Optimizing the Checkout Experience to Convert More Prospects into Students

 

How colleges and universities can implement eCommerce best practices to improve conversions and grow revenues

 

Optimizing the Checkout Experience to Convert More Prospects Into Students

So your marketing messaging worked and you managed to bring a prospective learner to your website. They poked around, they found offerings that appealed to them, and they got ready to enroll.

But then what happens?

For most eCommerce businesses, at this point over two thirds of their prospective customers disappear. 

How can colleges and universities overcome the hurdles faced across businesses of all shapes and sizes? 

Destiny One manages all aspects of the learner lifecycle, but by specifically optimizing the checkout experience—achieved by recognizing then responding to some of the eCommerce industry’s major barriers to purchase—Modern Campus has realized some incredible returns for its partner institutions. 

Not only do Destiny One schools enjoy a lower abandoned shopping cart rate than the industry average, but as a result of the unique—and automated—abandoned shopping cart recovery feature, Destiny One has generated an average revenue boost of 17% for its partner institutions.*

Understanding eCommerce Industry Averages

Across the eCommerce industry, the average abandoned shopping cart rate is 69.9%.  This means more than two out of every three shoppers puts items in their cart but never follows through on purchasing them. Of that population, 37% of shoppers abandoned their carts because they were simply browsing what was available. There will always be a population of prospective shoppers that are just browsing and there’s little that can be done to change this.

Looking at the remaining shoppers who abandoned their shopping carts—normalizing the responses to remove people who were just looking—there are six main reasons why shoppers abandon their carts: 

Destiny One is Bringing Back Customers You Didn’t Even Know You Lost

With most higher education registration systems, either the prospective student registers or they don’t. If they don’t, you may never even know that they visited your site.

Schools powered by Destiny One, however, can be proactive about serving potential learners. If a prospective student puts items in their cart but gets pulled away before finishing the transaction, a school running Destiny One can bring that student back. First, the system saves their cart—with all of their discount codes and pricing selections preserved. Then, after a short period of time, the system automatically sends the prospective customer an email prompting them to return to the site to finish their purchase.

Internal analysis found that 8% of learners recovered their otherwise abandoned carts when prompted. This led to an average 17% increase 

in revenue for Destiny One institutions over one year. Overall, 31 Modern Campus partner institutions, ranging from large to small, generated over $18.7 million from abandoned cart recovery.

Of course, as a result of the customer-centric design of the Destiny One shopping cart and checkout flow, fewer students abandon their carts in the first place. While the eCommerce industry averages a cart abandonment rate of over 69%, schools running the Destiny One SLM only had an abandoned shopping cart rate of 53%. 

How Destiny One  Optimizes the Checkout Process

Of the six reasons for cart abandonment identified by the Baymard Institute, some are more relevant to higher education than others. For example, regulatory concerns and the fundamental nature of higher education require prospective students to have an account to register for offerings. That said, there’s no reason that process should be time-consuming or challenging when it doesn't need to be. 

As such, Modern Campus designed the Destiny One Student Lifecycle Management (SLM) system to directly address the most common roadblocks standing in the way of eCommerce customers, creating a more streamlined journey for potential customers to take en route to enrolling in an offering. While some of the roadblocks can’t be removed, the impact of each one can certainly be minimized. 

The following pages will look at five ways that Destiny One manages consumer concerns and mitigates each of the main reasons why shoppers abandon their carts.

THE 5 FACETS OF YOUR WEBSITE THAT MAKE OR BREAK YOUR BOTTOM LINE

1. A Simple, Visual Shopping Cart
2. Optimal Information Security and Site Integrity
3. Rapid Registration
4. Immediate Online Course Access
5. A Shopping Experience Designed for the Modern Consumer

1. A Simple, Visual Shopping Cart

To start, Destiny One helps its partner colleges and universities offer students a simple, visually appealing shopping cart so they can quickly and easily understand what they’ve selected and how much it’s going to cost. They can also apply any discount codes and immediately see the total price, adjusted for them. While this might all seem very straightforward, the fact is that delivering a simple experience along these lines 
is very rare in the eCommerce industry, let alone in higher education. Only the top eTailers—like Walmart, Office Depot and Sephora—deliver this kind of experience to their online shoppers.

What’s more, Destiny One allows schools to set featured images for each course that populates in the cart so that, just like Amazon, students can visually assess and identify the offerings they’re registering for rather than having to rely on often-confusing course codes.
By offering a visually appealing and comprehensible shopping cart, colleges and universities using Destiny One are helping students easily understand their total costs and providing them with the professional and trustworthy shopping experience they’ve come to expect when making purchases online.

THE CHECKLIST

Which consumer concerns does a simple, visual shopping cart address?  

2. Optimal Information Security and Site Integrity

Destiny One is constantly upgrading its security interface to maintain the highest possible security designation from PCI PA-DSS. This commitment to digital security means sensitive student information that colleges and universities must collect during registration—from credit card numbers to birthdays and even social security identifiers—are as safe as they can possibly be when processed through Destiny One.

