel
Another important part of the approach was looking beyond the initial lead submission.
In the education loan industry, the customer journey can include several stages:
Lead Generated → Lead Qualified → Student Logged In → Loan Sanctioned → Loan Disbursed → Sales Closure
These stages provide a more meaningful view of business performance than lead volume alone.
The focus was to improve the quality of leads entering the funnel and support better outcomes through subsequent stages.
This made it possible to evaluate advertising in relation to the commercial objective: acquiring relevant students and contributing to completed education loan business.
The Results: Up to 80% Lead Quality and 5% Sales Closure Rate
The audience strategy helped improve the reported quality of Lorien Finance’s incoming leads and supported better alignment between marketing and the sales funnel.
Performance Results at a Glance
| Metric | Reported Result |
|---|---|
| Client | Lorien Finance |
| Industry | Overseas education loans |
| Strategist | Himanshu Soni |
| Working arrangement | Individual remote collaboration |
| Project duration | September 2024 – March 2026 |
| Lead quality | Approximately 70–80%, reaching around 80% |
| Audience strategy | 1% lookalike audience based on existing education loan students |
| Funnel improvements | Logged-in, sanction, and disbursal stages |
| Sales closure rate | Up to 5% |
The most important achievement was the shift towards more relevant enquiries.
By using existing education loan customer data to inform audience acquisition, the strategy helped address the original problem of irrelevant personal loan enquiries.
The reported improvement in lead quality, together with progress across the sales funnel, demonstrated why audience selection should be evaluated against business outcomes rather than lead volume alone.
Note: The reported 70–80% lead quality figure should be defined using Lorien Finance’s actual qualification criteria when publishing. The 5% closure rate should also specify its denominator, such as total leads or qualified leads, if that information is available.
Why This Strategy Was Relevant for Education Loan Marketing
Education loan advertising differs from general-purpose loan marketing because the intended audience has a specific need and customer journey.
A student may be planning to study overseas, comparing universities, preparing an application, or looking for ways to finance tuition and living expenses.
A person searching for an unsecured personal loan may have an entirely different requirement.
This makes audience relevance particularly important.
The Lorien Finance project illustrates three useful principles.
1. Existing Customers Can Inform New Customer Acquisition
Customer data can provide valuable signals about the type of audience a business wants to acquire.
When used appropriately, a relevant source audience can help advertisers build lookalike audiences designed to identify new prospects with similar characteristics.
2. Lead Quality Should Be Evaluated Alongside Cost Per Lead
A low-cost lead is not necessarily a valuable lead.
If a large share of enquiries comes from people seeking the wrong financial product, the sales team may spend more time qualifying prospects without generating proportionate business results.
For this reason, lead quality and downstream conversion metrics should be considered alongside cost per lead.
3. Marketing Should Be Connected to Sales Outcomes
The ultimate objective of lead generation is not to fill a CRM with enquiries. It is to attract prospects who can progress through the relevant business process.
For education loan providers, this means understanding the relationship between lead qualification, student login, loan sanction, disbursal, and closure.
The Lorien Finance strategy placed greater emphasis on lead relevance and its contribution to this wider funnel.
Himanshu Soni's Role in the Lorien Finance Project
Himanshu Soni worked individually with Lorien Finance as a remote Performance Marketing Strategist from September 2024 to March 2026.
His work on this project focused on:
- Identifying the causes of irrelevant personal loan enquiries.
- Reviewing the existing student customer data.
- Developing a 1% lookalike audience strategy.
- Improving the relevance of incoming leads.
- Aligning advertising audiences with education loan requirements.
- Evaluating lead quality and sales funnel performance.
- Supporting improvements in logged-in, sanction, and disbursal stages.
- Focusing on sales closure outcomes rather than lead volume alone.
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