Dive Deeper with EAB: The Future of College Search: Can Your Marketing Keep Pace in a Digital-First World?

Greetings all, and welcome to today's dive deeper session. We have the one the only EAB entered gate today. They will be discussing the future of college search. Can your marketing keep pace in a digital first world? So before we get started I'm just going to read a short description about today's segment. Then I'm going to go over some housekeeping and then I'm going to pass it off.

So the enrollment landscape has shifted forever and yesterday strategies are no longer sufficient in today's digital first recruiting environment to amplify your enrollment results, you'll need to deliver marketing campaigns that are responsive, personalized, and precisely timed. Today you will learn how cultivate ABS, fully integrated solution for engaging prospective students in today's recruitment ecosystem. Can help enrollment teams be more effective?

In the areas of responsive marketing, immersive digital content and parent engagement and so much more.

So before we get started just a little bit of housekeeping.

This webinar is being recorded and will be made available for your viewing at a later time. Closed captioning can be enabled by clicking the closed caption button at the top right corner of the share window. Full screen viewing can be enabled by clicking the expand button at the top right corner of the share window.

Should you need to re sync audio and or video, please refresh your share window. Questions may be posted in the chat and the chat may be turned off by clicking the chat icon at the top right corner of the share window. So without any further ado I have my presenters both Michael Copenhaver and Lex Ruby have. Please take it away.

Thanks so much, Jordan, and to the slate team for having Michael and I today. It's a pleasure to be with you and the introduction was very favorable so hopefully we can live up to the expectations Jordan just set. For a quick note on if you want more content from a band you haven't already subscribed to. Eaves enrollment blog can do so at the link on the page. There will be glad to send that link around in our follow up note to you. Also, you have another opportunity to do so, Jordan.

Already introduced today's webinar topic, the future of college search and so will be with you for roughly the next hour. We may give you a little bit of time back so you can move to coffee before you go to your next zoom meeting. Your next impressive meeting. But we're really looking forward to digging into this meeting topic before we do so, just in case this might be your first time at an IAB webinar. Wanted to put in some context for those amongst you or refresh for those who have joined us before.

As you can see across the page, EAB serves the entirety of the education landscape from K12 institutions all the way through advanced degrees and graduate and adult learners and including life after graduation. For some of our advancement and alumni relations solutions across each of these terrains, we now serve an expensive 2000 institutions and growing daily that mostly in EU S and North America, some in Canada, some across the pond in the UK.

At some happily in my homeland of Australia, where I so desperately wish I was, sometimes the common thread across each of these services and engagements is we are rooted in research. EAB has an entire team. Rather, teams dedicated to uncovering best practices, market trends, new pressures and challenges to deliver meaningful insights to help executives and practitioners like yourselves advance your institutional and professional.

Priorities what will walk through today and our time together sits within our enrollment success division where Michael and I also sit and focuses in on ensuring partners like yourselves tackle the myriad of challenges and changes that Jordan just outlined that are facing them and primarily so that we can assist you in seeding and shaping your classes. So with that context underway, will do some quick introductions so you know who you're chatting with.

Least virtually across the next 50 or so minutes. I'm like, sorry how, as Jordan mentioned, I serve as managing director of Partner Development and now enrolled 360 or enrollment and marketing division.

Prior to joining EAB almost nine years ago, I worked in my homeland of Australia further, then Australian Prime Minister in her education and cabinet divisions as a policy adviser and prior to that, I served at my alma mater, Penn in Philly in some on campus roles in admissions and alumni relations. So I sometimes joke of myself as a recovering admissions officer, but glad to be in amongst this well with with you all. Michael, do you want to introduce yourself as well?

Absolutely, uhm. Hi everybody. I'm Michael Cohen. After I run the marketing strategy, but also that all the creative teams at EA be focused on working with our our partners around enrollment success in neuromarketing. I've been in quite a long time, but I did want to make sure to mention that we are very grateful for the opportunity to partner with sleigh and particularly grateful for the opportunity to be with you all today. This is a great series that I've.

Heard really, uhm, really positive things about the attendees for these webinars in particular that is a vocal bunch and that you all collectively are great users of the chat and have lots of thoughtful questions. And so there is nothing Lex and I love more than questions and so please bring along and we'll do our best to answer them. We have a few of our colleagues were here as well behind the scenes not broadcasting. Who can help us with Triage Ng and responding as well. So please, if there's anything.

That lets or I talk about that you have further questions or want clarification please please feel free to ping US and we will do our best to to respond.

Thank you Michael. I might love chocolate more than I love questions, but the the the type they're up there with each other all right. Let me sort of said a little bit of context for how we spend our time. You heard from Jordan that will be diving into AB cultivate platform which is a connected ecosystem. But first I want it sort of detail what brought us to this moment and reimagined approach to marketing. Then we'll go through, cultivate with some more detail, and then of course, given that we are doing a webinar.

