Indiana University has won top awards for best marketing practices and promotional pieces from UPCEA, the nation’s leading association for professional, continuing, and online education. A panel of marketing, communication, and design professionals gave the Office of Online Education’s (OOE’s) IU Online website a gold award in the interactive media category for the entry, “How Indiana University Online Tripled Applications by Leveraging a Powerful Platform.” OOE also took home a silver, “most-improved” award for its IU Online landing pages. According to UPCEA, OOE stood out among hundreds of other competitors for its “effective, creative, and exciting” marketing achievements.
As a nationally renowned institution, Indiana University has a respected brand that helps drive student recruitment for online programs. When it came time to redesign the IU Online website, OOE wanted a tool that would stretch its marketing budget and boost the online visibility of its diverse programs among prospective students across the country. In February 2018, the office unveiled its new recruitment website, which is based on the Ranku platform from Wiley Education Services. The site features an intuitive and easy-to-navigate design, enabling prospective students to locate the programs and information they are looking for in as few as three clicks.
With its new website in place, OOE sought to boost its engagement with prospective students with redesigned landing pages. Ads created for OOE’s 2018–19 digital marketing campaign link to these pages, which feature strong visual images, streamlined text with key program facts, a simple request-for-information form, and a link to OOE’s 10-minute admission application form. The pages respond to window resizing, accommodating the increasing number of students who view IU Online information on mobile devices. View a sample landing page.
The redesigned website and landing pages, in tandem with the IU Online digital marketing campaign, have yielded impressive results in 2018, with record numbers of requests for information, admissions applications, and enrollments.
Chris Foley, associate vice president for university academic affairs and director of online education, said, “We are extremely pleased to be recognized by UPCEA. These awards underscore the important role our web presence plays in bringing IU Online to the attention of students across the nation and world, and they provide external validation of the success of Indiana University’s collaborative model for online education.”
The Office of Online Education will be officially recognized at the 2018 UPCEA Awards Luncheon during the 27th Annual Marketing and Enrollment Management Seminar in November in Long Beach, California.