Slate Spotlight on Deliver Designer and Components with enrollmentFuel

Good afternoon or good morning depending on where you're joining us from. My name is Peter McKay. I'm an assistant director of service here at technicians. I'm joined by Katie Jordan and Susanna Mayo from enrollment fuel. They will introduce themselves in just one moment and if you have questions, feel free to put those in the chat if you would like. This will be a moderated chat today, so I will be taking a look at the questions before they are moved into the chat.

Uh. But you're welcome to put those in there and we'll save all those questions for the end. Thank you also for all of you who did put in questions beforehand. All of those questions will be addressed by the presenters in their conversation today. But again, please feel free to put those in the chat.

Without further ado, I will pass it over to Katie Jordan and Susanna Mail.

All right. Hello. I am Katie Jordan. My real official actual job title is Slate Ninja. So we're starting off in a very fun note. Home for me is Meadville. PA, if you haven't heard of it before, I am one of about 10,000 residents, so that might be why Northwest Pennsylvania.

Outside of Slate I am really into fiber arts, specifically embroidery and cross stitch and I sometimes feel like my background is little ice spy game. But if you look closely there is my cross stitched from the good place just saying welcome. Everything is fine. I really love yoga and I also stage manage for our local community theater.

All right.

Hello everyone. My name is Susanna Mayo and thank you so much for being here. We're excited to present to you. I am the Director of Slate education here at enrollment fuel. I served in at a College in the Central Ohio area for about 16 years prior to moving over to enrollment fuel. I have a variety of different positions, so if you name a job in enrollment, I probably did it and I love Columbus. So if you ever want to talk Columbus, just reach out to me. It's a great city to come visit.

I have a kayak. I love to go out with my sister, I love to play trivia with my girlfriends, and my husband's in a cover band. So we go out and watch them on a pretty regular basis. Their name is Willie Nelson Mandela. Note the fun before and after with that and they're really fun to go. See, I do want to say I'm a huge Browns fan, so if you're wondering what this bizarre poster is behind me, it is a Bernie Kosar in Top Gun apparel. Not sure why it exists, but it is forever over my shoulder so you'll always know you're with me when you see this.

Balance poster behind me.

So now that you know a little bit about Katie and I, we wanted to talk a little bit about enrollment, fuel. So at fuel we do pride ourselves on our four core values which are genuine high spirited deliver and delight and love. So when we are working with our partners, it is our goal to make sure that that's part of every partnership, every project and every interaction you have with us. So those goals or those core values really do make a big part of who we are and help set us apart. We are teaching and learning.

Organization and we do student search as well as digital marketing, communication flow development and consulting for slate, as well as a number of other areas within enrollment. We also offer a series of courses through our Rev training. So we actually have them starting next week on communication flow development and we strive to provide admissions teams with the information they need so they can be successful moving forward. So our goal is to teach you to fish, not just come in and do what we need to. So with that, I'm going to step away and let Katie.

Take over and tell you a little bit more about delivery designer.

OK, and here we go. So I'm here today to of course tell you guys all about deliver designer. But before I really jump in with that, I'm going to just say up front, don't know if you can tell by my hobbies, but I do not immediately identify as either a computer scientist or a graphic designer. And that is one of the main questions we got ahead of time. How do you make delivery designer work for you without the huge coding background? And my goodness if I can't?

Answer that for you. So the first big question is, of course, what is deliver designer? So unofficially, deliver designer is for all of us who have ever built an incredibly beautiful template that is both functional and perfectly branded. Then you turn it over to the admissions team and then you kind of like wince just a little bit while the final product is being sent out. So delivered designer.

Takes the template tool that we know and love and allows for more flexible reusable options that are pre standardized so components are developed and placed into designer templates with pre set levels of editing access. Sounds really cool. What do you need to get started? You are required to have deliver template permissions to create components and to deliver design templates. As a side note, a slate also does recommend.

Knowledge on the fundamentals of liquid markup and optimizing messages for mobile responsiveness. So where to get delivered? Designer, like all great things, starts in the database, so it's an early access feature right now announced at Summit, that does need to be manually activated. So if you go ahead, click into your database, do a little search for configuration keys, scroll all the way down for early access, and then click on deliver designer. It will take just about 15 minutes.

Then be live in your instance.

And let's jump in to see what this looks like. So this is our very finalized template. It's pretty cool, right? But I'm guessing that your eyeballs look at this and basically think like, Yep, that's an e-mail.

So let's go ahead and break that down.

And so this will show you all of the different components that are making up this deliver designer template. This is a look into the pieces that we are using and just a little bit of fuels naming convention. So what looks like one message is actually 5 components and two body, two pieces of body HTML that are currently filler text and.