With Slate with when I talk through connect, creating connections to your CRM, which is likely it's like and as Michael mentioned, will also leave some time at the end. For some Q&A, though, we certainly certainly welcome you all to put any questions in the chat function that Jordan outlined earlier, which is just in the chat. OK, let's dive in.

It's hard to believe. I'm still sometimes astonished that you know what is time in today's environment that Nathan Grow published demand, demographics, and the demand for higher education. Three years ago already. And at the time, as I'm sure you all remember, it's at most of higher education. Twitter about the pending demographic Cliff that would hit in 2025, which is now just three years away. What you see on the left of this slide in front of you?

Updated statistics based on Nathan grows more recent analysis published earlier this year in his book that Agile College. This might be a refresher for some of you, but several factors including a contraction in the overall number of high school students nationally changes in their demographic composition and drops in colored the college going rate overall promised to reduce demand for higher education between 5 and 11% by 2030, these demographic shifts.

Coupled with COVID air impacts and turbulent channel changes have put enrollment teams and institutions on their heels or your old failing it, realizing that they need a new set of solutions to shape and see their classes and noting that organic interest alone will not and does not accomplish those goals. To make matters worse, those demographic changes that many are already experiencing have accounted for only one third of the overall enrollment impacts experienced across the last decade.

But rather shifts in market share how it made up 2/3 of those enrollment changes, and this confluence of things have led to neufeldt degrees of uncertainty. With schools and enrollment leaders like yourselves feeling out of control of your enrollment funnel.

That lack of control from move one forward one side is compounded even further by shifts in student behavior. Likely things that you're experiencing and sometimes feels like a game of whack a mole. We all know that Gen Z has certain habits, and I think we're starting to to identify them. They are digital natives as we know they are cost conscious. They are focused on authenticity and what's more important about Gen Z and probably also.

All recognizing this too, is that more so than any other generation preceding them? They are a sum of individuals with individual experiences, and you can see on this page a visual representation of the college search process of three hypothetical high school students, Mary, Yasmin, and Steven, that the journeys throughout their college such diverse and highly individualized. You can see that their experience or experiences are desperate.

Across channels that they're experiencing different sources of engagement and insight, they've got mixed intensity and they are across different periods of time in which they are on and off their college journey. You can imagine those three examples above, multiplied and diversified across your entire candle candidate pool. Whether that's 30,060 thousand 100,000. So the key question for us as enrollment leaders is now twofold. Do we have the right strategies?

To protect and win market share? Or does your strategy deliver individualized experiences for students at scale?

Sounds like the slides are a little small. I don't know if there's a way to make them bigger or if the slate folks who are with us can can share them with the participants. Live Michael. Are they small for you too? I just want to do a quick gut check.

I would say that they are not smaller than normal for me, but I will say that these are very typical of our EAB slides, which is that we do. We do love the density of information and so there's a lot going on here. We do acknowledge that there is a I have I have this on a big monitor, so it's not that small for me, but we will absolutely make sure that there's a way to get the.

Copy to an end. Also Lisa from technicians just noted in the chat that you may want to expand to full screen view, which is at the very top rate. I have it on my own screen here and it does help a bit and make it bigger.

OK, yeah that helped me as well, so I'm I'm sorry for the technical difficulties, but thank you for sticking with us and hopefully you will can see the slides, but we're certainly happy to to send them after the fact and hopefully my Australian accented over over speak well will support that. So why don't we keep moving?

Yeah, basically the point of the prior pages you've gotten massively diversified. Candidate pool that are engaging across multiple channels at multiple times with multiple engagement points in, in and out of their student search experience, so that that that creates an additional pressure to understand do we have the right strategies to win market share and can we deliver infant individualized experiences to those diverse set of students with diverse array of experiences at scale so that has created the sort of new demands?

Or imperatives for today's enrollment leaders and these four trends that are playing out across this across the page here centered around the four themes that we've heard from enrollment leaders like yourselves. Wanted to answer yes to those previous questions. Can we need expanded channel and platform access to build awareness and generate more leads? We need tech enabled, immersive, authentic experiences that connect with students and amplify your brand. We need future ready set.

Of integrated and responsive campaigns that meet the students where they are and we need access to both macro and micro trends across the enrollment funnel to ensure that you're optimizing campaigns across time. So with the evolution of those imperatives and the enrollment landscape, happily, EAB is at its finger on the pulse of those trends and those changes taking place. And, as you may have seen in the news or heard in the market, we've made a set.

