We all know that an effective landing page can capture a lead or make a sale, but they’re not only popular in the B2B sphere. When thinking of higher education specifically, schools can apply these same principles to generate interest.
Capturing a prospective student’s contact information can help colleges and universities generate inquiries and boost enrollment during the admissions season. While many schools use landing pages to help generate these leads, several make common design mistakes that minimize their effectiveness.
It’s fair to ask then: What design decisions can help make a higher education landing page more successful?
1. Create a bold and clear headline.
One of the first things the viewer will see is the headline. This is a great opportunity to showcase your university’s branded style guide with bold and eye-catching typography, while being informative and inspirational to your audience. There is no better place to inform your reader what the page is about, why not make it look good too?
2. Choose authenticity.
If the first thing your viewer saw wasn’t the headline, then it was definitely your hero image. Nothing screams inauthenticity more than stock photography. By eliminating staged imagery and using real students or faculty in on-campus scenarios, your landing page feels much more believable and relevant to your prospective student.
3. Chunk it up.
There isn’t much worse than a landing page with heavy content and lack of a clear hierarchy. One way to avoid this is by chunking up your content with subheads, small paragraphs, and bullet-point lists. This creates a good user experience and helps your viewer scan your page with ease. You can also benefit from key design elements. By using color, scale, line, and space you can establish clear prominence on your page, making it simple for prospective students to digest high-level information. To bring everything together, you should align these design elements with your college’s branded color palette and iconography.
4. Remove those unnecessary links.
The main goal of your landing page is to capture your prospective student’s contact information so they can continue along the student journey. So why take them off your page? Make sure your college logo is prominent, but do not link back to your main site and distract your user from the page’s goal. The same applies to multiple Call To Action (CTA) buttons; by diverting attention away from your main goal, you can limit your conversions. Make sure your main CTA button stands out using the elements of design so your audience does not miss it.
5. Make your form attention-grabbing.
When your visitor lands on your page, you want them to notice your form. This is where you ask your prospective student for personal information to continue them along the student journey. Keeping this form above the fold and using a pop of color establishes prominence, but that’s not where the process ends. Additional design decisions such as limiting the number of form fields, and being mindful of their arrangement makes for a better user experience and a better conversion rate.
The goals of your higher education landing page are clear: capture your prospective student’s information and continue them along the student journey. Beyond this though, being mindful that key design decisions can also lead to higher conversion rates and create a better and more effective user experience. Your landing page is a separate page from your main university’s website, so use this as an opportunity to have fun and showcase your branded fonts, color palette, images, graphics, and more. Using all of these tips will make a prospective student more interested to learn more about your school and share their information.
The brains behind this operation.