ABOUT STATWAX
Statwax is a full-service digital agency that specializes in student acquisition and enrollment for higher education institutions. Their services include digital ads, paid search, social media advertising, and digital video, and they have built dedicated CRO and SEO divisions. While they work with some SaaS companies, Statwax has developed a reputation for driving increased enrollments and lower student acquisition costs specifically for colleges and universities. Their clients include University of Missouri, Purdue University, and University of Miami.
THE SITUATION AND BUSINESS CHALLENGES
Statwax’s client base consists of higher education institutions who seek to attract students to enroll in their programs. Higher education presents several unique challenges for digital advertisers. Deciding where to attend college can be one of the most pivotal decisions of a person’s life. Many factors weigh into these decisions, including cost, location, campus life, academics, and more. These needs require advertisers to use precise targeting to match ads to the right candidates and nurture leads from application to enrollment.
The biggest challenge is that it has to feel like a 1:1 marketing conversation…It’s so life-changing that every higher-ed prospect needs to feel like we’re talking directly to them.
Another major challenge Statwax faced was with their clients’ web pages. University web pages tend to be old-fashioned and difficult to navigate. They generally contain a vast amount of information about the university and are not easy to change. These challenges made it tricky for Statwax to create highly personalized campaigns, as they would terminate at a daunting and impersonal university landing page that Statwax could not easily customize.
Statwax saw the opportunity to provide better value for their clients by creating personalized landing pages for visitors. Still, the answer to this challenge wasn’t immediately apparent. Statwax lacked capacity to provide web design services to their clients. Even if they had a talented web designer, that person would have to work across multiple large university websites, each with its own architecture and restrictions.
Though their campaigns were driving acceptable results for their clients, Statwax President Brian Walker wanted to bridge this gap and provide personalized experiences that could be a one-to-one conversation with a candidate all the way to enrollment. A business partner recommended that Statwax reach out to Instapage to solve their landing page needs.
INSTAPAGE UNLOCKS CRO CAPABILITIES
Statwax recognized the opportunity presented by custom landing page experiences for potential applicants. Rather than wait for the perfect moment, Statwax decided to develop test landing pages for their clients to demonstrate the potential impact on enrollments.
We could show them so much more value by doing just a couple of pages for them, even if it was free. All of a sudden it would open the doors to the possibilities we could provide as an agency.
EASY-TO-USE PLATFORM SPEEDS UP PRODUCTION
From Day One, Instapage unlocked CRO capabilities for Statwax without the need to hire a web development team. The landing page builder’s ease of use allowed Walker to assign designers and campaign managers to work directly in the tool. The team leveraged templates and global content blocks to create experiences consistent with their university clients’ long-established brands.
Walker was impressed with how easy it was to implement landing page updates on Instapage. “I don’t have web dev knowledge. I can go in and add hidden fields to a form and set up tracking for different parameters and push it live to one of our landing pages in five minutes. It’s that easy to use.”
Using Instapage, Statwax rapidly deployed landing page experiences for their clients. Statwax was able to bring these experiences from concept design to live deployment in approximately five business days, including QA testing for form integration. They estimate that they are 10 times faster in deploying new and relevant landing pages since starting with Instapage. The ability to deploy templates and global blocks helps Statwax cut down on redundant design and copywriting work, and enables quick and easy tweaks without back-end development needs.
RESULTS
Statwax has seen demonstrable success since partnering with Instapage, and have been able to provide incredible value to their clients.
In one instance, a Statwax client asked for help diagnosing and improving their landing page challenges. The client had recently published a new website design without using conversion-optimized design principles. When the new website launch resulted in a decrease in conversions, the client brought Statwax on board to identify the issues and provide a solution.
Statwax used Instapage to redesign and redeploy the webpages to test whether the new website design was causing the traffic decrease. Statwax leveraged Instapage templates and content blocks to create a test version of the landing page that featured personalized content, better form design, and a reorganized flow. Then, Statwax compared the new and original pages in a split test. In this test, the page designed with Instapage conversion best practices outperformed the client’s design by nearly seven times and drove significantly higher conversions.
SUMMATION
Instapage has allowed Statwax to unlock new opportunities for their business and implement better ad experiences for every client. The intuitive user interface and wide selection of tools, all in one platform, allowed them to quickly offer more value to their clients. They now include Instapage experiences as a core part of their services.
We started to realize not only the speed at which we could deploy things to help our ad efforts from Day One, but also the ability to test, and tweak, and split traffic, and start reporting on CRO things to help our clients do better with their overall website traffic.