As important acquisitions involving our offerings to match where the market challenges are headed, I know that you all, and perhaps some of your Europeans have wondered what is EAB doing with all of these acquisitions. Completely fair questions and we've brought a ton of capabilities into our family. First, we brought in you visit as you can see in in the page and that is, if you're not familiar with virtual tour storytelling platform that creates.

Factual torrent experiences we brought in CapEx, our audience generation college search platform.

We brought in Weiser fully Bright branded peer to peer network for digital engagement between students and colleges and we brought in intersect at career readiness platform with huge reach that builds brand significant awareness and engagement across the high school student population. They are represented on the page as a set of logos but what I think is really important and what our partners believe is the real power here and the answer to how all of these puzzle pieces get integrated. Really really integrated.

And help leaders tackle that uncertainty to take more control over their final. And that's where we're going to spend the rest of our time in today's in today's session. As a quick preview, I want to share a little bit about ABS. Now responsive, automated automated marketing powered by that ecosystem that is comprised of all of those logos on that previous page that become an ecosystem directed at improving the shaping and seating of your classes.

You can see here across the page that each of the nodes that have been added to our ecosystem and strengthened bring data about student interest and student intent. So as you think about you, visit or cap ex, we're able to see how students engage where they engage and deepen our understandings of their preferences, engagement and intent. Second, as you see, animated by the arrows flowing each way with a connected ecosystem like enroll 3.

60, which is what we call this ecosystem. The data doesn't just flow from One Direction to students, from students to channels, but rather from channels back to the student. So they are coming that that flow back is coming in the form of more personalized, more relevant, more individualized offers that are based on the engagement and behaviors of those virtual experiences that students are having. Our ecosystem is dynamic and re self reinforcing too, so we've intentionally invested in.

Each of those numbers that you saw in the previous page and you can see populated here and build capabilities that connect the nodes like Edu, snip scripts and tracking mechanisms and dynamic nurture campaigns that Michael will go into further detail, and we've done all of this so we can match the pace and complexity of those student journeys that we detail the couple of slides ago.

Well on our partners behalf of getting in front of the right students at the right time with the right messages in savvy and sophisticated ways, all of the impacts of the ecosystem represented here. Just the tip of the iceberg. You can see a couple of them on the bottom of the page, but we are seeing dramatic and lifts like six times increases in likelihood to enroll when students engage on AB search, marketing platform and cap ex calm for example. So that's just one example of the amplifying.

Impact that this ecosystem can have so I know you were all eager to take this from theory into practice. Or make it a little bit more real and we'll go there and just a second, but it wouldn't be any AV web and R with without quick little poll. So as you will see, populate in the chat now it should be there. We would love to learn. What are the biggest priorities for you when it comes to growing your own inquiry pools? Is it reaching and engaging underrepresented?

Students recovering from declines and text test taking and name availability. Managing the size of your inquiry pool or navigating channel complexity. The pool should be populating there. If you've responded to it and you can see live right now in the lead of reaching and engaging underrepresented students, so item one. Some responses for 2/3 and four respectively, but it seems like reaching and engaging underrepresented students as a chief priority, and that is certainly something that Abby has seen.

Cross our engagements with our partners and something like that will tend to across today's time.

All right, why don't we dive in our next session section will detail how we cultivate demand within Roll 360. Thank you for submitting your poll responses Michael. I'll turn it over to you.

Uhm, thank you left and and so as I said, we've been talking about context. In theory, I want to give you some specific practice examples of how we are taking these imperatives about what we know that students want, or we know the market demands and building them into campaigns. And I want to say that I'm going to share some things that we are doing with our EB partners to create this ecosystem wide survey.

Experience, it is something that we're doing with a range of supportive technologies and.

I will say that at our last count, more than half of all of our partners actually have slate, and many have other rooms and so the role of the CRM I'm going to try to address it a couple times along the way. We got some questions in advance asking about how you would execute some of these more responsive, more sophisticated multi channel campaigns in Slate and I'm the first to admit that I am not the expert on that topic, nor is lex. I will also say as someone who's done marketing for many years.

And work with CRM's like Salesforce and other ones as well as marketing automation systems. Those are there are.

Uhm, different roles for a CRM and for technologies to support integrated multi channel marketing they need to be tide together but it CRM is an amazing extraordinary tool for scaling one to one communication. And so our partners some of our most sophisticated ones use their CRM for all kinds of things including events and scaling, counselor communications and and continuing the conversation that that's been started marketing.

Campaigns they don't use it to power, typically to power up marketing campaigns, lock, stock, and barrel. So I'm gonna try to address that along the way, but feel free to ask questions as we go through as well.

