Everywhere you go online, experiences are being tailored to the user. Amazon recommends products you’d like, Starbucks tracks your orders and rewards, Spotify creates playlists just for you. We’re in the age of personalization.
The students you’re seeking to enroll live in these personalized digital spaces, and they bring their expectations from those experiences to their interactions with your school’s website. They will judge the capability and modernity of your institution based on those interactions.
On top of that, personalized experiences can sway a student toward conversion in a way that bulk communications cannot. One-size-fits-all web experiences send the wrong message to students looking for a right-fit school.
The key ingredient in website personalization is data.
Site Visitors Are “Talking”
There is a conversation happening on your website, and data is the transcript.
Engagement can be measured with session duration and pages per session. Interest is communicated in their search destinations and duration of page visits. Events like watching a video, submitting a form or downloading a piece of content will tell you the degree of their interest.
Every visit to your website by a prospective student contains valuable information that can be used to personalize their next visit. Imagine the impression it could make on a student interested in your nursing program if on their next visit, the site imagery now reflects nursing scenarios. Think how you can help potential nontraditional students envision their experience at your school by featuring content about your flexible learning options.
Your command of the student decision-making process , when combined with this behavioral data, can create curated experiences across your website and portals.
How Personalized Data Helps Marketing
The data you collect for web personalization can also help you optimize the website and inform your marketing strategies:
What time of day is a student on your site? When a student is engaged can be a valuable insight for your marketing team on when to send emails for the highest open rate and best response.
Are students visiting from a desktop or a mobile device, and which pages? Research shows that students browse on mobile and do more complex tasks, like submitting forms, on desktops. Does your site cater to these preferences?
What is the geography of your website visitors? If you are seeing a trend of student interest from outside your expected geographic area, you may want to increase outreach to those audiences.
These cross-functional benefits from web visit data are undeniably valuable … but the data must be accessible and actionable.
Data Enablement for Web Personalization
Centralized data can be used to create experiences across a student’s journey with the school, bridging the distance between online experiences and on-brand engagement. It also enables different departments to contribute to and benefit from that data repository and the resulting insights.
Many schools have plenty of data for personalization, but it is captured and housed in disparate and often siloed systems and platforms. Data enablement is the process of collecting, connecting and activating data from across the enterprise into one data ecosystem.
It’s possible to make every visit to your website personal. If you need help getting to that point, Collegis is ready.
This article is part of a series covering data enablement’s capabilities. Read the previous installment.
Author: Collegis Education staff
Collegis is passionate about education and driven by the technology that keeps institutions moving forward.
