Dive Deeper with Waybetter: Four Strategies to Best Manage and Drive Visits in Slate

Hello hello everyone.

Little give it a couple minutes here. Feel free to introduce yourselves in the chat.

My name is Paige Dahlman and I'm a client support engineer at Technology Asians based out of our Portland office today. We have a wonderful event hosted by way better marketing called for strategies to best manage and drive visits in slate.

Our presenters today will be Ali Schreiner, director of Slate at way better marketing and John Thompson, who's the VP of Marketing Strategies also at way better marketing. We do have a couple of some housekeeping pieces that we just want to cover regarding this this event.

For everyone here, this webinar is being recorded and will be made available for Festival Pass holders within a week.

To enable closed captioning, you can click. There's going to be a little CC icon at the top right of the share window. Likewise, if you do want to enable full screen viewing, you can click that kind of those four arrows at the top right. If you're having any kind of audio issues, audio, video issues, any kind of echo, feel free. Just refresh the browser. That should probably solve it.

Certainly feel free to post any questions that you have in the chat. Last but not least, this is just day two of slate stage sessions, so feel free. Go to our website, take a look at any of the others that we have posted, but without further ado, I'm going to turn it over to Ali and John to kick it off.

Over to you.

All right, thanks Paige. We appreciate it. Thanks everyone for joining us to talk, visit strategy within your slate instance. As Paige mentioned I am John Thompson, vice president of marketing strategies. That way, better marketing. Given the marketing in my title, I'm going to go ahead and stay in that lane and bring a lean in on the marketing expertise and leave that slate technical aspect to my Co presenter alley. I will definitely stay out of her lane so my background is a.

Branding marketing where I spent some time in some of the more difficult sectors. Higher Ed being one of them and then eventually I was recruited to Albion College, which is a small liberal arts College in Michigan. I was the A VP of Marketing Communications there for seven years, so we spent a whole bunch of time talking about visits and how to drive them and how to follow up. So this is a subject very near and dear to my heart. In fact, that's when I first heard of way better. We had hired them to.

Just bring strategic leads to us for the general enrollment, but I quickly learned that they could take our slate instance from good to great and that included driving event attendance. So that was when I first came across way better than here. I am now representing way better. So back to visits. Why did we spend so much time talking about them? And I think it's pretty pretty safe to say everyone here has heard or have said if we can just get them to our campus.

We can win those students, so before we go too much further, I want to pass it to Allie. She's a our director of Slate. I'm sure many of you have seen her or heard of her by now, but Ali, go ahead and introduce yourself.

And everyone thank you so much for for joining us today as John said, and director of Sleep here, we better marketing been with way better over 4 1/2 years and just so excited to be talking about events today. Have a completely dedicated session really to driving visits. You know we do a lot of implementations. We do a lot of audits. We do a lot of work, you know, within instances all across the country and events is great because it's where a lot of people start. You know, in their implementations it's where a lot of people invest a lot of time and energy because it's a major driver of records.

Your instance so excited to get started and excited to be here all with you today.

Alright, so we're gonna run through the plan with you. We're gonna start with driving registrations. Once we do that. Of course we can't stop there. We need to get them to campus and then once we get them to campus we need to get them to do the next step. So if you're feeling like multitasking today on the webinar, go ahead and check out that hashtag there and you can have a conversation over in the Twitter verse as well. But we're just going to go ahead and jump right in us. All of us are way better. Very process driven people.

We we often say process with average marketing will be great marketing with average process. Now this is easier shown than talked about. So I'm gonna go ahead and do that. But I just wanna make it mention that I've seen great marketing with very little process. I've been guilty of that. I think at one time or another. But I've also seen process make do with just OK marketing. So as long as we have the process built behind it, we can still make good things happen. So we're going to move on and I'm going to show you.

