Slate Spotlight on Dynamic Content Blocks with Waybetter Marketing

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Well, good morning, good afternoon. As everyone starts to join us, welcome. We are so very excited to have you all with us today. We're going to wait just a few moments. We have a lot of people that are going to be trickling in here, so feel free to introduce yourself in the chat and sit tight while we get ready to get started.

Yeah.

Alright, well I think we're we're starting to level off here a little bit. Welcome once again my name is Ben Willner. I am a client support engineer with technicians based out of our Portland OR office. I am so happy to be here to introduce you to today's webinar. This is a slate spotlight. We are talking about dynamic content blocks with way better marketing topic that I am very excited about it.

Seems like a lot of other people are very excited about and we're gonna have a great time this morning, this afternoon, whatever time zone you are in as we get started. I do have a couple of housekeeping items that I just want to go over really quick before I toss it off to Alice and Clay.

First and foremost, this webinar is being recorded. That recording will be available after the fact for further viewing. Or if you have someone else who wasn't able to make it, rest assured that will be available. If you feel the need, there is the option to enable closed captioning, there's a CC button at the top right corner of the window. Similarly, if you would like to go into a full screen mode, you can do that there as well if at any point in time you're having any audio visual issues and need to resync. Or there's.

Yeah.

Tutoring or anything like that, just refresh the window that you will should be able to solve that right away and feel free to post your questions in chat. Please feel free to utilize that. I'll be hanging out in the chat as well, so rest assured you can feel free to do that. But with that I'm going to send it over to Ali and Clay.

Alright, thanks so much Ben. So we are also very excited to have you here with us this afternoon for our dynamic content blocks webinar. My name is Clay Myers, I am one of the directors of Slate Hero Way better marketing joined alongside with our other Director of Slate, Allie Shriner. We're really excited today to speak with you.

A little bit more about this relatively new feature from technicians called dynamic content blocks. So before we dive into a really great session, just want to share with you a bit more about who we are and then also a bit more about who we better marketing is too. So as I mentioned, Clay Meyer is one of the directors of Slate here, way better marketing lead a lot of our technical projects, anything from reports to implementations, making sure that everything that we are building and constructing is sound technically.

I've been here for the better part of nine months, but prior to way better, I've had over six years of experience working within Slate and that was from a wide variety of seats. So anything from an admissions counselor, utilizing reader or utilizing events scripts all the way to being a slate captain at Loyola University Maryland, joined here again by Ali Ali Shriner. So kick it over to Ali.

Hi everyone. As Clay mentioned, my name is Ali Shriner. I'm one of the other directors of Slate here at we better Bennett Way better going on six years now and really you know are dedicated to helping our partners, perspective partners really making the most of slate and really harnessing slate to its fullest capabilities.

And taking advantage of all new features as relates to content blocks, while we're here today, prior to way better, I was with the Chronicle of Higher Education for just over five years. They're supported audience development circulation, helped on board their marketing automation platform eloqua at the time. So gained a lot of experience with direct marketing and automation and also learned a lot about higher end. So it's a kind of joining of those two worlds for me and kind of really privileged to work directly within so many people's instances.

So thanks for being here.

Alright, awesome. So a little bit about who we are here at way better marketing. You know really the core philosophy for us and what we keep in mind when we are configuring anything inside or outside of slate is we want to make sure that whatever it is that we are building is going to help Dr. enrollment for our partners. You know we know that you on the university side.

Most important KPI for you and your teams is enrollment. And we want to make sure that what we are constructing and what we are building is helping you to accomplish those enrollment goals. Again, that's the key thing we keep in mind from a high level perspective when we are starting a project. But again, even if we're really in the nitty gritty in the weeds of a portal or the communication flow or of a new form, we want to make sure that that effort is going to help Dr. enrollment for our partners and we've been, you know, abiding by that philosophy.

Or a very long time. You know we've been in this space for a really long time, way better first opened its doors back in 2005. I was not part of the team then, I was about 10 years old in 2005. But you know we have been multi channel in our enrollment marketing really ever since. You know in 2009 we joined the higher education space. We've been there, you know since 2009 we're exclusively a higher education enrollment marketing company and we do a lot here. You know we have a lot in house.

We work with a total of eight different marketing automation platforms and this really gives us a lot to work with. You know, if we are starting work in a new marketing automation platform, we are really leveraging skills that we've learned in one, if we're trying to you know, discern best practices in in one marketing platform, you know we're we're already taking with us a lot of lessons learned in the other. So this really helps our team be nimble, be flexible to be adaptable and it really helps our slate.

Work as well. So we are a slate platinum partner. It's the highest level of partnership that Slate has to offer. So it means in the slate world, we can give our partner universities really top notch support. We've helped over 100 different schools with their slate projects. And the other big side of the house here at way better marketing is helping university partners with strategic search. So ever since 2005 / 100 million students have passed through one of our campaigns.

So certainly is a lot of learning and a lot of insights to be shared. So what you can expect from us here on this webinar is a few things. The first thing that we're going to talk about is marketing automation. So depending on your role in slate, whether you're a marketing person or more of an operations person, you're probably still using marketing automation every single day. And maybe you don't need to necessarily know the terminology or maybe you're not necessarily thinking of your work in that.

