Enrollment marketing entails putting a great deal of focus on Higher Education landing pages to attract students and provide them with details about courses they are interested in.
Optimizing or Building landing pages that convert is possibly the most customer-centric strategy to enhance lead conversions and engaging personas. Hubspot identified that simply increasing landing pages from 10 to 15 can allow marketers to increase leads by 55%. This means a better ROI and a more focused user experience for your audiences.
Landing pages are an important part of a content marketing strategy for higher education institutions because they provide a focused and targeted experience for potential students.
Our article today emphasizes the importance and benefits of optimizing higher education landing pages for enrollment marketing campaigns.
What is a Higher Education Landing Page?
Educational landing pages, especially those for higher education institutions, are specifically set up to provide a dedicated webpage to deliver timely, relevant, unique, and attractive information to prospective students. High-quality landing Pages are used for generating high-quality leads for your course.
These pages are usually designed in accordance with student personas and audience behaviors to not only deliver information about courses but also to drive traffic from search engines for both paid and organic campaigns.
A landing page of education website is designed to be the first page that someone sees when they visit your site. It is usually the page that a person “lands on” after clicking on a link from another site, such as an ad.
Landing pages are often used to promote a special offer or to get people to sign up for a newsletter.
The benefits of an optimized landing page for increasing enrollments include:
- More qualified traffic and leads
- Higher conversions
- Deliver more value to audiences
- Gather user behavior and data
Best Higher Education Landing Pages
The success and failure of higher education landing pages can depend on a number of factors including access to important information, forms on the page, downloadable applications, user experience, call to action, and several others.
To demonstrate the brilliance of optimized educational landing pages, here are three popular examples to learn from.
1. Chicago Booth University MBA Programs
The Chicago Booth MBA Programs page is a great example of creative enrollment marketing. Students are welcomed by a gliding video fold, with a clear, catchy, and concise headline. The navigation is clearly highlighted in whites given a constantly moving background video.
This is an excellent example of higher education pages with highly responsive mobile pages, optimized to run just as smoothly as they run on computer screens. As you notice, the landing page displays email signup to connect students who are still in the research and awareness stage of their journey.
As we scroll, the webpage takes students down a simple journey attracting, making aware, educating, and nurturing visitors. Every link to different MBA programs is highlighted in a clearly visible table allowing students to land on their relevant course pages.
The single-page flow is also a consistent element you will notice on almost all Booth University landing pages. The content is simple and short, allowing the students to flow through their journey and eventually move to CTAs at the end of the page.
This amazing higher ed landing page provides an excellent user experience and tells a story to the student allowing them to feel a unique experience. Supported by multiple testimonials on the home page and the alumni sections, students are also given proof of the university’s success.
2. University of South Wales
Landing pages from the University of South Wales website are an excellent example of a concise and clear copy. The website displays some great visuals including a video for more interactive engagement.
The landing page starts by putting great authority into the course announcing its top ranking to build rapport immediately with prospective students. Followed by a brief introduction to the course, the page slowly transitions into the latest semester schedule to trigger urgency in students.
The collapsing sections design is an excellent way to make the page simpler but include more information about students. The collapsable sections include all the important and necessary information in a single space.
The use of stories as testimonials is another great part of the landing page including those from graduates and students. The large highlighted CTAs are reflective of the South Wales brand and are listed both in the top and bottom folds of the page.
When considering a university branding strategy, the landing page must effectively communicate the unique value proposition and brand personality of the university.
The simplicity of design and concise content copy are some great elements on this amazing high-ed landing page. The accessibility, ease of navigation, and call to action make it an ideal page for signaling conversions.
3. UCLA Extension
Last up, we have a great landing page example from UCLA Extension. The page is thorough. There are many parts with crucial details, including the price, what the students can learn, who the program is for, and some alluring statistics.
In contrast to reading all of them, adding a video testimonial allows viewers to see the viewpoints of various students. The video also aids in saving space.
10 Effective Tips for Optimizing Higher Education Landing Pages
A well-optimized landing page generates leads that convert while ensuring it reduces the bounce rate, allows the audiences to explore other pages on the university website, and provides a journey to students to ensure they remain engaged with the institution.
In this section, we will focus on SEO for educational institutions. Furthermore, we’ll highlight some essential and effective tips to optimize higher education landing pages that convert from leads based on higher ed marketing trends.
1. Create Catchy and Concise Headlines
Having a catchy and concise headline is the initial engagement that keeps audiences on the landing page. These headlines should be researched in accordance with student persons and their goals in life.
This can be a challenge, but it’s important to remember that your headline is often the first thing potential students will see. You want to make sure it grabs their attention and tells them what they can expect to find on your page.