Exactly what I mean by that and the user experience definitely matters. I mean that it does a lot for the brand it does. It does a lot for the registrations it drops and the follow up. So what I'm going to go ahead and do is take two drastic steps. I'm going to use Tesla and the University of Maryland as an example. Now Maryland up front, I'm going to go ahead and apologize. We're just picking on you because you're in our home state flagship university and we had to choose someone. There was a lot of choices, but we figured we'd stay home.

And also I feel OK about picking on you all because I'm guilty of all of these things that we're about to see. So first I'm going to share my screen here and I'm going to go and I'm going to buy a Tesla with you all today. I'm going to get a Model 3 here and I'm going to take a custom order and I'm just going to show you how this goes for me in real time. So I like long range that's going to upgrade me. And now I'm just going to go ahead and and kind of be ushered through this this process.

I really like blue, so now they're going to show me my choice, reflected visually in front of me. I'm kind of getting excitement building here as I scroll as I know I'm getting closer to my new Tesla. The interior. I have two choices very simple. I'd like white. Then they go ahead and show me my choice again in real time.

Uh, my next action. As I'm scrolling down quickly, full self-driving capability, yes, you need to have that if you're going to get a Tesla, it's required in my opinion. Now they've got me continuing. What's my next easy, simple thing? Check a box here. I want to walk connector and then just like that they're collecting my payment. I mean, it was that quick. I can order with a card so you can see in a matter of seconds. I had been brought through this process of buying a Tesla and.

A less than a minute's time now I'm sure. I'll add a little bit of time when I add my information, but for the sake of this, I show you how quickly, now. Conversely, I'm here at Maryland. I'm looking through the website here. I want to visit. I just want to register for a visit. That's all I want to do today. So of course you have very little patience and you're scrolling and things are happening, popping out, and you can't quite find anything right off the top of your head here or off top of the home page here. So let's use a little bit of intelligence and we'll go to the admissions page.

So now we have a pop out and I see a video I can watch reminder. I just want to sign up for a visit. I just I'm going to go back into admission, so I'll click again.

And now I have another website, little micro site here and I.

Finally, find a visit button. OK, so now I'm going to visit and I have more text, more videos, more scrolling to do and I just still have not found an easy button to Click to get to my visit. But I do find daily visits here, so I'm going to daily visit. Now I'm gonna add another page you can see where I'm going here. I haven't bought a Tesla yet, I'm still just trying to sign up for a visit here and I first my first option. Here is a on campus Terrapin tour. Now I have no idea.

What a Terrapin tour entails or what it could mean. But it's my first action, so I'll assume they want me to take that one.

And you'll see more content. More content, more content, but a nice button here for register now. I don't know how many clicks I've taken so far, but I can assure you it's too many. So then I click on register now and they thank me for my interest and they told me that there's no events available or no space available. Now. That's really that's really unfortunate at that point, because that was quite a bit of clicking quite a bit of effort just to sign up. One of them cost upwards of $60,000. One was free, so you would assume.

That the free event would be easier, but unfortunately it wasn't. And again, Maryland, I apologize. I've done all those and many more errors, so please, please do forget me. But we did try a couple different times. In fairness and on the 13th I was met with this strange page here, so we wanted to give him another shot. So we came back a week later and we got this odd.

Central authentication service failure, which wasn't great, and then again on the 22nd we got the page that I just got which which meant there's just nothing for me today. So what you can see here is that this is portraying this image of disorganization and not a smooth experience, so that is very crystal clear as to, you know, where the process is is succeeding or thriving I guess, and where one is falling significantly short.

So here what we have is I went for real through the entire process on both last week and it took Me 2 minutes to buy a Tesla and the one I did chose ended up costing over 150,000. So that was pretty impressive with my features I chose, but the visit sign up page for the Maryland visit took me 6 minutes so you can see that that is far too long and we need to work on improving those so clear clean buttons. We're not. We're not there.

