CalArts Extended Studies
Microsite

A key part of our digital strategy is where we direct traffic to, referred to as a landing page. Given our robust outreach efforts outlined in the Campaigns section of this case study, we took a hard look at our website. While the majority of prospective students access the internet on mobile devices, many sites are built for a desktop experience. Our site was no exception, with a whopping 30% of the  homepage experience, above the fold, taken up by institutional warnings and cookies banners on first load.



Before we invested in any paid media, we knew we had to create a mobile-optimized landing page, and opted to build a custom microsite to act as an interim homepage. This way, we could quickly create a seamless transition into the larger DestinyOne site without dealing with the challenges of a comprehensive website redesign.

Because this was a destination page, we identified the actions we wanted our new users to take; the primary one being to subscribe to our newsletter. We brainstormed incentives we could promote to help us realize those objectives while not discounting the brand. We landed on teasing a digitized viewbook.



This lead-capture strategy took shape as a super-simplified signup form for an automated email campaign. Once a prospective student clicked an ad and landed on our page, we showed them a single-field name capture form that stood between them and their very own digital copy of our viewbook.

In order to conserve resources, I set up an email automation to send out a series of welcome emails on a time lapse to new subscribers, starting with the viewbook email. Each email focuses on a different selling point and conversion goal.

Outcomes:

• Automated subscriber onboarding.
  
• Over 1,000 new leads captured.
  
• 80% Open Rate on first email send.