Challenge:
A growing university with healthy business, healthcare, education, and arts programs, the university’s website was a hindrance to enrollment efforts: it had multiple subdomains with competing messages, making for a messy user experience; mostly, though, it did not represent the institution’s vibrancy and recent growth.
Solution:
The goal was to create a website that functioned as the university’s primary marketing and Calculate was hired to redevelop the website over 2 stages. The goal was to create a website that functioned as the university’s primary marketing and recruitment vehicle.
In Stage 1, we focused on the admissions process (undergraduate, graduate, and transfer):
- Eliminated sub domains in order to guide the user through a simplified admission’s process
- Wrote new content to reflect the university’s “Pay it Forward: brand
- Revised the admission process pages including How to Apply
- Added new content on financial aid & scholarships
- Added extensive success messaging (via personal testimonials and videos; institutional statistics, graphics, and accolades)
In Stage 2, we focused on
- Strategy, designed to serve the user (eg, prospective student) in order to attract and convert high-yielding prospects
- Reworked the architecture for an easy, intuitive user experience
- Added easy-to-see calls to actions throughout
- Added simple engagement forms on key pages
- Moved all content intended for the internal audience to the university’s intranet
- Eliminated unnecessary external links, thereby reducing the opportunity of losing users before they completed an action
- Content: re-wrote the remainder of the site with lean, active, marketing-driven language
- Implemented web- and SEO-friendly headlines and bulleted, scan-able text
- Revised all academic program pages to include success testimonial, industry opportunities, program highlights, learn more form, and more
- Added student testimonials throughout site
Results:
In the first quarter after the revamped website was launched, the site experienced:
- 152% increase in the number of leads generated
- 67% increase in the Visit forms
- Top action on homepage: Clicks on the Apply button
In the two years since the full site launched, the university’s enrollment has grown steadily, reaching “record-breaking enrollment” with the Fall 2021 class.