So we also have to remember who we're talking to. We're talking about Gen Z here. These are our digital experts. We all know that we all read quite frequently. They have an 8 second attention span. I'm starting to think it's much less than that. If my middle aged self is getting less than that, I would assume they're even quicker than that. They expect smooth and smart experiences. Tesla spoils people. Amazon is an everyday spoiler, and everyone's thriving to keep up with the the Amazon experience. And then, as I mentioned.

These students are choosing brands based on these. This demographic it's it's what makes them feel good. What was the best seamless experience, what? What was annoying? What wasn't annoying so they're choosing based on these processes, which makes it even tougher and more important.

Also, we're talking with the parents. What do we know about them? Not digital natives. They require the intuitive path. They they, they thrive on the the intuitive Amazon path. This next bullet here that don't. They don't understand the jargon. I'm not sure anyone understands our jargon in higher Ed. Not to mention the acronyms or like the Terrapin Tour. That's very internal facing, so I'm not sure that.

I think the the the word choice is critical here and then they're naturally skeptical, so anything that goes awry, it just kind of kind of just confirms their skepticism. So all of that said, we it's time to revisit the visit. I mean, that's that's what we need to do as a as a collective group, and we need to think about it differently. Strategically, process driven so we hear it way better. We have the rule and we have the three minute rule.

And.

We and keep in mind who who this is for. This is now for us here on this webinar. It's for the prospective students and their parents, so these users. They should take 3 minutes to fully register, not just to find it, but to fully register and start the conversation. Get in the flow of these events. So 3 minutes start to finish because right now we're finding it takes about 6 and that's entirely too wrong and too long. And I do think 3 minutes quite frankly is.

Is generous in time. I mean if we could cut that down to two, that would be even better. So to learn how to do that, I'm going to pass it over to Al and she's going to share some tips and tricks to kind of cut down on that timeframe.

Thanks so much John, and I think one of like as I'm listening to you talk and kind of really kind of reviewing those slides. It's make it easy and they will come. The easier you may get, the more registrations you get, the higher the conversion will be. So what I want to do now is screenshot this slide. So go ahead and do it. You don't need to be shy and next I want you to screenshot it and then use this checklist to really secret shop your own visit process and better yet have your mom secret shop your own.

You know visit process as John was just saying we need to ensure that we're looking at this from a true kind of end user perspective. One that's not deeply familiar with our admissions process. Our jargon, you know, the overall kind of process of events we want to make sure that regardless of the user, there is able to easily and quickly register for a visit.

So First things first, we need to make sure that they can get there. There needs to be a clear call to action on your homepage to visit and be sure to look at this across devices. It's too important of a call to action to have it drop in a submap or a hamburger menu. Really fight for top level navigation and in line promo right within your home page. Next I want you to count those clicks just as John was doing with the University of Maryland. Example count the clicks. How many clicks does it take to actually reach where you can register for an event?

You've reached the registration form. Really, it should be ideally 5 clicks or less. The fewer the better, of course.

And I know what you might be thinking. These first two kind of checklists here on our usability guide is that it's outside of my control. It's outside of my slate control, but it doesn't have to be. And actually now it's going to save this for later, but John I think we should just go do it now. I want to show you a quick example of how you can actually manage this right within your slate instance today. It doesn't have to be managed by web it by your marketing teams. It's something that you can manage, you know directly within your CRM. So sorry John, for the quick.

It derailed, but I wanna go like I said into this live example here for our friends out at Juniata so Juniata is a small, private liberal arts College in Pennsylvania and we're here on their home page. So we want to register for a visit. Well, good news for us, there is a main call to action here within the header as well as inline promo and just to kind of showcase too. You know, as the screen gets smaller, you know. Obviously it would be different on a mobile device. But still there is a very clear call to action to visit.

And no matter what if I'm looking to do that, I will have the right click away. You know to take that step. So I'm going to go ahead and do that. I'm going to come to this visit page so this is their visit page. Everyone has one. It's information related to all of the event offerings that you have. What you might be able to see here. Eagle Eye if you can see in the screenshot is this is actually a slate portal. This is a non gated slate portal page we have. Everyone knows there's gated portal pages where a user has to authenticate.