Regard, but we really view marketing automation as crucial to the work that our university partners are doing and we also view it as a huge time saver too. So we're going to share with you some best practices about general marketing automation and then we'll dive a little bit more specifically into content blocks. So we know that a lot of folks here on the call today, maybe you've just started to implement slate or you've been in Slate for maybe a year or two, maybe you haven't even scratched the surface yet of regular old content.

Box, you know, we hope to give you a really solid foundation to then explain what those dynamic features of content content blocks are. And even for those who are on the call and maybe you're already utilizing content blocks extensively throughout your instance, this should still be a great refresher for you as well. We will talk about some of the new features and some of the new functionality related to the dynamic system dynamicism of content blocks. And I guess this is the reason why we are all here this afternoon too.

We also want to conclude the webinar with some great show and tell. We have been utilizing dynamic content blocks in our work very extensively over the past few months. We do want to show you what's possible, what we have configured in partners instances and then too afterwards we do want to kind of take a look under the hood. We do want to show you some examples of dynamic content blocks that we have constructed in our very own instance too. So again regardless of your familiarity with regular old content blocks.

Uh, whether you're just starting off or whether you are utilizing this really across your instance, there should be some great takeaways from this webinar this afternoon. So definitely a a packed agenda and we're looking forward to getting started. Well, I'm going to kick it over to Allie to speak about marketing automation, you know what it is, how to leverage it and how it's going to make life so much easier for you on the marketing front. Ali?

Thanks. When we, you know been thinking about marking automation when we kick off work with our partners, one personally, my favorite questions to ask and to really learn is the history of the instance for tenured instances one that have been around for many cycles. What did the implementation look like and what did the team focus on in those first early cycles?

But for really all if it's day one insulate or day 5000 insulate, it's why slate? Why the move to Slate? And though there is often one kind of main efficiency, maybe the team was really looking forward to. Ultimately the answer is the same across all institutions of all shapes and sizes. Public, private. And that is automation. The endless way you can streamline your operations, overhaul likely archaic processes, but also to apply that same automation.

The student outreach at every point in the funnel for every critical call to action. Sleep of course makes it very easy to be strategic and also systematic to apply this principle. And that is the notion that the easier you make a process, the easier it's going to be to configure to maintain internally from an internal perspective and then for users, the external audience, the really higher likelihood of conversion.

Because at the end of the day, regardless of CRM, great process with average marketing will always beat great marketing with average process. As Clay mentioned, we've had the privilege of working obviously with a lot of different colleges and universities. But when we think back to the results, to the impact that we've had a hand in, most of it comes down to overhauling process. The more complicated something is the higher risk of abandonment from students. Again, let's think externally.

And then internally, the more time that's wound up in the maintenance and the really kind of management of it all, that's why marketing automation is truly a win win.

It also marketing automation makes portal pages like this possible, one that you can guess is chock full of content blocks. And aside from being consistent, as you can see in the overall look and feel here with with the brand, it looks pretty, it looks nice. The real power of the page is harnessing the data that you have and using marketing automation and really all the things in your sleep toolbox to deliver a completely custom page, a completely custom experience to the student.

Because that's where the benefits of marketing automation lie. Data efficiency and personalization. First data. There's no shortage of it in slate. You probably have it coming out of your ears. All the demographic data available, excuse me. The license name sources the data you collect overtime, of course, via form submissions, event registrations, your application, no doubt. And then the endless supply of behavior and website analytics that you're constantly tracking via ping? You can use this data.

And drive decisions to drive insights to quickly be able to see and spot roadblocks where students getting hung up in, in the process and in your funnel where are they getting stuck? Next comes efficiency. We've already talked a little bit about it again that internal perspective and hopefully you're living the day-to-day benefits, you're taking advantage of a lot of those automations. But beyond that marketing automation allows you to make this scalable with other initiatives, another new initiatives, new builds.

You can also look to take advantage of, you know, new features that Alexander is going to promote at upcoming summits. This shouldn't mean longer cycle prep lists. It shouldn't mean that you're kind of backing yourself into a quarter, understanding that your implementation is never ending, it's iterative, you're always building overtime. And finally personalization, the portal status page, we just showed really proof of how this can pack a punch with students and how this can be applied, you know, across the across the funnel.

Across all your assets and sleep and of course the primary vehicle, one of the primary vehicles to do this insulate is content blocks which are transferable to many kind of key assets in your instance. So before we jump into some specifics, let's get a sense of where everyone is today in terms of their content blocks. So quick poll if you wouldn't mind kind of dropping yours in the chat.

Yeah, no worries. If you're still more on that a, you're that B.

Level that is totally OK. Again, we know that a lot of folks are very new to slate in general. If you are not utilizing content blocks again, no worries. Hopefully this session gives you some great takeaways to to bring some of those best practices within content blocks back into your instance.

All right. I see a lot going on in the chat and and really a lot of variety too great. So it looks like we have some folks that are really just starting off. We have some folks who you know again have been working within you know content blocks pretty extensively which is great. You know for those of you who are more on the A or the B level, let's give you a quick rundown of exactly what content blocks are first. Content blocks are a great way to pull in specific information that you want to show to a student based.

On a field value and you can utilize content blocks really all across your system and the very easy way to call those content blocks is to simply merge and emerge field. So let's say you are configuring a deliver message you're putting in perhaps the students major. The way to call that content block then is to put a space after the name of that merge field.