So I'm gonna come in particular talk about what we call cultivate, which is our approach to engaging sophomores and juniors largely in the college search process and getting them aware of the school and helping them build a relationship and eventually become ready to apply. There are a bunch of components to what we do that enable us to be able to provide that type of experience.

That students and parents are demanding, and so I'm gonna show you a couple examples here and we can go into a bit more detail.

Along the way. So first of all I want to talk about audiences because it is simple marketing math that the effectiveness of anything you do is only a function of the site as its size of your qualified audience, and so for so many of the Roman leaders that we work with for so many of the of our partners around the country, there has been real concern about our ability to reach our audience is because of the declining availability of test takers. This is something that was.

Already a concern before the pandemic, as shifts in test taking behavior became more prevalent. Uhm, I don't have to tell you that for the last two years I've seen market disruption in test taking behavior and that that has already reduced the ability of many institutions to reach out to audiences and has forced them to look new places for audiences. The question in many people's mind is where is this going to go and our best forecast.

Is that?

The College Board AC T UM institutions like that are going to continue to be important sources of student identity of student lists of student names for now, for a long time into the future. However, if you were to try to read the tea leaves of what's going on with mandatory testing in some states, what's going on with test? Optional guess is that it is probably going to be a smaller proportion of all.

All students there's a question about this left hand chart. If some of you can see it, whether this is all college bound students, that the answer is yes. I think there's supposed to be a proportion of all college pounds, reachable students, and how many are testing. The dark bar is testing and opted into being available for college search. The blue, the light blue is testing, but opting out of search and then the Gray bar is not testing at all. And so as you can see, we've already seen shifts. But we.

Are anticipating a further growth in the population of students who do not test at all.

On the right hand side is what we see as the imperative from a marketing perspective for us all to be doing about which is that we need to be thinking strategically and supplementing these test based names with other sources of student identity. And so a Plex shared with you some of the moves we've made as a V to make sure that we are helping our partners cast a broader net. So for instance, we're going to cap ex in an Intersect, this is.

A real data showing the availability of junior and senior names across a three year time horizon. So starting with 2020, which is largely reflecting the time before the pandemic and you can see that it's like a little more than 1.6 million leads. Then looking at 2021 which is firmly mid pandemic. See a pretty remarkable drop in the availability of juniors and seniors. One point little below 1.

With two million and then we can see here is what we have been looking at for this year's student services in 2022, and what we're anticipating is that we are going to be able to for the partners who work with us, get back pretty pretty close to pre pandemic levels, but it's not going to be through the same exact sources that we realize that we have to look at non assessment sources like surveys.

We have to look at aggregators and called surf sites like Cap ex.

And we also have to look at, UM, we. We also have to look at the traditional name sources, so that is a decent component of what we we spend time on as we were thinking about maximizing the efficacy of our campaigns in this more competitive environment with some real constraints, unaware what we're reaching.

Sorry, I'm I'm clicking for it. Here we go. So this is This Is Us doing a little bit of of the math, which is that we see sources beyond ask College Board being key for compensating through reduction in in name availability and that the numbers here are really quite large. If you expand your aperture. If you haven't already to think about sources like cap ex and intersect and so forth.

You can really capture a large quantity of students who might not have shown up as quickly, or maybe perhaps shown up at all in the College Board or asked sources what we see as well is that when we have done analysis of how these sources

interact with each other that we've seen that overlap between sources being smaller than you might expect, and that is not a function of the fact that there were millions of college students in hiding or across America who are coming out of the woodwork, but rather that the timing is highly variable as to when students reveal themselves through these sources. So in some cases, students are exploring on naviance, which is the source of the intersect names long before they are taking tasks or doing other things, and so there is an opportunity.

To reach students earlier than you would have otherwise and earlier than you actually, and perhaps using different criteria than the ones you would have traditionally used. So there was a question that I was trying to type an answer to, and then let's let's jump down at a little bit.

We are we are mindful of the fact that there's a potential inefficiency when you start going to multiple sources that you're going to get overlap, and so we've been trying to keep an eye on on the criteria and approaches that keep that to a minimum. We have, however found that there is some utility in what you might call it duplicate leads, inasmuch as different types of leaves to be different kinds of information, and there are some cases in which there is actually a value to having a.

Student in your search program based on their PS 80 squared or something and then knowing that they're in actual intersect inquiry and therefore their intent is much higher. So there there is some role for complementarity there in what we see.

Uhm, and what I'll acknowledge is that the landscape is becoming more complex as a result of these trends that I've talked about. So there are more places to go to try to construct an audience. More choices you have in terms of what criteria to use to get students from which sources and so so. Therefore we have really been spending a lot of time, and I imagine many of you have as well trying to build up.

Our sophistication and our ability to help partners triage among these different sources and make the right make the right choices as to whether the right answer is to try to pursue a new geography of it with names from College Board and or find these students from intersect and how that how all this works together.

