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Your prospective students spend a lot of time on websites that are extremely good at making things easy.
They can filter hundreds of products in seconds, get recommendations based on what they like, read reviews before making a decision, and come back later without losing everything they've already done.
Then they start researching universities.
Finding the right course can still mean several tabs, a fairly determined hunt for the fees and, eventually, a form that asks for information they've already supplied somewhere else.
Of course, choosing a university isn't the same as buying a pair of trainers.
But ecommerce teams have spent years looking very closely at the little things that make people hesitate, get frustrated or leave.
There are a few ideas worth borrowing.
Help students narrow things down
Give somebody 400 programmes and an A–Z list and you haven't necessarily made choosing any easier.
Some universities, for example, offer a major/career quiz: students choose images based on their interests and the tool suggests careers and majors that might suit them.
Ecommerce does something pretty well: it's great at helping people reduce a very big set of options into a much more manageable one (shopping for just the right thing!).
You don't need an elaborate recommendation engine to do the same thing.
Useful filters, comparison tools and a good course finder can all help.
We've talked before about hyper-personalization in higher education recruitment and how prospective students increasingly expect digital experiences to respond to what they’re actually interested in.
Let other students help make the case
Most of us read reviews before booking a hotel or buying something unfamiliar.
Prospective students do their own version of that too.
They want to hear from people who've already taken the course, lived on campus or gone through the application process.
Your marketing copy can explain what you offer, but another student can often answer the question they're really asking: what's it actually like?
That could mean student videos, ambassador content, quotes, takeovers or Q&As sitting alongside your program information.
The trick is not polishing those voices until they sound suspiciously like the prospectus.
Notice where people get stuck
Retailers pay very close attention to the point where somebody puts something in their basket and disappears.
Higher education has plenty of similar moments.
Someone starts an enquiry and doesn't finish: they begin an application, get to a document upload and stop. An admitted student misses one of the steps they need to complete before enrolment.
They may not have changed their mind, they maysimply have been interrupted or not known what to do next.
Pointing them to the right place is more helpful than a traditional CTAL like another general “Apply now” email.
And sometimes the problem isn't the communication at all….It's the journey.
Try completing one of your own enquiry forms on a phone. See how long it takes to find a tuition fee.
Start an application and count how many times you're asked for the same information.
Our 10 tips to reduce UI and UX friction on university websites has plenty more on spotting exactly these kinds of obstacles.
Make the next step easier
Ecommerce has become very good at remembering what you've already done.
Higher education is beginning to rethink this too.
You could use information students have already entered into their profile to make admission offers before they've applied to an individual college.
With this, you'd simplify a process that can otherwise feel daunting before it has even started.
You don't need to offer direct admission to look at the same issue on your own website.
See where students are repeating information, how they're being bounced from one place to another.
Check if a journey through your internal structure feels simple from the outside.
Mapping the whole experience can make some of those gaps surprisingly obvious.
Borrow the useful bits, not the annoying ones
There are some ecommerce habits we can happily leave behind.
Fake countdown timers, artificial scarcity, and ads that follow you around the internet for three weeks aren't fun, and nobody likes that experience.
And we can't compare students to shopping carts, obviously, but students are used to digital experiences that remember where they are, help them make sense of lots of options, and don't put unnecessary obstacles in their way… Just like e-commerce retailers do.
You don't need to make your university website feel like an online store.
But you can simply pay a little more attention to the moments where prospective students have to work harder than they should.
Where could you make your prospective student journey just a little easier? Share your thoughts on LinkedIn.