Checking In With Online Education

The last piece I wrote about online lead generation covered the basics of lead generation and arose out of an agency/broker’s desire to get a CPA price quote for an unnamed school. Instead of simply saying “$50”, I proceeded to write out a lengthy reply on why quoting a single number poses a challenge. Today, we look at a related topic – the various strategies lead generators employ to drive leads to a school. What makes this topic so interesting is that as recently as five months ago, a few on this list were considered on the fringe. The increased cost of traffic to lead generators and desire for schools to focus on a narrower band of providers has opened the door, though for some, once fringe, concepts to make their way into the mainstream.

The “fringe” activity in this case is the desire and push by lead generators to promote more than one school as part of the sign-up process. Three companies have made the greatest in roads – Quinstreet, ClassesUSA, and Nextag. In the case of Nextag, they only promote education in this fashion, whereas both Quinstreet and ClassesUSA offer schools several different ways to generate leads. Below are the four most common mainstream strategies used by lead generators. In this piece we focus on the presentation of the school as opposed to whether visitors came from search, display, email, etc.

1)      Single school landing page

a)      Exclusive lead, i.e. a student sees one brand on the landing page and can sign up for only one school.

b)      Form fields usually present; strong call to action; an information gathering page rather than an information giving page.

c)      Generally the highest quality but also among the most expensive.

d)      Viewers tend to see either a general landing page for the school,l or among the more advanced lead generators see a degree specific page, e.g. Criminal Justice based on prior intent, i.e. a click on a tab on banner or search query

e)      Some lead providers will, upon completion of this type of page, show a follow-up page with other schools; some schools will bar this, seeing it as leveraging their brand for a competitor.

2)      Directory style page / Homepage placement

a)      Among the oldest style for generating leads.

b)      No form fields present; limited if any call to action; a focus on information giving.

c)      Many schools co-exist on a page that typically look to provide users a way to navigate to a particular degree / school combination.

d)      The non-sales, exploratory approach means that viewers will often convert on more than one school.

e)      Seen as a clean and often preferred way for vendors to generate leads.

f)        Easily digestible and as a result historically the type of page show to schools by vendors when attempting to work together even though it drives a smaller percentage of leads.

3)      Multi-school “Shared Lead” page

a)      Credit goes to ClassesUSA for the nickname

b)      Marketing message driven page; focus on information gathering.

c)      Similar to the exclusive lead form except more than one school is presented on the page

d)      Unlike a directory page, focus is on a user completing a form rather than navigating deeper into the site.

e)      Nicknamed shared because after a user completes the form for a particular school, the page presents the user with other schools that offer the same or similar program, storing the user information so that they simply must click one or two times to be submitted to the next school.

f)        Students tend to sign-up for more than one school

g)      Some schools have seen only minimal degradation in enrollment rates by a switch to the shared model; whereas others have seen sharp decreases.

h)      Gaining increased acceptance among schools, albeit reluctantly.

4)      Forced shared lead page

a)      Currently only used by Nextag and allowed with them given their size and clout in the mortgage lead generation business.

b)      Page mirrors their mortgage form in that users complete information in the first part of the form and then are “matched” to schools on the second part

c)      Students will sign-up for more than one school (assuming a degree of interest is selected that more than one school offers.)

d)      Lead degradation occurs, but it’s not linear, i.e. a lead shared 3 times does not perform 1/3 as well. Closer to one half.

e)      Most controversial page as it presents the least information per school and does not offer a way for a user to learn about a school and select just that school.

f)        Additional controversy and push-back from some major institutions due to its commoditizing education. With the schools being given little to no room for differentiation, such forms have the potential to impact negatively the sector, especially if others jump on board. Users will lose out and the page will be seen by accrediting bodies similar to co-reg being run on incentive sites.

g)      The first type of site to have volume caps reduced and be seen as expendable.

In Effectiveness in Lead Generation and Finding the Sweet Spot we hit upon a few of the reasons why mortgage has scaled so easily and the challenges that online education faced in doing the same. What we see here are companies breaking free of those constraints, but the results of these new formats will determine its long-term success, of course. The best bet for vendors is to treat these strategies like a portfolio and have diversity. The new formats might have strong growth but they are also the most volatile.