A little content block of signature just for the fun vote. So how do we get to this point? We make our components. So before I go into details on this, I just want to put out there that we are of course sharing our slides today. Someone asked if this is being recorded. Absolutely yes. And just as a very fun thing, we do have a suitcase of all of the components that we are outlining today. So please don't worry about either taking notes or screenshots as we go, because this is all going to be.

A free public resource from fuel.

So Susanna is going to be coming in a little bit later to share all of our tips and our best practices. But as we are just getting started, do you want to say that there is a lot of value in building small to start and then growing over time? A big thing with that is building what you need and not just what seems cool and fun which.

If you know me is a really good example of do as I say and not as I do so. One nice way to get started is to, of course design your template outside of Slate. Sit down with your paper, your pen, and just draw what you think your ideal e-mail looks like and that can help you determine what components you will need to create.

So the five examples here are what are in the suitcase, and the other is completely up to you and your instance.

So to get started building a component we click on deliver and then designer and then component and then new component where you'll get this fancy little pop up and you will put in the name which is required description which is optional status. We're just going to go with active for the fun of it and OK folder is technically optional but on a more real level is not at all optional.

So once you have named and saved your component, we will begin to define it through variables and there are four different variable types. We're going to demonstrating several of these options today. So you can work with text with numbers with a true, false, or a select list and I will be going to be taking you through a text to true false the select list. We are not going to do numbers today though I have heard a rumor that it can be at best used with a thermometer to like show a percentage of a goal.

Staged if you provision showcase, it is on the techno revolutions event template. Peter can come in later and tell me if I got that right.

But for my contacts today, some of the examples of our variables are going to be things like the alignment, if you want your text in the left, the center or the right or colors, you are about to see a whole lot of fuels, orange and teal. And so this is really where we have the opportunity to pre set options within our components.

So thinking about the template that we looked at a few minutes ago, we are going to be working from the top down in terms of our components. So we're going to go ahead and start with the header image. And our goal is to have three different photo options. So each of our images is just dropped straight from the image library and defined as a unique variable. They have a descriptive name so that we can recognize them later on based off of the.

Middle not off of the photo and they will each have a unique liquid markup variable name.

I am not creative and so you can see Image 1 here and probably guess where it goes from here.

So you go ahead and you save that image and then we'll go into.

Our source. So we put in our photos one photo per variable. And one thing I want to be very careful about highlighting here is every single component should always contain the script line for optimizing on a mobile device, because your students just don't look at emails on desktops like you want them to.

So all our source is saying here that if our liquid market variable is set to true then boom, show the image and again we save that. And here is what it looks like on the template side. So you can see the template that it you can see our header just again very creatively named photo header that we built as well as the descriptive image names with the true false options to just go ahead and turn them on and off.

So we can also work with preset text options for a large and colorful header. So here we work with different variables to have options for things like the font color liquid markup name is color with the text can say like markup name is text and the text alignment markup name is going to be align since the exact same process to get started and this time we're going to be working exclusively with select lists for the variables.

So I said I'm not a computer scientist, right? And that's entirely too true. And this is the part where I confess how I built all of these myself from scratch, which is that I cheated. So here's the cheat. While I was working in the source for components, I realized that the easiest way to place my variables would be to modify rather than write my own code. So, for example, I.

Find color in my variable list and then I just took the text in the editor and I highlighted it and turned it Gray. No secret. I could then just go into the source and see where it had the styling with the CCCCCC and it placed my liquid market variable right there. Saved me a ton of time with trial and error and I'm putting that out there with the hope that it's going to save others time as well.

And so then you can see our final product again on the template with our list of select variables and not shown here. But to save time, we do have an absolutely identical subheader, also just text, same variables. It's in the suitcase and it's just based off of the slate standard H2 format instead of the larger H1 that you just saw in the source.

We also have a button. Everyone loves a good call to action for the button variables. I again used a lot of select lists. This is my personal favorite. It allows for a lot of customizing a lot of different options so we can preset not only the font color, the background color, but the links that are available and what the button will say and have all of those locked down to prevent any hiccups arising.

So Susanna and I spent a lot of time trying to push what is and isn't possible right now with deliver designer while testing. We really wanted to build to understand limitations, so we'll cover that a little bit more later on.

But with buttons one thing I will say I found particularly exciting while testing out our options is that string query parameters do work when included on the component level. So if you build in your question mark or your ampersand into the select list link and then your query matches with your prospect or other ID later on it will work perfectly.

So we are not showing this in any examples today, but one thing I do want to note particularly well on buttons is that you can absolutely use a component in a template repeatedly. And I think buttons are a really good example of that because you may want a black button that says apply now to go to your application and also hey, an orange button to say visit that goes straight to your event page.

