The Secret to Boosting Admissions with Your Edlio CMS

Increasing enrollment can be tricky. Luckily, your school’s website and Edlio CMS were designed to help you attract the attention of your education community! Your school’s site should have a navigation bar with a direct path to your admissions or enrollment landing page. Its purpose is to be the go-to area for anything related to admissions and a user should be able to navigate to it regardless of where they are on your website. A few examples of what could be included when you run your cursor over the tab in the navigation are:

Admissions process and information
Tuition and financial aid information
Setting up a visit
International application (if applicable)

These are just a few examples of what prospective families could see under the Admissions tab from the navigation bar. Once you’ve provided the general structure and landing page(s), you’ll then be able to employ our recommended strategies that follow to increase enrollment!

Your Homepage

The first step to increasing enrollment is deciding how best to leverage your homepage using Edlio’s easy-to-use CMS. You’ll have to ask yourself what you want prospective families to see first when they go to your school’s website. Do you want them to see the school’s news first then admissions or enrollment information after scrolling down? Or should they see the admissions or enrollment information immediately without having to scroll? We recommend featuring your school’s news first and then providing the important admissions or enrollment information further down the page because it allows prospective families to engage with your website as if they were already enrolled.

After you’ve decided where to place the enrollment information, you will want to have some admissions statistics to share that highlights the benefits prospective families can enjoy by enrolling at your school. Typically, this will look like a rectangle or box shape with a label, something like “[Your school name] at a glance.” There are a variety of categories to boast about, here are a few examples:

Graduation percentage
Percentage who attend a four year college or university
The number of AP courses offered
Scholarship money offered to the most recent graduating class

These examples are more relevant for upper or high school institutions but should give a general idea of what prospective families want to see. The facts should essentially represent anything that your school prides itself on that prospective families should know about. Once you’ve determined what you’d like to show, the Edlio CMS makes it straightforward to implement the various numbers and categories into your pages!

Creating a Form

Now that you have the essential information about your school figured out, you’ll need to build a form for prospective families to submit their information and begin their journey towards enrollment. Utilizing Edlio’s forms tool, prospective students and their families will be able to easily submit information such as:

Full name
Interested grade
Phone number and/or email address
Preferred method of contact

The beauty of our forms tool is the amount of customizations you can make. Whether you want to drag and drop like the aforementioned admissions information or change field requirements, you have complete freedom to make the form start the enrollment process on a positive note.

How to Enroll

There are several options available to you at this point in how you want to guide families on their journey to enrolling or finding out more information. You could:

Feature an “Apply Now” or “Get More Info” type of button below the admissions information on the homepage that takes them to a form.
Build out an admissions landing page with a form to submit their information.
Or an “Enroll” standalone button on the homepage.

The key consideration for guiding prospective families is easy navigation of your website for a frustration-free digital experience. Some users may find it easy to feature a button immediately on the homepage without having to scroll while others may want to show the school’s personality before providing a form for a prospective family to put in their information. Edlio understands that no one school or website is alike, so our CMS allows for that flexibility and ability to meet your specific design needs.

Announcing Open Admissions

Planning and creating the admissions information and form are the hardest parts of the process that you control. Once those are finished, all you need to do is decide how to effectively communicate to current and prospective families that enrollment for the next term is open. Think about the various ways your parents engage with the school as there are a couple of major channels of communication you can announce to.

In today’s current technological environment, families can be reached by snail mail, email, text, and announcements on the school’s homepage. You could send the announcement through all the available channels but be careful not to create a message that overwhelms them all at once. Since you’ve built a form to capture information digitally, We recommend utilizing email or text and setting up an announcement on your school’s homepage. You want parents to have the most straightforward path to indicating their interest, so minimizing the number of clicks or steps is key. An email or digital newsletter embedded with the form is effective as is having an announcement on the homepage that takes them directly to the form.

When you’re thinking about how to increase enrollment, the biggest factor to consider is how you communicate information to prospective students and their families. By leveraging an effectively designed website with minimal navigation, you’re holding prospective students’ hands to the beginning of a fruitful and lifelong relationship with your school!