Put the pipe symbol. That's the one that looks like a larger L write the word snippet, put a colon there, and then in apostrophes just put the name of the content block that you've already created within the deliver module. This way, what the system will do is it will see what that field value is, and then it will compare that field value with the content block that you've created. And if you've created a key value already for that content block, whatever you've determined in that content block to show the student.

Will display to this student in deliver in the portal, or really all across your instance. Now most traditionally when it comes to content blocks, if you're already utilizing those, you're probably utilizing string content blocks. This has nothing to do with shoelaces. This is just a string of letters or numbers that you are passing to the content block and the content block is then interpreting that and then presenting content in whatever assets you know you were calling it in. So again, the great use case here is going to be.

Major if you want to display major content to a particular student, you'll put the name of the major in that field so you know whatever the students major is, it'll be sent to the content block, and then if there is a corresponding key in that content block for that major, it will then show the content that you have determined you want to show for students in that major. But the use cases for content blogs don't just stop with strings, you can also program your content blocks to be integers or real numbers.

So if you wanted to show certain data to a student based on a number range, perhaps you want to show different content to students who had a GPA from a 3.5 to a 4.0. You can set up a range of either of integers which are whole numbers, or a range of real numbers which are just numbers with decimal points. So here again, doesn't need to match exactly that number that you're passing, can just be in a specific range. Finally, and and I would say you know a really useful.

Use case of of content blocks is going to be data-driven content blocks and a perfect use case here is promoting certain application deadlines. Let's say that you are a school with an early action deadline and a regular decision deadline. In your drip campaigns, maybe up until a certain date. You want to promote externally to students that the early application deadline is a certain date, but once that date passes you then want to promote your regular decision or your rolling deadline.

With those date and date time content blocks, all of that is possible without having to have separate e-mail or separate portal assets too.

Now again, for those of you who already have experience with content blocks, likely you are already utilizing your content blocks within deliver mailings or maybe even your applicant status portal as well. But you can also still utilize content blocks within any decision letter template, any inbox, any message that you're sending to students. You can even merge them into forms. Really anywhere in the system that you can bring in customized merge fields, you can utilize content blocks. And again, this gives you.

A lot of time, you know if you're setting these up correctly, you know this is going to give you a lot of time back in your day, you're going to be able to work smarter, not harder. So you know what are the really distinct benefits of using these content blocks really all across an instance?

Yeah, happy to kind of dig into those more. And I think kind of leaning on what Clay said, now that you know the types of content blocks and the youth cases for them, you're not really ready to leverage them for so many people that you know are not utilizing them today. These are kind of some key kind of quick steps that you can look to implement. And in some cases the student and user experience, the external experience won't change at all, but you're going to get real efficient on the back end. I saw in the chat a lot of people using content blocks.

84 signatures, that's great. And this, you know, I would say, goes a bit beyond that in our example, surely your e-mail messages today contain signatures. You're using content blocks maybe to support them. At times staff assign signatures, which a lot of you are probably doing. But what about from other members of your admissions team, likely in leadership VP's directors when turnover or or change occurs in this position, what happens for a lot of instances that we see, it means a lot of painstaking.

Updates across all of those messages. But you know the old adage work smarter, not harder. And content blocks really allows you to do this across all of your messages. Use content blocks with a defined value for the key. Normally in your construction, as clay just showed, you would rely on a field value to determine what content block version to show. Like field is major of interest, and then you have separate keys for accounting for finance. In this case though, you are going to hard code.

In that key value, again, not relying on a field. Next, you're going to then insert this into the content block, into the message, and now when you have to make an update, you make it in one place, consistently changing it across all of those assets. Again, most are probably familiar with this practice for staff assigned signatures, but these are for signatures that do not have corresponding values within slate. They're not being set by your rules. They don't have, you know, fields that are that are kind of harboring this data.

So then keeping with the theme of working smarter or next, going to use content blocks and a translation table to drastically change the student and user experience, the external experience. Here we're driving personalization to the student based on major of interest. First, we're going to use a translation table to categorize our program prompts. Let's say you have 90 program prompts. We're going to categorize them into larger academic segments or buckets. So think like you know biology.

Moral science, chemistry, those will all be science. There's a few reasons for this. Number one, let's start with this student. Again, external. Especially in the undergrad space, students are likely to change their mind, but as our research shows, they generally stay within that same bucket. You know, again, my science student, maybe he goes from biology to environmental science, he's still likely is going to remain a science student. And personalization is, we know works best when it's relevant. So even as a student changes his mind, academic segments.

Allow us to be personalized without being too personalized.

Also comes in terms of why use a translation table is management. The management of let's say 9 academic segments sounds a lot better than 90 in terms of those key values. Keeping the content updated cycle over cycle becomes much more sustainable. And even as new programs come online, all you have to do is add them to your translation table.

And then comes assets for my marketers on the call for those that, you know, work closely with those colleagues. Let's face it, you might not have video content, student quotes, you know, associated copy related for all of your, you know, major prompts. But it seems much more feasible, feasible to do this for 9 than it does again for 90.