And so with that again, we have our final options for you available on the template side.

And certainly not least, we have our footer. So if you're looking very closely today, you might notice it in the variables. It's actually named header. It's just because it's the first one that I built. It's also covered really well in the Knowledge base article about deliver designer.

Because I changed it to a footer, I wanted to also add in some terror false options to customize just a little bit of additional signature information found on a lot of emails.

So hopefully with that a lot of this now look a little bit familiar in terms of our true false logic and defined variables. But we do have something a little bit different here, which is to use the text instead of the select.

This can be a really, really nice option to give more sustainability to your components and your templates so that your users can freely type in information. So just to go back to our button example, if you were to use text instead of list, you could have users customizing links and button text without needing to update any of your component lists.

And boom, we have made components. So our next step is to go ahead and place them into our templates.

So again, just a little bit of navigating to get us around. If you click on deliver and then designer and then designer templates, we'll go ahead and pull up a new template. Here we can put in our name, our status, and again, I'm very big on folders.

So when you are just getting started very similarly to components, just think carefully about your filtering system.

And you have some other new options, so you can choose to set the e-mail with. I think we used 80% for most of ours just to have a little bit of wait for it body background? That'll be a Gray color that you'll see in just a moment, but you can also set a table background which is a color for your entire e-mail. If you are a dynamic portal person, you're able to add rows and select the six formatting options exactly the same.

So hopefully then that feels very, very familiar to you and then you are just dragging and dropping all of your components that you have built. You're able to see all of your variables, pick what you want to be the preset options, and this is where you are also able to decide which of your components are or are not editable later on for your users, and the editing options are entirely based upon the rows that we just.

Selected. So in our example we are really only using single row because that is what showed up best for us in testing and that brings us all the way back to our finalized version, which hopefully now makes a lot more sense. And just as a side note, if you are really paying attention, you may notice that our template includes the component website header. We did not cover that in the presentation today and that's kind of for a simple reason.

Love. It's not very interesting.

It is really just two components. It's our static logo and then three clickable text links just designed to look a lot like our website. This is a nice example of components with no customizing options at all. We built it in and now it's included just to be fixed coding. So we have our components, we have our templates, and from here all we do is Create an e-mail, which is where Susanna will come in and take over.

Hello, we never left.

You help him.

Alright, thank you so much for that great presentation. There was just a question in the chat just now. Actually there have been many great questions in the chat, but somebody asked if you would put the suitcase ID in the chat here so people could take that.

I did, I think.

It's a couple of, but it's right there.

Ohh, maybe I'm not seeing your response. You're a moderator. OK, well, perfect. Thank you for doing that. I'm trying to read too many great comments at one time. So the first thing I wanted to mention is that several people have asked if this is being recorded. Yes, it is being recorded. Yes, you will have access to that. It will be in the knowledge base. We'll put it in this latest news, etcetera. So you'll be notified of that. Just wanted to make sure that you get that out there. Several people have also asked if delivered designer is free. And the answer is absolutely as everything in slate, all of the all of the things all come with your license.

So you may need to talk to somebody in your campus to turn it on, but it is all included in slate there. All right. We have many great questions here. I tried to put a couple of them together. The first one is, if you wouldn't mind talking about how you get the delivery template permission. Is there a permission that goes along with that and maybe how to turn that on again in the in the configuration keys? Several questions about that.

Yeah, so that is the deliver templates permission.

Wonderful.

Jocelyn asked. Is there a minimum or maximum width for header images to tell the designers?

I am prone to just using 100%. I'm asking for a more rectangular image and placing that in the hands of people more knowledgeable than myself and Susanna may have a better answer.

Wonderful.

Somebody also asked if you could go back to the QR code slide for a moment if people wanted to take a picture of that QR code. Perfect. Thank you.

I'll keep sending you the easy questions.

Joan asks, is it possible to automatically have all of our links be a specific color or style?

Yeah, I mean so there I didn't mention but you can use a default setting if you don't want to have all of the options all of the time. Default works really really well that it will just pop in there automatically. You don't have to edit it. Boom, you've pre built it in and the component side.

Great.

Somebody else asked if there was an article that goes along with this. Yes, there definitely is. As I'm multitasking here, I will. I will put that in the chat here coming up in a moment.

Umm.

Shibumi asks, has any testing been done in these templates from a deliverability standpoint? Now, I will say that there have been quite a few questions in the chat, some of which I haven't approved because they're they're they're they're asking similar questions here, specifically regarding outlook. Just curious about some of the testing that you've done here on these. And do these actually reach inboxes? What is the code push the emails using the templates and the spam promotion folders, etc? Anything that you notice in the testing part of that?

