THE GOAL
Reach more students without burdening the school’s marketing department resources
THE CLIENT
A leader in career training institutions with 16 campuses nationwide.
THE CHALLENGE
The career college needed to connect with more potential students, and suspected that their website design wasn’t taking advantage of new landing page trends that convert today’s higher education seekers. Even though the institution recognized the opportunity for improvement, their internal marketing team lacked the bandwidth and CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) knowledge to make a change without diverting their attention from existing high priority projects.
THE STRATEGY
By handing off the CRO project to Statwax, the career college was able to continue focusing on their departmental priorities while relying on our higher education-specific conversion data and proven ideas to design and execute the CRO tests. By working as an extension of their marketing team, we were able to quickly implement strategic and data-driven testing of the school’s inquiry form without adding any new responsibilities to their internal teams.
A key part of the inquiry form test was using heatmapping tools to monitor prospective student behavior on the form, all the way down to the specific entry field where they abandoned the form. To our surprise, users weren’t bouncing out within the form, but instead were leaving the site before they even began to share their information. This finding, paired with our industry research, showed that the current design of the form was overwhelming potential students.
Our learnings were put to the test as we designed and implemented a new form, comparing its performance against the original. Form abandonment was drastically reduced, helping drive a 15.5% increase in Request For Information (RFI) conversions.
The CRO project produced such impressive results that the financial impact of the additional student inquiries more than paid for the entire year of CRO services from Statwax, all without adding more work to the marketing department’s plate. Beyond cost and time savings, the college now had peace of mind to know they were no longer leaving potential students behind, and a user experience innovative enough to give them an edge against competing institutions.
THE TAKEAWAY
In higher education, enrollment experts often know the opportunity exists to drive more student inquiries, but they don’t have the time or data that tells them how to do it. Partnerships with agencies that specialize in the higher education space are the key to unlocking additional leads, because they open colleges and universities up to a world of proven data, without putting a drain on resources.
If you’d like to talk more about how to uncover opportunities from your existing data, let us know.