Additionally, Destiny One is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering. This means divisional staff can focus their efforts on using the software, rather than on managing the incredible complexity of maintaining the back-end hosting infrastructure on-campus as well. It also means university websites benefit from much higher up-time guarantees than they could deliver if they were hosting on-site.

Simply put, Modern Campus’ focus on security and site integrity ensures students can trust that their information will be safe when considering registration at a Destiny One-powered institution.

THE CHECKLIST

Which consumer concerns does optimal information security and site integrity address? 

3. Rapid Registration

One roadblock that stops prospective students from signing up to waitlists and registering for free offerings—which often lead into paid offerings down the road—is the fact that they have to proceed through a lengthy registration process when it should be a simple transaction.

Modern Campus has responded to this issue by introducing a Rapid Registration feature for students signing up to waitlists and enrolling in free courses. Instead of proceeding through a multi-step registration process designed to collect payment, students can register for free offerings or add themselves to waitlists at the touch of a button. While students still need 
to create an account, it’s greatly simplified—all they need to provide is their name and email.
 
Gone are the days when students have to spend significant amounts of time simply to sign up for a waitlist or free offering. By allowing prospective learners to easily engage with the institution, colleges and universities reduce roadblocks to enrollment and set students on the path to lifelong engagement.

THE CHECKLIST

Which consumer concerns does rapid registration address?

4. Immediate Online Course Access

Today’s customers have an expectation of immediacy and convenience, and students enrolling in postsecondary offerings are no different. For a shopper, it means they want to minimize the time between making a purchase and receiving a product as much as possible. For a student, it means they want access to online course materials and institutional resources as quickly as possible.

Destiny One responds to that demand by automating online course access. That means that as soon as a student enrolls in a course at a Modern Campus partner institution, they can be provided with immediate access to the LMS, as well as the Destiny One Student Portal and whatever else they need to succeed in their offering.

No more wait time? Now that’s responding to the modern consumer.

THE CHECKLIST

Which consumer concerns does immediate online course access address?

5. A Shopping Experience Designed for the Modern Consumer

Beyond immediate provisioning, Destiny One helps its partner institutions deliver a modern shopping experience to its prospective students with two key features: the ability to save offerings for later, and automated shopping cart recovery.

Allowing students to save offerings for later mirrors the wish list functions offered by many eCommerce retailers, where customers can keep certain products saved in their browser so they can decide whether to purchase later. According to Metrilo, allowing customers to save products for later can increase sales by 19.3% on average because it keeps shoppers engaged and helps them easily navigate back to desired products. 

With the Saved for Later feature, students can save offerings into a specific area of their shopping cart to return to at their convenience and enroll. Automated shopping cart recovery 
is another feature that aligns the shopping experience of Destiny One’s postsecondary partners with that of eCommerce leaders like Amazon. When students add items to the cart, but then fail to complete the purchase, Destiny One saves their cart information—including pricing, discounts and any other customized information—and prompts the student via email to return to their cart and complete the purchase.

Delivering these elements of the modern shopping experience simplifies the process for prospective students, reduces barriers to completing a transaction, and allows colleges and universities to grow enrollments while meeting learners’ expectations, right from the start.

THE CHECKLIST

Which consumer concerns does a shopping experience designed for the modern consumer address? 

How the Optimized Shopping Experience Impacts Learners and Institutions

By recognizing and responding to the most common reasons why consumers fail to follow through on eCommerce purchases, Modern Campus has honed the Destiny One SLM to deliver an optimized shopping experience that maximizes conversions from prospect to enrollee.

MAXIMIZING REGISTRATIONS

The eCommerce industry has an average abandoned shopping cart rate of 69.9%, but schools running the Destiny One SLM only had an abandoned shopping cart rate of 53%. 

What’s more, of those individuals who abandon their cart on a Destiny One-powered website, 80% of the abandonments occurred before sign-in. This means the vast majority of individuals who abandon a shopping cart running on Destiny One were just browsing, and unlikely to make a purchase anyway.

RECOVERING ABANDONED SHOPPING CARTS

The abandoned shopping cart recovery function has also proved to be incredibly valuable for divisions running on Destiny One. As mentioned earlier, over a year of study, 8% of learners recovered otherwise abandoned carts, leading to an increase in revenues of 17% for partner institutions. 

For 31 Modern Campus partner institutions, ranging from large to small, this translated into the generation of over $18.7 million in revenue from otherwise abandoned online shopping carts—with no additional staff effort needed.

Is Destiny One Right For You?

Destiny One helps non-traditional divisions of colleges and universities deliver the student-centric experience today’s learners expect. Part of that is recognizing that today’s learners think and behave like customers, and expect their postsecondary experience to align with what they’ve come to expect from market leaders like Amazon.

If your division is ready to increase its conversions, optimize the checkout experience and grow revenues—all while improving staff efficiency and the student experience—it  might be time to see if Destiny One would  be a fit for you.