Log in your status portal pages that house your checklist. They're release decisions, but there's also the non gated pages. The non gated pages that you know are open to the public. Any user can can come and navigate to them and a great uses use case of that is a visit portal like this and we're going to talk about kind of three main goals. You know with this visit portal, the first being and this is true of any non gated portal is to deanonymize the user. When it's that status or you know portal.

Each for your decisions you know exactly who the user is. They're authenticating. And like I said, logging in here. I have no idea. Again, this is open to the public, it's just any other you know. Landing page on on your.edu. So my main goal is to who is this user? I want to identify them so I can follow up with them appropriately.

But goal two is why are they here? They're here to learn more about visits they want to visit, so we're going to give them the information that they need in order to kind of self select into the correct event for them. And I think you know when we've been talking with a lot of our partners, you know this is a drastic need, and now in the pandemic, your visit options have tripled overnight. All of your on campus options became, you know, virtual options, and even now kind of coming. Coming out of this, the.

Appetite for virtual offerings is simply not going away, so you still have to manage. You know all of these different kind of event types and modes, so you do so in a way that a student is or a user really can come here. And I can say, OK, I'm a parent, but actually I'm a senior. I'm a class of 2022. I'm getting ready to graduate, so the tiles change now it's from taking information. I'm learning about the user and I'm changing. You know what the page is is kind of showcasing here in terms of visit options. I want to come to campus. So now.

I have one option and of course during early spring during the fall, you know we would have open houses, preview days, etcetera that would be here. But given the time of year we're pushing a student to take, you know, to register for just a daily or a campus visit. So I'm going to do that. We then come to another event portal, one that you guys are all familiar with. So I'm able to select here great May 10th. I'm coming to campus. I'm going to register for the session at 10:50, so I think we can counter clicks definitely less than five.

And it's very easy for the student to understand in language that makes sense to them.

So those are goals one and two. We'd anonymized, and we've gotten them to register and visit for a visit that makes sense for them. Goal three, though, is to not forget that for users, for you know, for students, events are going to be a major entry point of records into your instance. You're going to find a lot of first tracked interactions and origin sources being the event. So what does this tell me? It tells me that we need to make sure that this page functions and is a very transactional element to facilitate.

Registration, but it's also a marketing opportunity. So just like your visit page probably has today, we're going to give them accommodations and just kind of travel information. But we're also going to give them that plus one. The why the start telling the genie out of story now so that when they come to campus they already know a little bit about us when they come into our compost now because they've registered for an event again, we've already kind of given them some information you know about about Juniata we're talking about affordability, but the appropriate links away so I can learn.

We're about my mirror and kind of need based options. We have embedded videos. If you heard us talk before harp on that, they'd be embedded. Do not kind of link away to YouTube or to Vimeo, really. Keep the user kind of confined here within the portal and video is great. It increases time spent on page. It's really engaging and it helps to paint the picture. Obviously, in a really kind of fun and visual way.

Next we have some carousel content here from a marketing perspective, we're marketers developers. We love kind of designing and coding these things. They're they're interactive, but there's also a very strategic reason for it too. We don't want heavy, dense paragraph copy all throughout the page. That would just be hard to scan. It's not very digestible, so here if the user is motivated and has, you know, scrolled enough to see this information, they click through and I was a student athlete. In high school, I see great there's.

Athletics 21 division teams that can learn more again with the appropriate links away. If I keep going again, I'm coming to campus on May 10th. I can learn more about their location here in Huntington and you know, see where we'll be visiting.

So that's just again, you know when when we come back to this usability checklist, those are ways that you can control those things right within your slate instance. That is a slate non deeded portal.

