What is the most important web page to your school? If you said your higher ed homepage, you’re only half right. While it’s true that your homepage is essential for guiding traffic to your site and providing important information to students, it’s actually your landing pages that are doing the heavy lifting and converting those prospective students into applicants.
Think of the homepage as the lead singer in a band, while your landing pages are the drummer, bassist, and guitarist. Sure, the lead singer gets all the attention, but no one’s buying the albums or concert tickets without the work that everyone else puts in. (You can trust me on this, as a former lead guitarist).
Dedicated landing pages are essential for optimizing pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns and increasing conversion rates. They’re important first impressions for new visitors, play a key role in highlighting competitive differentiators of your brand, and — most importantly — encourage your audience to take immediate action.
So, you need to get your landing pages right. If you’re not optimizing your landing pages, then you’re undercutting your entire paid advertisement strategy — not to mention your budget. Here are some best practices to generate more leads and boost enrollment, plus three common landing page mistakes to avoid
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What Are Effective Landing Page Elements
First off, let’s establish a few things about landing pages and what makes them effective. Just as your homepage is not a landing page, your landing pages can’t be a copy of your homepage — because they’re doing entirely different things.
Your homepage provides a wealth of information, communicating all the essential elements about your school. By comparison, every landing page should have a singular goal: to engage the user and encourage them to take a specific action. That action can range from requesting more information or applying for financial aid to accessing an asset such as a brochure or a webinar.
What you’re offering is a secondary concern; what you’re really after is getting them to enter their information. This means that every landing page needs to have some kind of request for information (RFI) form.
You’ve definitely seen them before — here’s an example of one of ours.
The form should appear above the fold, as close to the top of the page as possible (though there are exceptions we’ll talk about later).
More importantly, the form should only include a few fields, ideally four to five. With prospective students, you’re really looking to secure their:
- First Name
- Last Name
- Phone Number
That’s it. You want minimal distractions so the user is compelled to take action. Both the form and landing page should be clear about what the offer is, why someone should fill out the form, what will happen after they fill out the form, and what they will receive.