Uhm?

This is also something I imagine and I know from experience many of you spend time with, but we really have been investing across the the last few years in enhancing the parent component of what we do in search because we know it's not a surprise to any of us that students are highly influenced by their parents, among other sources of information as they are building their consideration set and as they're proceeding down there. College journey. We have survey findings and focus groups and findings so forth that.

Confirmed that even though many things have changed better Generation Z, this certainly has not, and so therefore we have a couple different audience generation approaches that we bring to bear.

As we try to construct parent audiences, so one is that we really try hard in the construct of our campaigns where we're doing outbound marketing to sophomores and juniors. We try to ask pretty directly, like for students to provide parent email addresses, parent contact information so that we can use that as a diagnostic indicator of whether students are going to apply, but also we getting enrolled parents in their own marketing stream.

We also use consumer databases to try to do household matches and do some kind of fuzzy logic matching to identify parents of students where we don't currently have the parent content information, but we can surmise based on the consumer databases, who the parents are and therefore we incorporate that into our campaigns as well. And we found that that can be a powerful driver of engagement on the part of the student if we get the parent into the conversation earlier. So as we're thinking about what a best in class.

First campaign looks like it it it is a campaign in which you have constructed a robust audiences from all the available sources. But whereas in audience not just of students but also parents.

Uhm?

So, so the someone asked is the consumer database matching something that's an additional service we charge for? No, it's not. It's something that we do as part of our every search campaign that we do does have this as a as a component. Every year we we do change and enhance our campaigns. We've been doing the consumer dates database matching for a couple years now. We are however.

Uhm?

Try to think of the right word. We're we're adding a bunch of parent marketing across the next one in two cycles because we have seen the efficacy and so we are building out a bunch of dedicated strategies for parents, some shown here, where in some cases we find that there is there's value in efficacy in sharing with parents, what we're sending to students. So an example here of like where we merchandise a virtual tour, virtual tours degree with students as components of campaigns. They also agreed with parents. And so we build that in.

We also have been building some dedicated streams on the as you can see on the right where sophomores in high school are not necessarily ready for affordability messages. We've done a lot of work to assess what thematics and what topics tend to resonate more at which time. I will say, however, that parents are ready a whole lot earlier to hear cost messages and are a lot more interesting. And so in some cases we have pulled forward the affordability messaging into.

Into parents dreams as well.

So in general, that isn't like all of this is in service of trying to get relevant, engaging content to students and parents at the time that is relevant to them and that.

There's the reason why it's actually pretty pretty clear when you think about it 0.

For many years when we thought about how you would market to students in particular in the sort of underclass year the typical constructed of student search is that it is a linear campaign that is, in many cases driven and mediated by when student names are available from College Board or AC teams. So there are a couple of big launches a year in which we do a multi channel campaign, try to engage them.

Come and generate any robust inquiry pool that then we can go on and carry forward to the application marketing.

That what I would say is that that is a a necessary foundation, but it is probably not sufficient today, and this slide might illustrate why. Which is that, today's students in particular who have spent 18 months at home on the computer, if they were digital natives before? And now I think they're they're nearly cyborgs at this point, like they're so deeply integrated with their phones than their laptops or their tablets that they are, they are.

Taking the reins in their college search to a degree that even surpasses what we saw a couple years ago in terms of stealth explorers, stealth applicants, and so this hypothetical student. If there are so many ways that she might fall off the path that you'd want her to take to get to your institution if you don't have a broad ecosystem wide approach to meeting the students where she is and also taking advantage of your.

Interest and moving forward, so she might search on Google for a program that she's interested in, but not find it because the website is not designed to not optimized in a way that helps her find through her search engine or helps her engaged. If there's not tight integration between college search sites like cap ex or or nice, you might actually drop the ball on her interest and not engage or quick enough. If you were not.

Doing a good job leveraging website traffic and identifying the student and following up the relevant messaging, you are going to miss out on a powerful opportunity to take her digital body language or moment of intent and turn that into deeper engagement. And if your timing is not aligned with her timing, she's not necessarily going to get her attention at the time that is most effective. And So what we've been thinking about is like, how could you design A campaign that.

Wood.

Uhm, avoid all these pitfalls and actually meet.

These students, but also parents where they are at the time that is relevant to them and that is through integrating these different parts of the ecosystem both on the front end and the back end, and by instead of having a linear campaign that stops and starts at a given time. Actually think about campaigns as being more responsive to timing more responsive to students actions more responsive to their interest and therefore a whole lot more.