Then of course what everyone has in their instance today is the registration form. You know, the form itself really needs to strike that ultimate balance of collecting enough information to create the record, of course, but also to support all the automated efforts you know and and rules to come at this point, though, it's critical to not overwhelm the user. And frankly, at this point you don't need a lot of information. There's always time. There's always room, you know to collect it later.

And it's you know this question is when we get a lot. How long is too long? What should I be asking and we always say not one question too many but for starters, let's give an example of what you should not do. You know, certainly, in preparation for the session today, but just in general, we're always on the lookout for what institutions are doing, and this is something that we see in our audits. You know of Slate instances, event forms and templates that look like this. So this form there's this page. There's more.

And unfortunately, there's even more. I remember back that initial point, make it easy and they will come and Simply put, this is just not easy. You know, when thinking about that Tesla and Maryland, University of Maryland visit example. This is a free visit and you're just asking too much information. It's in my mind this is an application. It's not an event registration form. You should not be asking ethnicity, pronoun preference, test score, GPA's. You know at this stage you know there's always time to collect it later.

Again, that general rule of rule of thumb, if you need it to support rules or dynamic content, collect it. Otherwise create a campaign. Collect this information over time. As you might guess, we're huge fans of a two step RFI process collecting just enough to get them into the top funnel, and then you know developing that data profile over time.

Because at this point at the visit again at that kind of early top funnel, it's just too much to ask. It's too much work. The user will abandon and not only the perceived work, you know, imagine 16 seven year old coming to this forum. Like Oh my gosh and seeing all these questions. But also let's say they are motivated. They're kind of going through it, but then they reach that test score question. It's like, Oh well, I can't remember my test score. I'm just going to do it later and later never comes. They never come back. So make sure that when you have their attention and you have that.

Motivation at its highest that you're converting them with a nice kind of easy to complete form.

So instead, this is what you should be striving for. Basic contact information, entry term, program of interest and collecting parent data as relationship scoped. You know data.

In terms of form abandonment, we're going to give some other you know, quick tips to take into account, and that is to use section headers. You know for your form. So with this I'm actually going to kind of scroll back to this other side so you can see here this, you know, sample of event form is about 12 questions or so. There's some conditional ones in there, but again, it's 3 sections the user can see face a contact information and then kind of program of interest and for from there it's very easy to understand very kind of scannable and and digestible.

Along with that, you'll also see that we denoted any required fields with asterisks. We don't want this to be a surprise to the user, so when I hit submit and all the form validation comes up, the very kind of I would say you know slate bread that everyone knows all too well. We don't want that to be a surprise. Clearly to note those kind of earlier on and to piggyback on that earlier point, only require those that are absolutely required. There should be some nice to have fields and then of course some must have fields.

So next, we're going to talk about you know related events, a few of you had questions for these when kind of registering for this session and for related events, we're going to talk about campus tours just as we were looking at the daily visits with Juniata, so be sure that you're creating these and managing these kind of in that you really want to ensure that you're giving students a few weeks worth of dates you know to choose from, because, again, it all comes back to the user. It all comes back to that user experience and imagine you're.

Apparent and you come, and you see this event portal to the left. Life is simply too busy to only have 1 available option and ultimately this is going to hinder conversion if you're busy or you know if it's just not going to work, you're not going to register. But conversely, let's take a look at the portal to the right. These screenshots were taken on the same day, of course from different institutions and changes. Our registration will happen at a higher rate to the institution to the right. More choice in this case equals, you know, more registrations.

And don't forget that again, as we had talked about many students first tracked interaction Origin source will be with the event registration. It's that major point of entering into your CRM should ensure there's consistency. What you're collecting across all your major RFI. Your inquiry forms should mirror what you're collecting on your event templates, because then regardless of how the record is created, you're building that consistent data profile and of all the things that we've discussed so far, I would say that this is the most common.

And the most critical issue that we see in instances today is a common pitfall that we see, you know, within those audits, and fortunately it can be easily corrected. You literally are just going to pull up your eyes. You're gonna pull up your event templates and see how they compare to one another. If major of interest is required on the RFI, you'll want to require it on your event template as well. Consistency here is just key, because then you'll be able to have the same experience across rules marketing automation to follow.

