Designing a Better Mobile Experience for Higher Education Lead Generation
Admissions Marketing
Pop quiz: Where are today’s students going to research schools and careers?
Answer: Anywhere. They’re Googling you from wherever they’re sitting, by way of their phones and tablets. What they’re not doing is going to the library or sitting down at a computer. Instead, the portal they use to find information is right in their pocket, all day long.
That’s because the internet has gone from an activity (remember when you had to sit down and dial in?) to an “always-on” experience. Our behaviors (like researching life decisions) have adapted to match.
This is how students are searching you as an institution. They are turning to their phones and tablets to search for your admissions requirements, program information, student life and social media. You need to own the space, give them a positive user experience and entice them to give you your information.
As a result, we are helping our clients adapt with them. Here are four ways we’ve met these changes in behavior for our clients:
1. Responsive design
The earliest iterations of mobile sites were just truncated versions of a desktop site, with all of the functionality stripped away so that everything fits on a small screen and didn’t take too long to load on a slower connection.
That’s not enough, anymore. We’re rethinking the entire process of building sites that work on both mobile and desktop with the same functionality.
Here’s what we’ve seen:
Smartphone and tablet visits are through the roof, and conversions are up with them. In our case, that 3% boost meant over 400 more form submissions per month.
What can your admissions representatives do with 400+ more leads?
2. Keep Your Forms Short and Visible
Think about typing in a form on your phone. First, you have to make sure the cursor is in the right box. Then, you have to fill out your information. Is your street address going to fit in that tiny box? Oh, and the keyboard takes up half the screen so you can’t see what you’ve typed and… The point is, it’s not a great experience — on any device.
The answer? Make it as quick and painless as you can. Don’t make users hunt for forms — place them on every page.
That’s it. Clients we’ve worked with have doubled their form submissions within the first two weeks of making the adjustment.
This gives your admissions reps enough info to contact the lead, speak to them about what they want to do, and ultimately give them the ability to work with the lead when it’s best to get started. Obviously, a lead form is customized to your institution, but the key is to make it easy to fill out on a mobile device. It allows for a more personal conversation about what the prospective student wants, but leaves room for discovery and conversation. Once they are comfortable with the info, the rep can easily collect address info, how they heard about your school, and any other needed data. The lead form is not the sales pitch — the conversation is.
3. Conversation (In Social Media)
The conversation does not end when the call ends. We know that it takes multiple touches to really close that lead. Make an appointment, schedule a tour, attend classes for a day, meet with a faculty member, send follow-up emails… the list goes on.
But we’re talking mobile here. Nothing is more mobile these days than Social Media. Continue the conversation there. But it takes work. Social is an ever-evolving moving target that needs to be monitored, curated and developed on a daily basis. Students are using your social properties to judge you, which makes community and reputation management extremely important. Keep the conversation going, not only by providing the content they need to help them make their decision, but through the kind of engagement that makes them feel confident that they made the right choice. Then, encourage your new students to share that decision with their friends, families and colleagues. Make them your advocates.
4. Get Help
Your time and resources are already limited: implementing responsive design, best practices in mobile development, testing to make sure everything works properly, finding the right social properties to use, managing those multiple social media communities and speaking to your many audiences is a lot to add to your already full “to-do” list. Your job is to literally get “butts in seats,” and our job is to help you do that.
EGC has been in the digital world since 1997 (and has been working in education even longer). Find out more about our Admissions Marketing and Education department and what we can do for your school.