So now with the foundational knowledge and kind of direct application of content blocks under your belt, now we're really kind of getting why you're here today to go beyond this to talk about the new feature related to you know, dynamic content blocks. So let's review what's new and really kind of available now for us to utilize the 1st. And this is personally a big win for way better is that you can now utilize merge fields within content blocks. Just be sure of course that this is referenced in your query and recipient list.

Object, and you'll of course need to know the appropriate export name to then include in your content block.

The application of course here is endless. And like I said, for way better, we were super excited when we heard this at Summit. And it's frankly something we always really had to work around in the past because we weren't willing to give up the field word personalization and we obviously needed to have our content block. So in terms of the source code, we really had to splice the code and be quite surgical to accommodate the field merge while also accommodating the content block. And this is now really a thing of the past. This will streamline your work. It opens really the door.

A lot of possibilities and the next is really true for liquid markup and conditional logic. For those not familiar or maybe just kind of getting started with slate, liquid markup and conditional logic is basically the ability to apply comparison statements. If X show this, if Y show something different. And again this allows you to streamline your bills because this can now all be baked into the dynamic directly within to your dynamic content block. Now the content block is home to.

All the intended personalization making it really easy to kind of manage and maintain overtime. Plus content blocks can now reference and call upon other content blocks which is extremely useful when working across personalization that really leans and is dependent upon multiple data points, multiple field values and merge fields kind of defined higher up in the flow then flow down to the content block. So you can bring in a content block that included.

Merge fields for a records name or conditional logic that references that data again piped into the message.

The important caveat with this though is knowing your limitations, the really the levels of recursion, which is basically just the number of content blocks that you can call on. You have your first content block which calls on content block number two, which then calls on content block number 3, but that's your limit. You really cannot go beyond that third level of recursion without an error. So now that you know kind of what's new, clay is going to walk you through the direct application of these kind of three, you know, main features.

And showcasing examples, but really kind of diving into way better instance too, to show you direct application of how to configure.

Yeah, absolutely. And and really just to to kind of add to this example to really 99% of the work that you're doing in slate when it comes to content blocks could likely be accomplished with just one or two content blocks. You know, it's very rare that you are going to require three content blocks to get your message across. Even less likely you would ever need 4. So if you find yourself kind of running into this, you know, recursion error, I would say, you know, take a step back.

And really try to examine your processes. Is there anywhere that you can really simplify? Again, the key and the benefit of marketing automation is that things are sustainable to build. And if there is so much logic that it's crazy to understand if you're looking at it for the first time, likely it's just a bit too complicated. So try to be as simple as you possibly can when it comes to creating not just content blocks, but really anything in slate.

All right. Well, let's jump to some tangible examples here. You know, first we'll show you what we have created in the instance of our university partners and then we'll do a little bit of screen sharing. We'll show you what we've cooked up in our own way, better slate instance as it pertains to dynamic compound blocks. And hopefully this inspires you to again starts to build these assets within your own system.

The 1st and the most traditional example is still going to be within deliver and it's going to pertain to staff signatures as well. So you can see here on the upper left hand corner of my screen we have a message and of course we have that content block for signature. But here instead of hard coding in something in the signature, say for a director or for a VP, we are referencing merge fields. Within that content block we are referencing the staff assign name.

In the staff assigned title and you can see here that this creates a very formatted staff signature. Now you might be saying, well, can't I just put this staff signature directly in my deliver messages? And the answer is yes, of course you can do that. The big advantage here though of using a content block is a cross messages. All of your signatures are going to be uniform, they're all going to be formatted in the exact same way. You won't have to worry about fighting with line breaks or fighting with e-mail hyperlinks if you're utilizing a content block.

That is consistent across every single message asset that you happen to be utilizing. And we'll touch upon this example in our show portion of our when we're doing some screen sharing. But this is also a great way to display alternative calls to action for your students within deliver messages. So let's say that you have a really important open house coming up in just a couple weeks and within your drip campaigns that you're using this content block in, you want to make sure that students know that that event is happening within that.

Content block. You can just enter in a couple spaces and append that registration to the open house. So again, that way students, as they're receiving messages in that drip campaign, know about that huge banner event. And of course, once that event ends, all you have to do is go into that content block and delete that registration link. If you've set this up in, you know, a dozen or two dozen separate e-mail assets, well, you're going to have to do is go into each and every message, delete out that alternative CTA.

And then reschedule the message. If you're using that at a content block level, it is going to save you a ton of time and a ton of energy too.

Now another place that again you can utilize these dynamic content blocks is within your decision letter templates. And this is actually the example that we'll show you what it looks like on the back end in our slate instance. In this particular example, we have a dynamic content block within our admit letter and we are referencing the students major. Based on the students major, we're sending that information to a content block that's going to display additional information to the student. So again, perhaps.

If a student is an architecture student, we're speaking about the ends and outs of the architecture program. If they're sports science, we're giving them information on the sports science program. Before biology, we wanted to introduce one additional nuance and here this is an example of utilizing liquid markup within a contact block. In this particular instance, we are saying that if these students concentration within biology does not exist, we're letting the student know that they have to choose a concentration by their junior year.

Else if that concentration value does exist, we are referencing what concentration the student applied into and what concentration they should plan on studying once they begin their university career. And you can see here on the right hand side the differences within this content block. So that larger example is if the student had not chosen a concentration, but if they've already got a concentration on file with that content block, that same content block via liquid markup we are referencing exactly what that.

