The Gist

Background

My primary objective was to expand our reach to a larger student base without overwhelming our marketing department’s resources. As a leader in the career training institution sector, we operate 16 campuses nationwide. We recognized the need to establish connections with more prospective students and suspected that our website design wasn’t effectively engaging today’s higher education seekers. Given the limitations of our internal marketing team in both capacity and Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) expertise, making changes without diverting attention from ongoing high-priority projects was challenging.

Execution

I took the initiative to lead the CRO project, enabling our career college to maintain its focus on departmental priorities. Leveraging my higher education-specific conversion data and proven ideas, I designed and executed CRO tests with my team. We functioned as an extension of our marketing department, allowing us to swiftly implement strategic, data-driven tests on our school’s inquiry form without increasing our internal teams’ responsibilities.

One crucial aspect of the inquiry form test was the use of heatmapping tools to monitor prospective student behavior on the form, pinpointing where they abandoned it. To our surprise, we discovered that users were leaving the site before even beginning to share their information due to the overwhelming form design. Backed by our industry research, I decided to revamp the form.

The learnings we gained from this process were then put to the test as we designed and implemented a new form, comparing its performance against the original. I was thrilled to see that form abandonment was drastically reduced, resulting in a remarkable 15.5% increase in Request For Information (RFI) conversions.

The results of the CRO project were truly impressive. The financial impact of the additional student inquiries more than paid for the entire year of CRO services, all while sparing our marketing department from added responsibilities. Beyond the cost and time savings, I gained the peace of mind of knowing that we were no longer leaving potential students behind and had a user experience innovative enough to give us a competitive edge against other institutions.

Takeaway

In the realm of higher education, I recognized the potential for increasing student inquiries and took charge of the project. In collaboration with a specialized agency, I was able to offer my client access to proven data and strategies without overburdening our resources. The results we achieved, as mentioned earlier, were substantial, significantly improving our lead generation efforts on flat spend with no additional investments.