What Career Are You? Part 2

In my last post I wrote about DU's content solution to a vendor contract for a mini DVD designed to bring leads to our website. (Did I mention this is year two of a legacy contract leftover from a recently departed Admissions head?) Our idea was to host a "career quiz" modeled after the quizzes you see all over the web, hosted on our domain and designed to capture email addresses for our lead database.

In this post I want to tell you how we're doing with that. Remember I said we had about 30 clicks on any of our urls on last year's DVD, and that these resulted in zero apps or visits.

So our goal was easy: Get more results - of any kind - than last year. Although I'd be the first to admit this is a lazy goal, for which I offer no excuses. Anyhow ... here's how things are shaking out so far.

Looking at conversions




The screens on the DVB all have links to our Visit and Apply pages. The quiz itself collects a name, high school grad year and email address before displaying results to the user. Each page of the quiz also contains a contact phone number and website address.

Number of DVDs delivered - 35,000
Number of DVDs in the field, Sept. - Dec. - 20,000
Visits registered - 16
Applications completed - 19
Email addresses collected - 824

Total conversion rate - 4.29%

Which is better than the expected direct mail response rate of .5% to 1.5%. Also, the DVB is still being handed out by admissions reps, so these are just "results so far."

But we won't do this again ...

I have to say, however, that next year I plan to duck out of this contract (it actually is renewed year to year and somebody jumped in and signed us up before we got a chance to show concrete reasons not to). Why?

I haven't calculated ROI on this yet, but here's what I know: We paid the higher ed vendor about $1 each for something we could have gotten much cheaper from our local fulfillment house (if we even decided to make such a thing, which we would not. We could have gotten similar results with the url printed on a frisbee or something). Especially given the fact that all content was sourced by us per the vendor's spec/template. This year we even asked for the specs and designed our own DVD sleeve because we were unhappy with the vendor's design last year.

In addition we took on the task, in-house, of concepting, researching, writing, designing and developing the quiz.

Even if it turns out to have positive ROI in the end, this is obviously not a smart way to work.

And so?

We still have a feeling the quiz is a good tool for generating interest in DU, so we've got plans brewing to put it to work elsewhere. I see a Facebook app in the near future ... Josh? :-)

Other suggestions out there? Leave a comment!