Mighty Interactive Boosts Online Leads 49%Uses Advanced Testing to Generate Massive ROI for NextStudent

Tempe, Arizona
November, 2004

What if you could spend 3% of your monthly marketing budget to increase your results by nearly 50%? You can, and NextStudent a Phoenix-based provider of student loan services, recently did. The company refinances and establishes new student loans for thousands of college students and their parents each year. Working with Internet marketing firm Mighty Interactive, NextStudent primarily advertises online, and generates hundreds of new student loan leads each day - cost effectively.

"Since we started working with Mighty Interactive, our average cost per lead has gone down by more than 400%," says Scott Linzer, NextStudent's Marketing Manager.

While happy about the overall success of the Internet advertising program, NextStudent and Mighty Interactive wanted to find a way to improve results even more. To do so, they focused not on the Internet advertising, but instead on what happened AFTER somebody clicked on a NextStudent ad.

"We felt we could increase the percentage of people who complete an online loan application once they get to that page of the Web site," said Jason Baer, Mighty Interactive President. "The problem was, we knew a different headline, or photo, or copy could improve results, but to test every option would takes months," he continued.

To solve this problem, Mighty Interactive partnered with Optimost, a New York firm with a computerized system that automatically created thousands of different Web page options based on parameters provided by Mighty Interactive and NextStudent. Each time a potential customer went to the NextStudent online loan application, they saw a different version of the page.

The system uncovered which elements of the online application had the greatest impact on completion rate, and methodically tweaked the layout to generate optimal results.

At the conclusion of the program, the percentage of people completing the application increased by 49.4% using the best possible combination of Web page elements.

"These results are phenomenal," said Linzer. "Given the size of our Internet advertising budget, to be able to increase leads by almost 50% has a dramatic impact on our bottom line. This program paid for itself in about one day," he continued.

According to Baer, testing and optimization of Web pages and online forms is an emerging Internet marketing tactic.

"No matter how good your current Web page or online form is it can be improved, and our experience and this new testing technology allows us to unlock that improvement for companies," he said. "If you’re at all serious about online leads and sales, you should consider this technique."

About Mighty Interactive

Mighty Interactive is an Internet marketing agency based in Phoenix, Arizona. Founded in 2000, the firm provides Internet strategy, usability consulting, e-mail marketing, search engine marketing, and online advertising services. Ranked as the Valley's No. 1 Internet services firm by readers of the Phoenix Business Journal, and Arizona Business Magazine's "Ranking Arizona". Mighty Interactive clients include: Arizona Lottery, City of Phoenix, Circle K Stores, Pinnacle West/APS, DMB Associates, Arizona Highways Magazine, Phoenix Children's Hospital, Greater Phoenix Chamber of Commerce, The Flinn Foundation, and others.

About NextStudent

NextStudent is one of the nation's premier education funding companies. NextStudent helps students and their families achieve their college education dreams by making college funding simple-simple to understand, simple to apply and simple to manage. Online resources that give students the tools and tutorials they need to understand financial aid and make well-informed choices.

NextStudent began in 1991 as a scholarship database company with Scholarships101, an award-winning scholarship search engine. In 2001, the name changed to NextStudent, to reflect the company's expanding offering of education lending resources, as well as the scholarship search engine.