Your Higher Education Marketing Link of the Week… Roosevelt University: Brief Inquiry Form… 27 January 2017

Direct Marketing at Work at Roosevelt University Inquiry Form

From time to time we celebrate examples of “blessedly brief” inquiry forms designed with a primary purpose in mind: capture an online inquiry. Direct marketers know that the longer a form, the fewer are the people who will complete it.

Forms like this resist the impulse to populate an admissions or enterprise-wide database with demographic information that is not needed for the primary purpose of this form: make a first contact with a potential student.

Only 4 Required Info Blocks

The link to the Roosevelt University form is prominent at the top of the home page, just to the right of the University logo. Follow that link and you arrive at one of the shortest inquiry forms we’ve seen yet: just 4 required block to complete, plus a 5th space for a phone number:

First Name

Last Name

Email Address

Confirm Email Address

Primary Phone

There is also an optional block to ask a question, followed by a place to tell Roosevelt if you’d like to get information by mail. And so no street address and therefore location information is required.

3 Optional Questions

The from closes with three optional questions on planned starting date, area of academic interest, and type of student at time of entry. None of this is required. And these items that often clutter these forms and make them more difficult to complete are not included:

No gender.

No ethnicity.

No date of birth.

No high school or high school code or ‘last school attended.”

No test score or GPA request.

On Mobile

Google “Test My Site” tool gives this page a relatively high 69/100 for Speed but an unusually low 67/100 for overall Mobile Friendliness. Desktop speed is better at 83/100 but Google rates that as only “fair.” This information form is not designed to convert many smart phone users. Fixing that would not be difficult.

Follow the Link of the Week

To experience an online inquiry form that follows direct marketing principles to increase conversion rates, visit the Roosevelt University Contact Information page.

Original Link of the Week Page

Regular readers will notice that the Link of the Week selection now appear with my blog. To review initial 2016 selections and previous years visit the Link of the Week archive page.

3 Comments

  1. Does anyone run into problems with their operations team claiming that they NEED some of those additional fields in order to correctly match the student with a counselor or prevent a duplicate record from being created? I’ve been lobbying to have a simple form but it terrifies our operations team because they think it’ll lead to chaos in our database.

    • Hi Rachel, Aaron from Roosevelt here. We absolutely ran into the same struggle. If I remember correctly, I believe we settled on email address as the unique identifier. While a person may have multiple email addresses, you likely won’t have one email address linked to multiple people.

  2. Hello Rachel… Keep lobbying, for sure. I visited the Agnes Scott inquiry form. In the present format it asks for much more information than should be needed to prevent database chaos. If preventing duplicate records is the goal, can the operations folk identify an essential element that will do that?

    Also noticed that your admissions counselors have geographic territories. Adding a request for a mailing address with the usual zip code would not be out of place, even though Roosevelt does not require that info.

    Optional athletics and academic info at the end of the from can be asked about later after an inquiry is received.

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