Concentration is now this is less of a marketing automation when, it's more of an operational efficiency when, but either way, you're helping to relay accurate information to students that's relevant and that's based on characteristics of that student's application.

Finally, and probably my favorite example is using content blocks in content blocks. Now this particular example was taking place within a portal and this specifically was a graduate student admitted portal. Here we utilized translation tables to group similar majors together and for those clusters of major, we displayed the appropriate program director for that student. So for students who were studying in physical therapy didn't matter the exact.

Program. They should see the same person, the same program director. We were able to accomplish that of course with a traditional content block, but there were many other programs with a lot more nuance and a lot more intricacy. A good example here was certain psychology programs. Not all psychology students would have the same program director at this particular university. This was based on the students specific concentration. So here within our psychology content block for program director.

We inserted reference to another content block and here this second content block was looking specifically at the students concentration. Based on the students concentration, we are then showing the appropriate individual for that student. So here I would say this is both a marketing automation win and an operational efficiency win too, because you are displaying accurate information to the student based on their academic program. And you're doing so in an appealing way, in a way that's, you know, really easy for students to understand.

Accessible for students at the same time too.

Alright, well let's jump into the way better slate instance to show you a few of these examples. We have a couple samples queued up here and again hopefully with this screen share you can start to see what exactly is going into this from a technical standpoint. This first example is with a signature that's bringing in merge fields. So you can see here this is the most basic of basic e-mail messages. We just have one sample student here referencing their.

E-mail. I'm gonna zoom in one more just so everybody can see perfect. We have some Latin filler text and then we have this e-mail signature. Now if I were to jump into the message, you'll see that that is not hard coded in. You know, we are not referencing specific exports that we are calling on in the recipient list for staff assigned. This is all simply a content block.

And you'll also notice here too that the value that I'm calling here for signature is not something that I'm providing in the recipient list. So this if you do this method, it's going to save you a step. You won't have to define what this export is because within that webinar signature content block, I don't have any values here. The only value that exists here is the default content block. So again, because there's nothing being passed for signature, everything then is going to go to the.

Default content block which has these merge fields right here and we can also see too that we have an alternative CTA for the students when it comes to this content block. Join us for our dynamic content block webinar on March 16th. Well now that it is March 16th and this event is over, I can simply delete that, I can save it and if I were to refresh this message.

And if we let this run, we would see that that normal signature has returned. So instead of having to stop every single message that's in my drip campaign and add in an alternative CTA or take out an alternative CTA, I can control that all at the level of the content block. This will really make your messages timely and hyper relevant for students too.

All right. The next example I want to queue up is the example with decision letters. Now I have five test students queued up here with various majors and various concentrations in all of these students have been admitted. If I were to go ahead and click on this students decision, we can see that this students, the program that they are applying into the major is being referenced here. So this student has been admitted to the Sports science program or telling them all the great things that they have to look forward to.

During their four years of study, that's all good and well. We can see a similar case when it comes to this architecture student. If I were to see this students decision letter for architecture, we can see very similar terminology and a very similar structure as well with a content block. We are referencing more about the architecture program.

Now, the biology program at way better University is a little bit different. You do need to declare a concentration by your junior year. So this student is a biology major, but they don't yet have a concentration on file. So we can see here they're admitted to the biology program, but they do need to choose that concentration by their junior year. Now we do have two other students who have been admitted who do have concentrations on file. So if I were to select this student, we can see that again, they're being admitted to the biology.

Program, which is great. We're then also referencing what academic concentration they'll be planning to study in as well. And if we queued up this student who is planning to study organismal biology, we can see a very similar pattern we're referencing that they are admitted to the organismal biology program. I was a biology major on the undergraduate side. I, you know love biology so hence the, hence the example here. But this is all being controlled at the level of content block. So here in our decision letter we are referencing.

This content block and then we can see that all of this custom content lives here. And of course this can be as simple or as complex as you would like. These are more demonstration examples. So so fairly simple. But again the idea is that you can migrate this to your own instance to your own decision letters as well. Now I do want to point out the biology key here. So again we are referencing that if these students concentration is null or if it does not exist.

So that's this kind of special use case Liquid markup statement.

They need to choose that concentration by junior year, else the academic concentration will be in that field value for concentration. So this is an example not just of liquid markup, but also merge fields within this content block as well. Now a few questions that were submitted to us before the webinar indicated that some folks had some trouble when it came to utilizing content blocks. Within your decision letter, my word of advice is to utilize a merge public query to bring in.

Any of those field values. If you already have a merge public query set up, go ahead and add to it based on what you want to display in a content blog. If you aren't familiar with a merge public query, take a look at the knowledge base. This merge public query is a very powerful tool for customizing your decision letters.

And you might also notice here too, if you're really fluent in liquid markup that you know this could have probably been done with an existence export. You know, if the field value for concentration exists, put Y, if it doesn't, put a no within the export. That's certainly possible. In this example I just happen to do this. You know, kind of the more manual, old fashioned way of of calling upon a null value within a liquid markup statement.

Alright and the final example I want to pull up here is what these students applicant status Portal would look like. So here we have the students applicant status Portal, we are referencing the students major and we are sending that to a dynamic content block. So this will lead to a really dynamic student experience as they're logging into their applicant status portal. If I were to go ahead and see this students academic contact, this is a sports science student we're seeing contact.

