1. Create Landing Pages that Convert
There’s nothing like a well-built landing page to capture the attention of your prospects and turn them into students.
How Can Landing Pages Attract More Students to Your School?
First Impressions
The landing page is often the very first thing new visitors will see when directed to your website. And, like in many other areas of life, when trying to attract the attention of prospective students, it’s important to make a good first impression.
A clean design with appealing colours, stunning graphics, and compelling copy will provide a great user experience, making prospective students more interested in learning more about your school.
Capture Leads
Landing pages are a phenomenal way for your school to capture high-value leads. In fact, companies that increase the number of landing pages on their website from 10 to 15 see a 55% increase in leads!
By offering incentives, you can collect valuable information from your website visitors and then use this information to reach out to them in the future.
For example, think about a student who’s surfing the web looking for information about colleges or universities. What’s their end goal? It’s probably to enroll in a post-secondary institution.
So, if they arrive at your website, you could consider offering something like a free ebook containing information that they would find valuable. For example, 15 Study Tips For College Freshmen.
In exchange for this valuable content, they will need to provide their name and email address.
Increase Conversions
Designing custom landing pages can significantly increase conversion rates. In the last section, we mentioned how landing pages can be used to collect information like names and email addresses.
Well, this information can be used to help you to create a personalized message targeted directly towards each individual student. Seeing as marketers observe an average increase in conversions of 20% when using personalized experiences, adopting this approach can be very valuable.
Provide Valuable Insight into User Behaviour
With analytics software like Google Analytics, it’s easy to track user behaviour across all of your webpages. With that in mind, a well-structured landing page can provide tonnes of valuable feedback.
You can find out which links are being clicked the most, which content users are engaging with, how long they stayed on your landing page, and other important insights.
Using this information, you can then make changes to your landing page to improve its efficiency.
So, now you understand that landing pages can be a valuable tool to help attract more students to your school. But how do you create a successful landing page?
Let’s take a look at some of the most important elements!
Elements of Successful Landing Pages
Landing pages are only effective if they’re set up properly. Here are a few important elements you cannot afford to overlook when creating landing pages for your school’s website:
Design – when most people think of design, they think of colours, images, and other visual elements. Yes, these things are important, however, you also need to consider creating a quality user experience. Most of the best webpages today feature interactive designs that anticipate the behaviour of users.
Copywriting – when promoting your school on your landing pages, you need to make sure the copy is clear, compelling, and convincing. A great way to do this is to focus on outcomes rather than features. Instead of explaining your school’s facilities, activities, professors, ect., focus on what your school can help each student achieve. For example…
“Our programs qualify you for the career of your dreams.”
Or
“Looking for a high paying job? Our programs can teach you the skills you need to succeed!”
Performance – today’s consumers are impatient. If your landing page takes too long to load, you’ll lose potentially valuable leads. But exactly how fast should your pages load? Well, data suggests that 40% of people will wait no more than three seconds for a webpage to load, so it’s a good idea to shoot for three seconds or less.