This blog is brought to you by Craig Nathan-Moss, Account Director at Revolution Viewing.
Remember when Coca-Cola started printing popular first names on their bottles and cans? With the soft drink industry under heavy scrutiny regarding sugar content, the public have of late, looked for healthier alternatives. In the US, Coca-Cola realised that 10 million teenagers had not had any of their drinks in the preceding year so launched their campaign to make more of a personal connection with this group. The result was that 1.25 million more teens tried a Coke during the following summer and sales of participating Coca-Cola packages rose by a phenomenal 11% in the US.
Not many can boast a budget like Coca-Cola but the concept of personalisation remains important across all industries. Whether it’s customers, prospects or students, people are gravitating towards brands that feel like they understand them and pay attention to their specific wants and needs. Personalisation allows specific content, messaging and experiences to be unique to the visitors profile and without it, people can get frustrated and become disloyal.
Through a combination of both qualitative and quantitative research, we have observed that everything stated above, rings true with prospective students. Indeed, one told us that “If universities didn’t have the information I wanted right away then I’d usually just click off it and look at a different university website.”
The data from our Vepple platform provides more powerful evidence that personalised content makes a significant, positive difference. Over a 12 week period we saw that universities who personalise their offering, so the user only sees content that’s relevant to them, are 57% more likely to click on a primary/main call to action. This was hardly surprising as we also witnessed users spending in excess of 15 minutes on the site compared to over 7 minutes for those who receive a generic experience. Finally, we noted that prospective students experiencing personalisation are 36 times more likely to click on a function allowing them to chat to staff or current students.
The purpose of a university website is to provide information to a whole cohort of users such as prospective students, current students, parents and academia so naturally, it has to contain a lot of information. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that the more content you can make specific to your prospective student needs, the greater the chance of engagement and conversion.
To see more data and insights on prospective students behaviour, check out the upcoming webinars. If you’d like to speak to Craig in any more detail, you can also get in touch via craig.nathan-moss@revolutionviewing.com.