From the pandemic’s disruption to learning and its impact on young people’s mental health, to digital poverty and increased gaps in pupils’ attainment, we’ve all read and heard about the detrimental effects that covid-19 has had on prospective university students – particularly those from widening participation backgrounds.
More than ever, conversations need to break down any barriers, listen to their needs and provide them with the support they need to access and succeed at university.
So how can you evolve your content to really engage with students from disadvantaged backgrounds, right from the offset?
5 ways to enhance the content journey
In our experience of creating personalised content journeys to increase positive user engagement, we’ve summarised five effective tactics worth considering:
1. Get instant data
Once prospective students have applied, you have a wealth of information about them to start tailoring your email comms and web content – meaning you can make sure your content to students from widening participation backgrounds is relevant and supportive. But cues.ai enables you to start this journey the first time they visit your site, regardless of whether they’ve applied to you or not.
With simple, subtle prompts you can gain real-time information about a web user without asking them to fill-in a form or provide personal details. By learning more about them with gentle cues, you can then guide them towards the most useful content based on their answers. So, if they indicate that they’re from a widening participation background, you can guide them to important content such as, financial support, mentoring schemes or study skills support.
2. Better inform your prospecting ads
By integrating your digital advertising with cues.ai, you can make the messaging in the prospecting phase of your ad campaign much more targeted and relevant. For example, if you know that a group of users have indicated via a cue that they would be the first in their family to go to university, you can then show them ads featuring real stories from students who are first in family sharing their experiences of applying and going to uni. This kind of content makes for an engaging rotation t in your ad mix.
3. Connect to a real person
Speaking of real stories, there might be instances where a prospective student has been browsing multiple websites with tons of information (from UCAS to student finance), and quite simply just feeling the overwhelm. Using cues.ai you can set prompts that will spot the right time to offer a human voice to help answer any questions they might be struggling with. Whether that’s showing them a shortcut to a support helpline, or offering them a peer-to-peer online chat service, being intuitive to the need for a real chat at the right moment will make for impactful and helpful conversations.
4. Make them feel listened to
By running cues.ai on your site, you can track where a user last left off. This removes any irrelevant content that could frustrate an enquirer and helps to gently nudge them along a content journey that’s going to be continually personalised to them.
From a user point of view this can make the browsing experience much more seamless because a) they won’t be faced with content that’s not relevant to them each time they visit. b) they’ve not been disrupted by being asked to type in any personal details.
5. Break down off-putting terminology
Let’s face it, large websites like university sites often come with their fair share of jargon. And in many cases, it’s difficult to get away from the higher education terminology that we’re all so familiar with. But to prospective students too many unknown terms or concepts will actually become a barrier that disrupts their engagement with your content.
Our ‘snippets’ tool is designed to break down complex text and terminology. It works like this… When a user is browsing a page that’s particularly text-heavy, our technology will detect an optimal moment to gently serve a snippet of information. The snippet can either draw attention to and reinforce a specific point you’ve made on the page (so it doesn’t get lost in all of the text), or, it can explain a specific phrase or title in more simple terms.
Sign up for a trial to see how you can benefit from using cues.ai.