Engaging, so that's something that starts with thinking about web exploration and search engine optimization and making sure you are online properties are compelling in the right way. It's about integrating those online properties with outbound marketing and in a timely and relevant way. It's about having paid social that actually speaks to the rest of your campaigns and it and is relevant in topics and timing.

It's about having experiences and components that are engaging and immersive and interactive in the way that students have come to expect, and so that is our vision of what a really good campaign approach that engages sophomores in interviews would look like.

And so that that is what we have been engaging in building little by little with our partners, so that we can get to this ideal, because believe that there is competitive opportunity for the schools that do this really well, and we have seen that play out in the market.

Just to get a little more concrete, we've been thinking of sort of the engaging sophomores and juniors, not just as really 11 campaign, but we've been thinking that that it's actually more fruitful to think about different components of a campaign, each of which does different purposes. So there is a almost like three or four campaigns in one, so there's an inquiry generation phase, which is where you're taking someone who might be a stranger or certainly a stranger to you.

Even know who you are getting them to take the first step, raise their hand the first time like a multi channel campaign directed in students and parents that has that objective. For those who do engage they.

You then want to nurture their interest. If you don't, there's a dedicated set of tactics to try to re engage a dormant audience that tries to balance the interests of email deliverability with the desire to to try to get them to either definitively opt out of interest or opt in. And then there's this key component which is nurture, so not just taking someone's interest in saying. Basically, thank you very much, sending them a couple emails and moving on, but actually creating experience.

That lasts for potentially the entire duration of their underclass years until they are ready to to become.

Aspiring applicants.

In particular, there is a wide wide variety of execution out there in the world in terms of how students interest is nurtured, and I will tell you that a true best in class nurture campaign is very few and far between. We we work with.

Dozens and dozens, and in fact hundreds of partners. And so we have a relatively clear vantage point that it is rare for two to have a high quality nurture campaign that would take someone who expressed interest their sophomore year and continue to provide them engaging in relevant content and experiences through the end of their junior year. But there are some out there, and we've we've architected.

Set of a set of multi channel communications that are dynamic that are triggered and integrate with different parts of the ecosystem but also have engaging content that.

Uhm, in general follows the interest that students tend to have in this time period, and Taylors relevance to what they actually are are interested in.

Uhm, that's something that we do through in any multi channel way mail email landing pages so forth but also integrate back and forth with with things like virtual tours with interactive online communities and so forth.

I didn't want to spend a minute on actual content formats though before because that is one area where we've done a lot of thinking and a lot of work, and we have A at this point aggregated at decent amount of evidence to show that that different in kind execution formats can produce different kind results. So the first thing that I want to mention is the idea of having an immersive virtual tour as Lex shared.

At this point, now probably about two years ago, we joined forces with you visit, which was the leading virtual reality company doing immersive virtual tours. We have some pretty extraordinary statistics showing that the immersive experience leads students even this jaded digital overloaded Generation Z to spend an inordinate amount of time on the site so the average tour duration 8 is 8 minutes and 26 seconds.

Which is just crazy when you think about the seven minute 7 second attention span of generation ZI. Also, by the way, have evidence from just from our outbound campaigns that, should that be called to action that features a virtual tour. So showing the experience you're about to have has dramatically higher engagement than just showing something flat.

Uhm?

So on the right side I wanted to show an example of a virtual community. We also know and those of you who have direct experience with students like the teenagers in my own household. I can tell you they want to have interactive experiences that are authentic that are unmediated and so some of what we have been looking at is how do you foster the development of virtual communities and how do you feature that as a component of a experience for students who are going through the.

This search process and we found that, for instance, this platform wiser that we acquired earlier this year, I had some really powerful statistics about the active participation engagement in these online discussion forums and one to one matching with student ambassadors and what that meant for their engagement in the in the admissions funnel down the road.

Uhm?

Some examples of how we actually manifest.

Assets like that across the ecosystem. So in fact we we can take virtual tours and we actually feature them in emails. We feature them on landing pages. We integrate them into our partners websites and so we do.

Try to make good on on what we are describing as an ecosystem by actually not just having all these assets and touch points out there in the world, but figuring out how you bring them together to drive more utilization, Dr, more engagement and ultimately elevate every aspect of what you do.

Uhm, the last thing that I wanted to point to, just as elements of what we see is a best in class search approach is actually about a very.

Unglamorous operational aspect, which is the last mile of execution in this case. This line is about email deliverability.

You you probably know from your your work in Slater from all the other marketing work that you do, is that so many of the emails that we are sending to these days, whether their student or parent email are either managed or owned by by Gmail and so there are such a Google such a dominant player in whether we actually managed to reach students, inboxes, parents, inboxes, what you may or may not be aware of is that there is wide wide variability.

