As we hurtle towards 10th August, where all students will officially be able to go through clearing and confirmation, many will be searching out possible alternative options in preparation. So how do all the interactions stack up on your digital channels?
There are some simple alterations you can make to really maximise these coming weeks to ensure you’re proactively engaging prospective students and helping them have all their options ready ahead of results day this year. However, by doing them you can also start taking a longer-term view of how you can improve the interactions prospects have with your website throughout the year.
Marketing Conversion Goals
Before students apply there can be a multitude of actions that would indicate they are including your institution as a potential option for them. You can line these up against the typical student cycle over the course of the year but also extend this, reaching into early research phases younger students do, through to more specific time frames, such as leading up to results day and how they might be quickly reviewing options ahead of clearing.
By taking this perspective, you can begin to adjust different cues you might ask students at different times/stages and also what goals might serve the student best.
For example, right now you might look at pre-clearing call-backs, specific questions (cues) around clearing that would indicate where they are so you can provide them with key information such as available courses, clearing hotline numbers or entry requirements.
Learn from Your Data
Often, some of the metrics that are used within a team can really distort what outcomes you’re actually striving for. For example, driving a lot of traffic to your website through digital advertising can be deemed as a measure of effective ad spend, but if that masks that the duration time is really limited because students who land on your site don’t find what they need at the stage they’re at, then you’re potentially losing time and budget.
One you have your marketing conversion goals, you can utilise the data you have to start understanding what impacts them. End-to-end understanding of what your digital channels are doing to conversion will help you to continually improve all the interactions a student may have with you as part of their decision-making journey.
Test, trial and Implement
As well as our current client base we are also working with a number of new institutions who want to test aspects of Cues.ai for clearing and conversion, running trials on specific course areas or cohorts.
We’re seeing some really impressive trials working with international student groups as well as specific course groups. By taking this approach you may be able to get a clearer picture of what Cues.ai can offer your students and of course recruitment, marketing and digital teams.
We also know, rolling out something new across everything you offer is really challenging, so we advocate testing and trialling cues as believe it offers clients a realistic way of working with the tool and the data it produces before implementing it on a larger scale.
If you’re interested and would like to find out more sign up for a trial of cues.ai.
