One of the best ways to save time and effort for your admissions department is to send them pre-qualified admission leads. In order to determine whether a prospective student is ready to go to your admissions team, you’ll need to capture the right data and ask the right questions on your forms and landing pages.
You’ll want to ask questions that can allow you to target each prospective pupil with the most relevant content, which in turn will help them make a decision about your school. In this guide, we explore the list of questions you should be asking on your forms and landing pages to determine where students are on their admissions cycle.
Mandatory fields
You’ll want to ask the following to ensure that you can contact the student again and supply them with the right information and content.
- First Name
- Last Name
- Email Address
- Age
Other fields
- Date/ year of entry
This is useful: knowing the entry year of your prospective students will allow you to focus your efforts on the more timely leads. Parents often enquire about very young children who are nowhere near school age yet, while others are looking to enrol their child for the following semester. This can help you know what content to send and whether to alert the admissions officer straight away.
- Subjects and activities of interest
Although not necessary, this information is useful in order to tailor content to each enquiry. It’s a great way to segment data too – you can group students interested in a particular subject or extracurricular activities and add them to a relevant email sequence. Also, don’t limit the fields to just one option – you can have multiple tickbox fields so they can subscribe to material for any and all of their interests.
- What event they would like to attend
This one depends on the form – a general inquiry form may not need it, but if this form is on a landing page about your virtual open days, then a drop-down option showing different dates and times can improve your chances of attracting attendees. You can also use this information to send reminders nearer the time.
How else can you figure out what to ask?
The best approach is to talk to your admissions team and find out what the most qualified leads look like. Figure out what they want to know and prioritise what’s most important. The optimal amount of fields in any form is seven, so rather than trying to get all the information in one go, consider ‘progressive forms’ which gather data on a lead over a period of time. You can do this by gathering slightly different information on each form. For example, you can require applicants to fill in mandatory fields as well as their proposed year of entry in order to download your prospectus. When they do, you can target them with an ad for your open day which gathers information on their proposed year of entry and subject interests and so on.
Here are some examples of forms and landing pages we have created for clients for their virtual open days, hosted on targeted Facebook ads and landing pages:
Getting your forms right is important since you’ll be able to gather helpful data to qualify your leads and market to them accordingly. In return, they’ll receive the right content for them which will help them make their decision about attending your school.
If you would like more professional tips on marketing your schools do get in touch with the Digithrive For School’s team who are always happy to help. contact us here