Wonderful. Thank you.

Next question on the list is.

Rachel and a couple of people have asked about mobile friendliness. Can you talk through the considerations for creating mobile friendly multi column layouts? The columns don't appear to automatically flow under each other on mobile.

Couple other questions related to that too.

Keep plugging those slate feedback forums. That really is where our designers go to get those ideas about how to make this service better. Everything in Slate has all grown from use cases just like these, so please continue to put those in the feedback forums.

A couple of people have asked about standard templates or recommended templates. Can you give a list of examples of standard templates one might use when building out the system initially?

I like that, so I would take it from. I would take it from starting at the component level spoiler and thinking about what you're using your messages most frequently for right now. So gives you a chance to do a nice little system audit if you know that the majority of your one off messages are going to be invitations to your open houses and building from there. So thinking about what your instance is doing.

Most frequently, and grabbing those images, grabbing those links, and building up from there. Because the nice thing is you don't have to have just one standard one. You get to have many, many preset standard things to give you that flexibility moving forward.

Create.

Thank you for the continued questions pouring into the chat. I really appreciate it. I also did put in the deliberate designer article there, so that will be a helpful resource.

Wonderful.

Or both the content of the message and the envelope available for AB testing, says Ben.

Wonderful.

Let's see. Another question is.

You've touched on this a little bit, but a couple of people continue to bring up columns and different layouts, etc. So are there more advanced template options like multiple columns, different layouts, etc? I know that this has been answered a little bit in the chat, but just wanted to give you an opportunity to explore that.

Our first draft included a lot more columns.

Um, and we, we scaled back based on testing and specifically how it was rendering on mobile. So as I said earlier, you have all the options that you have within a dynamic portal, but it just it just didn't render well. And we figured we'd rather show simple and have it show as best as it could then go as complicated as possible.

Wonderful.

Uh, next question.

If only our department advancement uses our slate account. Would deliver designer be worth trying for us?

I mean, I want to touch everything in slate all the time, so heck yes, try it, see what happens.

But honestly, yeah, it's it's still a great tool for branding, for consistency, for having all of your messages show in a really nice, marketable way. So.

My vote is yes. I might be biased.

Great. Thank you. Suzanne, are you testing with the web-based outlook or the desktop based outlook or both?

Great.

I also wanted to read this comment from Robbie. I really appreciate this comment. It says. Just to reiterate in regards to the outlook formatting issues, those problems are not specific to slate and have been ongoing for the better part of two decades. I've been to web marketing for a long time and e-mail layouts have always been something I've avoided For these reasons, so I'll put that in the chat so you can see that. I think that's a great point to mention here, that that some of these are really about the interaction with with other with other third parties.

I'm not sure if you're going to be able to answer this particular question. I know there have been some thoughts about it in the chat question about adding liquid markup variables to the CSS styling in the header for an e-mail template.

You know, I tested. I did not test with that, so I I hesitate to answer. I certainly want to try now, but I don't know.

Great.

Uh, somebody else says. Once turned on, can new deliver emails be required to use the deliver designer template?

Required is such a strong word.

I would say office policy, yes, officially in slate required, no.

Thanks.

They are both live. We don't suddenly turn this on and then all of your other templates are are gone, which could be a very good thing.

Great.

This is a good question from Hayden. What are the skills we should make sure our marketing or communications team have before launching deliberate designer in our system? Any recommendations on when to use the new tool versus some of the basic functions?

I think that ties in with a lot of. I mean, First off, test, test, test, test is more important than a skill in my opinion, because if you if you have the time to play with it and develop it out, it's going to be beautiful.

With that test, test, test.

Wonderful.

Umm.

Rates.

Alright, we're getting down to the end here. Such wonderful questions. Again, I'm sorry if we haven't gotten to some of your questions, but a lot of those really overlap in terms of the content that we're trying to talk about today. If there are additional questions about any of these things, please feel free to either get in contact with Kitty or Susanna. The service desk is always there as well. I lead the team that is responsible for deliver and deliver designer, so please feel free to submit those service desk requests and we'd be happy to help you out. Marina asks. Is it available for one e-mail such as sent from the person record?

As well as deliver mailings.

I don't think so.

I checked that very quickly and I believe that you could only so far use the standard templates.

Great.

You know where you could put that?

Wonderful.

And I think last but not least, is there an HTML e-mail editor that plays well with Slate that you'd recommend? Looks like a couple of people have had examples in there, but if you have any thoughts on that as well.

Yeah.

Love it.

Wonderful. Katie, Susanna, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for taking the time today and sharing your knowledge with all of us. Again, if you have questions, get in touch with you Savannah, or us at tech dilutions. Thanks, everyone.

Thank you.