Or Shaquille O'Neal. If we were to go into an architecture student and impersonate their status page, we have the renowned architect Ted Mosby seeing more information here about Ted Ted's e-mail as well. And then finally, we are bringing up biology again, this is the program with much more complexity. If the student doesn't have a concentration, that's all good. And well, they're seeing. Rosalind Franklin did a lot for discovering DNA. We can see her contact information in here.

And then based on these students concentration, you know we're also seeing different values. So while this student is a biology student, they have a specific concentration in molecular biology. We want to show that student something different. So again the front end of you for these student is not seeing Rosalind Franklin, it's seeing another individual that's going to be the best point of contact for them.

We can also see here too that this next student is still a biology major, but they have a different concentration. For those students, we still want them to see the contact information for Rosalind Franklin. So while for most of our students, the major itself is going to drive that point of personalization, there is some additional wrinkle, some additional nuance for our biology students. We for those students are making a decision on who their advisor is based on their concentration.

So how exactly are we doing that when it comes to our content blocks? We mentioned here that the dynamic blocks content block is what we're referencing within that portal. So we can see that all of our architecture students are seeing Ted's contact information. We obviously have some CSS styling within our portal so that this image is not gigantic and square within our portal. It's, you know, contained in that neat kind of profile for, you know, for that contact information. And we can also see something similar for sports.

Hands too. So again, traditional content blocks here for both architecture students and for sports science students as well. Now again for biology students, you may have guessed this is an example of a content block nested within a content block here. If students are getting to this point, if their major is biology, the content block is then referencing another content block. This is referencing a different ad content block that is named differently, and we're also putting in a different field first, so instead of looking at major.

We are instead looking at concentration.

Here is that that content block that's referenced for that first recursion. So here based on the students concentration, we're showing them something different for molecular biology versus organismal biology. And this is also a great time to bring up the true importance of setting a default content block because we know that there are students in our applicant pool who are biology students who don't have a concentration. We need to account for that with a default content block because what will happen is.

If they don't have a concentration, there is never going to be a key that this content block can pick up on. So nothing's going to show unless we're specifying what that default value should be. And we're doing that here. That is Rosalind Franklin. So you know, this is great if you know in your pool that there's going to be students that don't have that field present on file. But even if you know, you know that there is. You know a value that every single student has a concentration in your pool, it's still a good idea to set that default.

Content block and the reason is as new programs or new concentrations come online, while it's going to be best practice to keep these content blocks updated, this default content block is your full back. So in case you forget to update a content block in case there's a spelling error somewhere along the way as you're adding in new programs, there is still going to be some content that's displaying to students. In this example, have there not been a default content block, this would simply be blank in, the student would not see any information.

Here so again, certainly best practice anything student facing to make sure that you've got that default content block in hand.

Alright, well, we'll jump back into our slide deck here. And you know, especially for those who are just getting started, maybe you're only utilizing content blocks in one place. I am totally OK. We've got another great philosophy here, a way better and that is do something and continue to work at it and make it better. You know, after this call if you don't have any content blocks in your system, try to build, you know, maybe a test message that's referencing a signature if you already have content blocks galore in your instance but you're not currently utilizing liquid markup or you're not.

And utilizing content blocks in content blocks. Try it out, continue to work out it. You'll be surprised at the progress you can make and giving yourself some efficiency, giving yourself some time back in the day, and ultimately ultimately leading to a better student experience as well.

Well, we've got some time here at the end of the call to jump into some questions, but did want to reference where you can find us here at way better obviously with any sort of slate initiative, whether it's communication flows, whether it's portals, whether it's full scale implementations, applications, report builds, etcetera. Feel free to reach out to us at the website. We've got a great webinar archive too. Going back actually a couple years here, we have a lot of recorded webinars pertaining not just to slate topics, but really higher education.

Enrollment marketing best practices too, so take a look there. Ali and I will be speaking at an upcoming community conversation pertaining to events on April 6th and we'll have our preferred partner webinar on May 9th as well. So plenty more opportunities to to come back if you've liked what you heard today and you found it useful too. And of course Ali and I certainly happy to answer any questions or any requests you've got via e-mail as well. Anything you want to add before we jump into some questions?

Perfect.

No, I think a ton of great ones came in. In terms of questions, we obviously had one submitted to as a part of the registration. So we'll just dive in and kind of use the rest of our time here doing those. So glad. I think looking at the chat and then knowing what has come in here before, I saw a like a common one that keeps on coming up and is there a current workaround to content blocks with multi value fields.

Yeah, that's a really good question and this is going to depend, you know, really what that field value is. So one common example that we've seen is missing materials. You know, if a student has a whole list of missing materials and you want to tell them a little bit more about the Inns and outs of that material of how to, you know, submit it, you can go ahead and utilize existence exports. So you can go ahead and say, you know, if the field value contains, say, a missing FAFSA, go ahead put it.

Ask, if not, go ahead and put it no. And then line up a content block, you know, tied to the value that's going to come out of that existence export. And then you can merge in a paragraph perhaps pertaining to whatever missing material this student has. And then of course continue to repeat this. You know, for any, excuse me for any other missing material that the student may have. I know this also comes up a lot with with academic segments with you know, inquiry major of interest. So Ellie, what's the best way to kind of tackle those?

