A large, moderately selective, 4 year, public program in the Midwest was experiencing high form abandonment on forms which was resulting in wasted advertising spend, as the traffic being driven to their landing pages was not being capitalized on or leading to conversions.
For their Online Program recruitment drive, they wanted to reduce this in order to maximize form conversion and get more prospects through the funnel.
How we got involved:
INSIGHT
Our team of experts analyzed current form performance to gain clarity and eliminate guesswork around why prospects were abandoning forms in the first place.
They also recognized an additional opportunity to expand beyond email as a method of contacting leads, which wasn’t currently being utilized.
This would help engage more potential prospects who might not have responded to email.
ACTION
The experts designed, built and implemented Convert Forms for their Online Program Campaign.
These forms attracted over 2600 page visitors, but as we know, if those visitors didn’t subsequently complete the form, we wouldn’t be successful.
A key change we made was removing phone number as a required field (as only 30% were willing to provide so this was likely contributing to form drop-off).
We also added a field which asked whether prospects would like to be contacted by SMS, which would potentially open up new contact opportunities without adding any additional workload to the marketing or admissions teams.
OUTCOME
The thorough Akero process was able to create full visibility on why and where bottlenecks were occurring.
This helped to eliminate future guesswork and use institution-specific learnings to optimize current and future results.
The form abandonment rate was reduced to a minimal 15.63%, meaning more prospects were able to progress through the funnel.
By segmenting form performance by lead source, we discovered that 60.13% of Google leads wanted to be contacted by SMS, as opposed to just 19% of visitors who came from Facebook.
This meant that we could set up an automation for those who had opted in to receive a follow-up SMS as soon as they’d completed the form.
