When looking at a website page from a marketing perspective, it’s important to define the ONE action you want your prospects to do when visiting your page. This is a website lead generation best practice, especially in the education sector. When we give our prospective students too much choice, they become overwhelmed and often leave a site without taking any action at all. You definitely don’t want that!
We believe the main goal of a website is to generate inquiries that lead to enrollments; it’s a sales conversion tool, moving broad interest into focused, semi-qualified interest. The best way to do this is to connect a prospective student with an Admissions Rep as quickly and easily as possible, thus generating a conversation.
Most schools have made strides to maximize website traffic and convert users to leads. Sometimes tools are in place to drive data and phone inquiries to designated Admissions Reps, who in turn take those inquiries and help to create further clarity and focus for prospective students. In our research, we know that the best lead conversion to enrollment activity happens when someone inquires off of a website perusal and is contacted right away. The longer there is a lag, the lower the conversion to enrollment.
So, back to how this translates to having only one offer on a website page. Many offers on one page is kind of a “throw the mud on the wall and see what sticks” philosophy. While logical, our research tells us repeatedly that this approach makes matters much worse. Having only one offer or call to action guides the prospect to what they need to do next – they need to know what to do, they need to be taken by the hand and guided to further clarity.
Giving prospects too many choices is confusing and competes against your end goal – getting students in seats. A laser focused message always wins the race, in part because it eases a prospect’s anxiety. Prospective students may not know what they need when they first come to your program page.
Giving them one option to inquire about and guiding them to their next steps helps them along their personal career development path and directly impacts the enrollment success for a school. It’s a win win.