Yes, yeah, I would think when we do audits of instances when we're working you know certainly kind of getting to know the data infrastructure building out. You know when any given project we're tasked with, we find this to be perhaps a common misstep that academic interest is writing back as a multi value field. So to account for this number one, make sure you have default content. Clay talked about the importance of that for so many reasons. But for this again if you have a major of interest it has the, the field value has to match exactly the key value and the content.

If it doesn't match, it's going to show the default. So in the case if a student has art, biology, exercise science, they're not going to match any of the key values, they're going to see the default which should be undecided content because in all actuality they are undecided. The other thing too is is that don't forget about plain old liquid markup. I've been seeing the chat about like when to use liquid markup versus content blocks. And you know you can certainly utilize just liquid markup with the use of existence filters to say if count, you know if field.

And count is greater than one show, my undecided. You know, maybe it's a subject line that says Are you ready to study at institution? If you know that there's just a single value, you can say Are you ready to study biology?

So I think that you know, it's it's a great question and it's one that we've run into all the time. So appreciate you guys servicing it.

Another one too I think that comes up a lot is, you know, the use of content blocks within the application, you know, on application pages. So Clay, I think the ones specifically that people were setting were default ones, you know, for personal or academic information.

Yeah, absolutely. So on some of those Slate default application pages, such as the biographical page where students are inputting their name and their e-mail and their birth date, you know, because this is already pretty much baked into slate, you know, to the best of our knowledge you would not be able to call content blocks there, but.

Because your custom app pages are forms, you will be able to reference content blocks they are in those custom forms. So all you would have to do is bring in a merge field in the conditions of the form. Doesn't matter what it is, just go ahead and bring it in and in the best place to reference that would be in usually static instructional text that you would include on that form. So again, just like in deliver, just like in a portal, you can go ahead and call that content block based on the merge field because you're already pulling that merge field already, you know, within the conditions of the form.

You know those custom app pages? Yes. Standard app pages? Likely not. If there is additional customization that you want to do those slate standard application pages, that is likely a good use case for a custom app scope form that would replace those slate standard application pages.

Ellie, another one that we get, we got you know at the webinar and that we I think we talked with partners about this with with some frequency as content blocks for not just signatures and emails but also within headers and footers. You know what's the best practice surrounding that use.

It's a great question and just as you mentioned, clay, it can be basically exercised in the same way we showed you the examples of the signature to offer a lot of consistency and to make it an easy insert, you know, for kind of the staff and the users building the message.

I would say just a caveat here, and this is really true of any content block. When you're working within your templates, be sure you're always working within the source and that you're closing all the division and style tags within the content blocks. You know, you have to be very, I mentioned kind of surgical almost with how you splice the code, especially with headers and footers. But obviously the value is just like the value we've been talking about. If you have an update to your social accounts and you want to update the handles, you can do that easily in one place rather than painstakingly going through.

You know, updating a bunch of messages.

You know and then kind of I would say when when thinking about referencing clay, you had mentioned some of the merge public query. I think there's a lot of questions you know related to this indecision letter codes. Anything else that you would, you know further kind of expand on that?

When it comes to merge public you know it's it's it sounds a little bit scary and we we would used to call these like magic queries. You know, it's really just a query that you are creating and then you're putting it specifically in the systems folder within your query module. There's an additional step or two to make sure that it is a merge public query. But essentially you know I know there's plenty of documentation in the knowledge base but you know here you can bring in additional fields that you want to use to customize things like.

Decision letter. So again, I know there were some initial struggles with getting content blocks to function fully with the decision letters. We've had a lot of luck with merge public, so would definitely recommend you know, pursuing that route for sure.

And then, yeah, I would say, you know, especially when it comes to your decision letters, you know, there's a huge benefit to making these as simple and as straightforward as possible. And of course, you know, we know that there's going to be some nuances with students. You know, this is like the most important thing that you're ever going to have out of slate is admitting students is making sure that students are seeing your letter and they're receiving accurate information. So any types of customization that you're doing, we would recommend testing these extensively. Like you, you can look at it three or four times.

If you've done that already, look at it 1/5 time like you cannot be too careful when it comes to these decision letters for sure.

And I think MNB brings up a good point too of avoid too much nested liquid markup. And I think that's the power of the new capabilities of the dynamic content blocks is allowing you to kind of couple those things together. Because I mean, you're exactly right, it's very hard to troubleshoot after a few layers. And we talked about the sustainability and making it scalable, building on it over time, it just becomes this rather raptured nest that's really hard to iterate.

So yeah, we had another question on utilizing liquid or utilizing liquid markup and content blocks within various parts of a deliver message. I like to speak a little bit more about what exactly that looks like, you know, can you, can you use it kind of all over the message only in certain parts, you know, what does that look like?

Yeah. And I think there's been some conversation in the chat and I would agree with kind of all of it and basically continue to utilize merge fields, liquid markups and subject lines you know of deliver messages to really.

Kind of offer personalization. I would we would caution against using content blocks here of course you know, for for sender, recipient again use kind of more traditional field merges. I would just say you know and again referencing some things that have been communicated in the chat is what's the ultimate goal, what's the ultimate like? Is it transferable or are you going to be repeating this kind of practice and exercise again and again because then use a content block. We talked about using it for signatures, using it for headers and footers. That's a very repeatable action that you're going to get a lot of efficiencies from.

