Five ways to deliver an outstanding student journey on your higher-education website
A higher education institution’s digital presence is its first impression on the world. Today’s students are digital natives. They’ve grown up sharing their lives online, they communicate with friends and family online, they watch TV and movies online, and they buy groceries, clothes and holidays online. All of this is made simple by the intuitive and personalised experiences they have come to expect from the brands they buy from and engage with.
Higher education institutions’ websites are home to a whole host of different information types, including staff details, campuses, courses, events and research, to name just a handful.
This means the in-built search function used on these sites needs to be fast and intuitive, so students can find the information they need as and when they need it without too much digging around in the archives.
A university's website can be a determining factor in whether or not a student chooses to attend a university or not and the stats don’t lie, with 14 per cent of people who use a university’s website doing so to learn more about the university, with 12 per cent being relatives of the person interested in attending.
Site search is one key tool to help learn about prospective students, deliver the right content at the right time, and provide high-quality touchpoints at every step of their journey.
How can this affect the Student Journey?
The student journey includes every single touchpoint, or interaction between each student and your higher education organisation across their entire lifespan, from prospect to student, to graduation and into their alumnus years.
Some examples of digital touchpoints include:
Website
Search
Social media
Emails and Messages
If you know where students are in their journey, you can gather data and insights from these interactions to address pain points and improve the overall experience.
You can learn more about students’ pain points by conducting some research:
Making small improvements over time will help to drive an increase in enquiries and, ultimately, enrolments.?
Five ways site search helps deliver an outstanding student experience
But with multiple information types to share, an intuitive site search function is vital to find and deliver what your students are looking for quickly.
You have to capture short attention spans, so they don’t give up and look elsewhere.
In-built site search tools such as Funnelback site search unite websites, departments, directories, social media, XML feeds, and more via a single search function on your website, providing an experience your students expect, which your marketing department or web manager can easily manage.
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This means your students are more likely to find what they want and provides opportunities to target and engage them with relevant content within the search results.
With search tools, such as Funnelback, you can promote targeted information in the displayed results based on the words students type in the search box. Display content can promote events, open days or webinars to nurture students along the journey.
2. Reduce the impact on student support teams whilst connecting your students to what they need fast.
When your students are empowered to find the information they need on your website, they won’t need to drain internal resources trying to find answers, freeing up support staff and reducing the service cost, allowing your organisation to focus on growth and retention initiatives.?
We’ve found through customer research that organisations implementing Funnelback site search have saved more than a day, or 25 hours, in customer support. And reduced service calls and tickets by at least 5%.?
Connect your students to the people they need to reach - students can find the right person to talk to, such as contacts for enrolments, researchers or careers, through customisable search result summaries.?
3. Optimise content for higher engagement
You can use site search data to identify your highest-performing pages using Google Analytics and optimise those pages for site search.?
Get insights into what your students are finding (and not finding) on your site. Funnelback’s analytics dashboard shows you where your visitors are clicking, reading and engaging.
Your high-traffic pages may not always seem the most important, but they present an opportunity to improve existing content or direct users to another page or platform.
4. Deliver meaningful results to help students make a decision
You can showcase degrees through site search and provide easy comparisons via functionality like favouriting and shortlisting.
Include calendar events, set helpful reminders and reference quick maps to recruit and engage students at each stage of their journey.
Be where your students are - by augmenting site search with results from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, your students have the flexibility to follow you wherever they like to be.
5. The power of personalisation
Visitors to your website expect to see content that’s relevant to them. They aren’t prepared to trawl through numerous pages to find what they need. You have to spoon-feed mutually beneficial information.
Using Funnelback site search means you can personalise search results using predictive segmentation by setting up user attributes and rules based on their IP address.?
This allows you to present relevant information based on user attributes such as location and individual user behaviour. Predictive segmentation will provide targeted and more relevant content, such as enrolment details for overseas students when the IP address indicates they are in another country.?
Delivering a personalised experience at each student touchpoint, tailored to their interests and behaviours, will nurture the relationship. You will build loyalty and the likelihood that your student will enrol, complete their course and stay engaged beyond graduation.
In conclusion
Students are digital natives. We’re no longer engaging with just millennials who started using the internet in their late childhood and teens.
We’re speaking to those born into the digital world and expect a sophisticated, personalised, seamless and simple website experience.
By implementing smart technology, such as Funnelback site search, to optimise and personalise content from end-to-end, you’ll build a strong foundation and lasting relationship into the future.
Curious to find out how search can support Student Journey? Our Higher Education guide will walk you through functionality, back-end control analytics and auditors that are included with Funnelback.
Book a session with one of our search specialists and learn how an search effective can help students easily find what they’re looking for, fast.