Some tips for creating catchy and concise headlines:
- Use active language
- Be straightforward
- Keep it short and sweet
- Highlight what makes your school unique
2. Ensure Visibility of Buttons and CTAs
One of the most important elements of a great university landing page is the strategic placement of buttons that encourage your visitors to perform a desired action like “register” or “inquire”.
Secondly, the placement of call to action (CTA) buttons must be research-based, using tools like Hotjar that map out the entire browsing journey of a lead. The CTA is the final part of the process that allows the students to apply or make an inquiry to apply at the university.
3. Write Highly Convertible Content and Keep It Simple
The content like all other elements of the landing page must be well researched and should address the important pain points for students, providing them with a final solution.
Generally, enrollment marketers employ the AIDA (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action) model to craft converting landing pages. A page designed through the AIDA model provides an organized flow of emotions to the student when they visit the website.
AIDA-based landing pages motivate students to read through the copy and click the apply button at the end. Do remember that using the AIDA model for landing pages requires a mix of both content and design elements to cohesively work together for conversions.
4. Keep Important Elements Above the Fold (Headline, Form, CTAs, Banner Visuals)
Enrollment marketing teams must keep in mind that important information and elements like the headline, application forms, contact forms, CTAs and inspiring visuals should be placed in the top fold to ensure they engage the students.
Since we want prospective students to have the essential information regarding our programs, it’s important to maintain the flow as per the AIDA model discussed above. Placing course information at the end can have adverse impacts, or having a CTA on top of the page can also backfire. Understanding user experience is very important to ensure elements are in a strategic flow.
5. Focus More on User Experience
The focus of marketers should be on user experience. There are multiple user experience factors that enrollment marketing teams should consider when building landing pages. Here are 7 important ones to focus on:
- The layout of the page
- The use of whitespace
- The font size and style
- The color scheme
- The images used
- The navigation
- The content
6. Create Separate Layouts for Mobile
Having a mobile-optimized landing page is essential to attract and convert more leads. Since the smartphone is the ideal device for millennials, Gen Y, and Gen Z audiences, it is essential to have a creative, accessible, and interactive mobile landing page design for prospective students.
Mobile-optimized landing pages can be designed to load quickly and clearly display the most important information about a school, such as its location, tuition costs, and program offerings.
Including easy-to-use forms and contact information on mobile landing pages can also make it easy for potential students to get in touch with a school’s admissions office.
7. Use Attractive Visuals to Attract Attention
A brilliant aspect of any higher education landing page is the visuals, images, and videos placed on it. Photos of students, campus buildings, classrooms, and ideal colors are essential to attract the attention of students.
In addition to photos, use other visuals like infographics and videos to showcase your skills and accomplishments. These can be especially helpful if you’re applying to colleges that have specific requirements or areas of interest.
8. Include All Necessary Details in Lead Form
To effectively generate leads for higher education, the lead form on landing pages is crucial and should provide all the necessary fields for students. The lead form must be clearly visible and include all relevant fields allowing admission officers to evaluate students for their chosen courses.
Higher education landing pages must include all the necessary details in their lead forms. This includes contact information, educational background, and other relevant details. By including all of this information, higher education institutions can ensure that they get the most accurate and up-to-date information from potential students, which is essential for an effective enrollment funnel.
9. Establish Trust (Success Rates, Testimonials, Alumni Success Stories, Trust Badges)
Establishing trust through testimonials of students, alumni success stories and trust badges from accreditation organizations is a great way to increase conversions. Having at least one student testimonial is necessary to engage students since it gives them a real-time product review of sorts.
Alumni success stories provide a picture of the future for prospective students. They can choose careers based on various graduate stories and offer them more specialized areas of study, which is why it should be included as part or all educational landing pages!
10. Always A/B Test Your Pages
Using A/B testing is a great idea to test different designs, content, elements, CTAs, navigation, visuals, and flow on educational landing pages. This allows marketers to gauge a variety of metrics that provides them the insights to regularly improve landing page design and experience.
Conclusion
Routinely optimizing educational landing pages is essential to ensure continual success based on the insights provided by tools like Google Analytics, Hotjar, and others.
Universities should consider revising their landing pages after every intake, revisiting the content, design, user experience, navigation, and other elements of dedicated higher education landing pages.
If you need help getting started or want to improve your results even further, reach out to us. We offer higher education marketing expertise and edtech marketing services that guarantee results. We’ll assist you in growing your income, grants, and funding through data-driven marketing approaches. Our experts will work with you to find practical ways to grow and dominate the fiercely competitive higher education market.