But at the same time, you know, I think that needs to be consideration each time as well as what's in the content block. Is it just like a line or sentence kind of a simple expression that can be easily, you know, kind of personalized with liquid markup or incorporating a photo, a video, kind of more complex HTML depending on again on the asset from delivered to you know, decision letter templates to the portal. It really varies.

Umm.

Just taking a quick look through the chat here, looks like there's a lot of great stuff in here. One I want to talk about, and I believe this may have been addressed in that chat already, is can we clarify if you have to stop and restart the message to start running with an update to a content block or does it work with already running messages? The huge advantage here is that it already works with already running messages. So if you have a content block and a message and you change that content block, that change will be reflected in that live deliver message. So you know again, no stopping or starting.

It's obviously a lot of room for human error when it comes to manually stopping and starting messages. So you know, if things not just like a signature, but really any other aspect in the message, you know if it's being run by a content block, you can change that externally without having to worry about stopping and starting.

Absolutely. I think too there's been some questions about date specific content blocks. Our slate team here is answering some of those in their spot on just in terms of the configuration. But this also presents a very good use case for how it like a use case for dynamic content blocks. Perhaps you have a message that's specific to major, but within that nursing then has specific deadlines that change over the course of the cycle. You can then use a content.

Have date driven to have that change, you know As for those kind of deadlines pass. So it's it's a great example of now you know the kind of correct formatting of that as well.

Right.

They tweeted, troubleshoot that too. You know is to bring in say a current date export. You can format that export within the deliver message. Usually you won't need time. You can usually format it as a date and then it will present itself as a date. And then what I would say is, you know, to test it out, bring that merge field into the content of your message. You will be able to see exactly how that date renders and then based on how that data is rendering, that should be the format that you're utilizing within that content block.

On the date export, you can still utilize a format mask so you can specifically specify I want the state to be M/D/Y or if you're just using utilizing the default you will know exactly how to reference it within your content block too. And again, another way to test that is putting in like a literal date, like if today's date is 3/16/23 and you want to make sure that this is going to work for the variation.

I don't work.

You have after say July 15, you know put in the literal value for July 15 or 16. Test it out or just change the years that you referencing in that content block to you know. Again make sure that that dynamic content is working as you want it to.

Another good question here, if you utilizing content block defaults like if the webinar signature would you end up with a whole bunch of content blocks and how would you advise to utilize the default method versus creating multiple value options. Yeah that's a really good question and I would say specifically for the example that we covered you know I would I would use those alternate CTA's pretty few and far between. I mean that should really be promoting your large scale events like that should be putting an open house orientation or an accepted.

Student day, you know you'll likely won't have to utilize that you know for a number of different events. I would say keep it really as simple as as possible. You know regard to using you know multiple value options you know that's something that can be hard coded in the source code of the message I know if you have any other thoughts on on that specifically, you know based on our comments work.

In terms of if it's a multi value.

None of it's a multivalue, but things like signature or anything that's going to be like used kind of throughout the instance. Is there a use case for just a default or for having some values that's attached to say, a signature or a footer or a header, you know, content block?

Right. And I think that our example that we had showed with the kind of more leadership admissions titles, you know, showed we had a PP signature, director signature or transfer signature. Again, thinking about those that don't have associated field values, you know in your instance that relate to it, of course always want to have a default as we've kind of have hit home.

Today, but I think you know to Clay's point I think for the staff assigned just really using those for a kind of high level you know admissions events and to really kind of promote you know any kind of you know big initiative that would be transferable and I would say broadly applicable to your messages. I know there's been communication in the chat too of like dependencies on the content blocks like where it's being utilized. So just always kind of note that like where is this content block you know being kind of translate, you know, utilized with maist instance.

Some of the really interesting one that came through. So for the e-mail signature example, could the link to the event be placed within a different content block by date and then embedded within the signature block? The answer to that is yeah absolutely. It certainly could. I would just caution that, you know you're introducing additional complexity into the system. There is more room for human error. There is more room, you know, for for getting that externally facing view to students wrong. So you know with with this and you know what we try to do is is.

We were building these things. We want to still have the desired end user effect. We still want these to be hyper personalized, hyper relevant to students. But we want to do it in a way that's as simple as I possibly can. And the reason being is it's going to be easier to maintain cycle over cycle. But also if someone is stepping newly into a role and if they can look at it and understand it and see what's going on, it's going to make that maintaining, you know, so much easier to do in the long run. So you know.

Again, can certainly be done, but I would just say be careful if ever you're introducing you know really complex content blocks, especially for things that are more seasonal like an open house promotion. But yes, it technically can't be done for sure.

Kate.

Alright, great. Well we are just at about time. So you know again really appreciate you guys taking some time out of your day to hear more about dynamic content blocks. If you're double screening with March Madness, totally OK. But of course you know as you're working through these or if you'd like some additional state support, feel free to reach out to all your eye. Certainly happy to to get on a call and help work through you know what it is that you've got some questions on.

Thanks everyone.

All right, everybody. Thanks so much. Have a wonderful, wonderful rest of the day.

Have a good one.