And how effective you can be just sending to a prospect audience that has not already engaged with you because Google spends a lot of their time trying to screen out spam messages or messages that are not going to be valued by their recipient. And so there is a fine art as well as a science about how you actually convince Google.

Through actually and not through nefarious ways, but through a bunch of different approaches that your messages are legitimate and valuable. And So what we found is that we are able to do a ballot.

Four times better than the industry average in terms of email deliverability through a very proactive in hands on approach to sending a email, sending an email. Monitoring the reason this is so important and the reason that I'm putting it here is that all of the work that it was describing to create a responsive digital first multi channel.

Ecosystem Wide campaign is for, not if you're not able to close the last mile. So if a student parent doesn't get your email if they don't get your mailing in the in the mailbox, it is not going to going to have the intended effect, and so we do spend a ton of time and deliverability. We also spent a ton of time by the way, on paper. These are messages sent from AV platform, not from client CRM's.

These because we don't, because we don't actually.

Directly send from our partners here as we don't have a comprehensive stat other than the benchmarking that third party firms do from from various platforms about CRM sense, but those those tend to be closer to the 80 just because the way that you get from 1895 is through pretty proactive management of sintim segmenting based on engagement.

Like message out of grammar, flagging reputation, score management, things like that that are a lot more for better for us. A lot more manual than you would. You would be able to do in a serum context.

Uhm?

I just wanted to show you this one set of data as an indication of why we are so confident that we collectively as an industry need to move from a episodic periodic linear approach to to a more ecosystem wide.

Dynamic engaged approach for for student search and that is because we we have evidence at this point across a long time horizon that combinations of approaches so things like CAP X plus the enrollment services tend to provide better impact, better predictions but also better overall results than a single stream of single approach alone. And so we really are passionate advocates of a of a ecosystem wide approach to what you're doing because.

Every student is different. Every student's path is different. Every family is different, and the more you're able to sense their interest in a timely way and engage them in relevant and timely communications that further their interests, help them understand if you are the right fit for them, the more effective you're going to be, and that has always been true. But it is all the more true in an environment like we're in right now.

Dumb I.

Certainly did not want to leave today's conversation without talking very explicitly about the connections between Slate and Evie's work. As I mentioned at the outset, more than half of our partners are also slate customers, and so we have a ton of experience at working in a consultative and collaborative way with with partners who have who have slate on making sure that we are working together.

In the most effective and most automated and most streamlined way possible, there are a lot of different ways that our data and our engagement can inform your CRM. Some of it is about the ways that we integrate back and forth with slate through transfer of data and through our responder files that we send.

So this is a. This is 1 illustration of the pathway where we capture all these different interactions. We have a responder file format where we aggregate all of the student data and we do.

Daily delivery at very least of of responder files to slate, and that does help.

To construct a 360 view of student interactions, it's also something that overtime we can build up more and more with predictive analytics as well, and it's something that we have done most notably in the yield phase, which recognizes not the subjective days conversation, but I wanted just to show, for instance, we have a predictive platform called Yield IQ, where we take dozens and dozens of data points and interactions.

And we use that to forecast probability of yielding and we actually have an audit automated data exchange where Slate actually provides some of the data that powers the model, and so the inbound integration from Slate into our engines is part of what makes this work. But we also have an outbound integration where we spit out the output from this predictive model back into slate to make it accessible to your teams. And that is a.

Has been a synergy. This work really well for our partners in in for us and so that is a model that we operate now. But we are planning to build on top of B because it is been a big step forward in terms of the.

Timeliness the specificity. The adaptability of how we can do some of this really important forecasting the drives workflow also drives projections.

We also are doing this with some with some of our other ecosystem properties. So for instance wiser and sleep have a very robust integration that has has been validated dozens and dozens of times, which is used for both. Getting these students to be invited to Slate, but also by getting a customized URL that's.

That allows them to get pre verified access into a wiser community. This is we have well established approaches for passing this data back and forth, and that's something that that, as part of our overall data work we we facilitate, and it's a model that we we want to be able to do to build out this. Is it an example of how this done for an actual partner, Wellesley College that did their slate invites through their dinner?

Wiser invites through Slate come here. This is the pre verification URL, which is what it is called. It's a email merge field and that's what came from the pre verified in integration and it got dropped into this Join Now button to give a personalized invitation.

And there are also ways to trigger on demand exports when when specific things change, and so I'm showing it as an example of the fact that there are many integration points between EAB work and slate, and many much more we could do in the future. A lot of it is driven by this specific priorities and needs of each partner we work with, but there are general best practice approaches that we've developed too.

Facilitate the exchange integration. I think it does help that slate is not only great platform but one with tremendous market share, and so therefore we've had the opportunity to develop lots of track, record and expertise and understanding how to make sure we're mapping fields and data correctly.

