CTA's aren't as highly utilized in higher education as they should be. I've spoken to a few recruitment leaders that weren't exactly sure what a CTA is.
A call-to-action (CTA) is an image or text that will prompt your prospective students to act. The simplest example is a link or image you use in an email or on your website that asks prospects to RSVP for an Open House. The image or text you are using is your call-to-action.
Recently, the folks at Grow & Convert shared some research on how CTA conversions of email capture forms vary, based on where the CTA is placed on a page. If you're really into CTA's, then you can read the 4,000 word post focused on CTA strategy here.
If not, and just wonder about the conversion rates, then here they are:
- Sidebar CTAs – 0.5% – 1.5%
- Generic End of Post CTAs – 0.5% – 1.5%
- Pop-ups – 1% – 8%
- Sliders and bars: 1% – 5%
- Welcome Gates: 10% – 25%
- Featurebox: 3% – 9%
If you're looking for a better placement of your higher ed CTA's, then read below for the CTA definitions; it's important to ensure we're on the same page with this.
Sidebar CTA's are the CTA's located on the narrow column of a webpage (checkout the CTA and form on the right side of this page for an immediate example).
The End of Post CTA is just that - at the end of a page or post. Generally used in blog posts, this CTA is one you post inside the body of the main content, but at the end. The thought here is that if the reader made it to the end, she/he wants more.
That said both of these locations have the weakest conversions.
Pop-ups are those annoying ads you mostly familiar with from the early 2000's. Newspapers and other media sites are still pretty bad with them, but smart businesses have perfected the pop-up so that it isn't as annoying as it used to be (most of the time). Because of the wide variation of the quality of the pop-up, you see a wide range of conversions.
In a nut shell, though, pop-ups work.
So what is a Slider? Simply put, a cousin to the pop-up. Sliders appear similar to the pop-ups, but they slide in after you've scrolled down the page a bit. And because the work like pop-up's, they generally convert like them too.
On mobile devices, sliders typically work much better than pop-ups because they don't immediately cover the entire screen. Although I didn't see specific conversion numbers based on mobile from the report, the authors did confirm that pop-ups on mobile devices are generally very low, and are less than conversion rates for sliders.
What are Welcome Gates? Aggressive tactics to get prospects to give you their email address. The CTA report used Mixergy is an example of a site with a welcome gate. I find them annoying, and we obviously wouldn't see them on an official college or university site. That said, back in the early to mid 2000's, some of the ads/landing pages used in the for-profit (and to be fair, some non-profit) campaigns were based on mini-welcome gates. You clicked the ad and landed on a micro-site locked by a welcome gate. You couldn't get to any of the information in the site without completing the form.
When you look at conversion rates, though, you won't find much better than this - especially if you're only trying to get an emails address.
Feature boxes are the cousin to the welcome gate. The phrase itself comes from the folks (founder) of Social Triggers. Note, though, that even on this post, he uses a slider.
Feature Boxes are dedicated, above the fold space to place your CTA. they may be banners that slide down, then slide back up, or they may be static. Basically they replace the typical banner/header you have on your typical pages.
Note - they still convert very well.
Which of these options should you use? Truly it will depend on the your institution's site, its capabilities and the powers' that be willingness to try something different.
At minimum, you should be able to implement the sidebar or end of post CTA, but if you're lead generation efforts are really behind, something more drastic may be worth consideration.
For my site, expect more sliders and feature boxes in the next 8 months!