So we are at 252, which is if I if I'm not mistaken it does allow us a few minutes for more chatting questions from from the group you all have been wonderful in asking questions all along the way which has been helpful and I hope less than I have done a decent job. I have it open on the right. I'm trying to address this as this happen.

If there are any other thoughts that you'd love us to address, we are here, willing, willing and able.

There are, well, well, I'm waiting for this. I will say that there are some questions that attendees provided in advance and we had the opportunity to to look at them.

One question, which is one of my.

One of my favorites, which is how can we strategically target various student populations without bombarding them with emails?

And the reason I love that question so much is I feel like I've heard that for the last 15 years, with different particulars around email marketing, I think. And my answer is.

Volume of emails is rarely the problem in email marketing. If you provide relevant desirable information in people's inboxes, no matter who they are with AIDS there, they will respond well. I think the greater challenge is to provide.

Is to make sure that you know who you're reaching, what's interesting to them, and how to provide it in the inbox in a really compelling way. And that is something that is probably subject for another conversation. It's more detailed, but it's something that we do spend a lot of time on is understanding what students in general, but specific populations of students are looking for, and how you construct messages so that you engage them, and so that you are a welcome presence in their inbox and not not a.

Not something that is even bombardment in the words of the questioner, which I thought was a great phrase.

Michael, we got a question from Amy Frost who asked we are not search cultivate client but have other EAB partnerships. Are you able to do a data match data match to capture parent information for prospective students? Is it an add on service? It's a good one for you.

So I I will take that one and I would. I would say it depends on the other. Maybe partnerships because we do use the same matching approach for application marketing. For instance in and we do even use it in our in some of our yield marketing work. Depending upon the specifics of your work with the abuse, we should definitely talk about it. It is however deeply tide into the workflow for the technology in the back end for the.

Actually be campaigns like like cultivate like we're describing today. So so there the answer is basically maybe it depends, but we should. We should go one level deeper and talk about that. We can do that follow.

Easy to follow up with Amy. Thanks for the question.

So there was another question I saw. Also a great question, which is what data points are schools analyzing to gauge funnel performance. So the questioner said we tend to focus heavily on conversion rates from prospect to inquiry to applicant. Are there other data points that we should be measuring? So I will say two things and be interested in Lexus thoughts as well. I number one or three things really number one. Those are obviously.

Key inflection points kletke conversion points and measuring rates let's you know whether you how you're doing relative to others who might have the same rates. It helps you understand changes your every year super important. However, it's also important to compliment your analysis of rates with absolute number, because rates are actually very much influenced by the composition of what is in the denominator. What's basically further up the funnel.

Let me give you an example. If you are trying to engage an audience of perspective students and to get them to raise their hand.

Uhm, and you're like this year I'm going to go really aggressive and I'm going to contact twice as many students, including 100,000 students in markets where they've never heard of me.

Your rate is going to go down your absolute number of inquiries is going to go up.

And so you need to be careful that you are not basing too much performance management just on rates as opposed to absolute number. So that's the first thing they'll say in that. That example actually does hold all the way down the chain of causality. You really need to be mindful of what is going into that rate and what changed about your mix upstream in the funnel that might have influenced influenced your rate, because ultimately you want more high quality inquiries, more high quality applications, more deposits.

Uhm, not necessarily irate.

That's my first thing. My second thing, and this was fresh in my mind because I just came from an analytics session. Those are those funnels. Stats are great if you want to go in level deeper then you look into the causality of what creates each of these steps. So for instance when we are looking at the we're looking at.

Prospect inquiry rate. In order for a prospect to come in inquiry, they have to.

Click on any receive an email click on an email.

Give up some information in a form or something, and so we what we typically do is then we. We decompose that prospect to inquiry one level down and look at each action or each individual micro conversion that gets you along the chain of events. The reason we do that is that helps you diagnose potentially where you have opportunities for improvement and what might have changed your in year. We're doing that for a component of the application funnel for some campaigns earlier today where we're saying is our biggest opportunity for improvement.

Any interaction read the very front. Is it there an opportunity for improvement in the start to submit the submit to complete and so in general I'm a big fan of the funnel approach and of the looking at rates and looking at causation, but there's so much you can learn when you drill in one or two levels deeper.

Hey, and it seems to me like we're basically at the top of the hour, so we have fulfilled our charge I believe, which is to share a bunch of information thanks to our friends at Slate with this this group. It's been a real pleasure. As Lex said, there's we are happy to follow up.

Q If you have identified things where we know we'd like to, we need to follow up 'cause we couldn't get you the answer right now, but the please don't hesitate to contact us or to ask for information or help in later on.

Thanks everybody and thanks display talk to you all soon.

Thanks Michael.