So Next up, a student has a lot of influencers when it comes to their college search and decision. You know family, friends, guidance counselors, and arguably the most important of these are their parents and to visit. Registration is a great way to collect this information. In this case, don't wait till they apply. We talked about other fields that you should wait until they apply. This is 1. This is an important data set. You want to start collecting it now because you'll be able to see see parents on all the reminder communications. More on that in just a moment.

But you'll also be able to funnel parents more importantly to their own comp flows to their own automated drip campaigns. So across statuses inquiry, incomplete app awaiting submission, awaiting materials admitted students they can be an additional driving force for you to get the student to take action because parents at the end of the day they want what's best for their students, of course, but more importantly, they don't want them to fall behind. They want to understand what are my students next steps so they can push the student to take that.

Next step.

So it's important to map this data to relationship scope fields. We don't want any custom fields here. Needs to go back to those relationship scope fields, so again you can kind of build out this important, you know data set, you know within your instance and believe it or not to kind of do derail a little bit. This can actually help with your application submission rate. If you collect parent data along the way across your inquiry campaigns across your event templates, you can then surface this data back to the student.

In your application via relationship form widget and this not only tells the student you know who they are because you're kind of surfacing this data they've already provided, but you're helping with conversion. At this point they can just confirm. Yep, that's my father. That's his contact information. Looks good on to the next and they go to the next section of the application. So if you pick, you're obviously collecting emergency contact information, parent information. Do so via relationship form widget makes it easier on the user and then.

Operationally speaking, it's better for data cleanliness. You're not. You don't have to worry about duplicate data records being created. You know on the relationship side.

Ultimately, you just want to take advantage of all the hard work that you've done to collect. You know this information and to service it back up. You know on the application itself.

So now we can take a breather. The student has registered for the event, done so via a great kind of user experience and form registration process. But as we all know, there's still a lot of work ahead of us. We first need to ensure they get to campus or in the case of a virtual event, that they get to, you know, their their device on time.

So in my mind, another screen where they shot or screen where they slide. Here coming up and we get asked this question a lot is what should my cadence of reminder pushes be? And I think again you'll hear us talk about this a lot. The first rule is consistency across your event templates. Ensure that you're adopting the same approach, so if it's an open house, it admitted student day, a preview day, etcetera. All of those should have a similar cadence in terms of the reminder series. It's good for the user. They may or may not notice.

That they're receiving the same messages at the same cadence, but actually the bigger benefit is for your staff, so that if a counselor knows there's an on campus event coming up, there's no question that the student is going to receive a 14 day reminder. A seven day reminder a one day out reminder, and then attacks the day of. There'll be no question because all of the on campus events will be absolutely the same.

And then to back it up, just a moment. We've been talking about the reminders, the confirmation page, another kind of common audit pitfall that we find here, and that is many folks use the email plus confirmation page option as an asset type. You know, within the event communications and Simply put the formatting, the design, the language appropriate for a confirmation page. Not appropriate for an email, so be sure you're utilizing separate discrete assets. You'll have a confirmation page, you have a confirmation.

Email and then you can tailor. You know the design and content you know based on the based on the channel.

And of course, the cadence kind of outlined here is for an on campus event for a virtual event, we would recommend a one week reminder a day at reminder, and then an hour or so before you know there's less work in prep to get to a virtual event so you don't really need as long a reminder series.

So in terms of the reminders themselves, personalization here is really key and it's I mean that's true of any kind of marketing message. You know. Of course out of delivered, but with event communications the personalization should be around the visit itself. In again, kind of going back to that campus or Daily Tour has the student created a personalized itinerary? Maybe they're sitting in on a class meeting with a coach meeting with financial aid. Remind them of this through liquid markup so they know what to expect. You're managing their expectations, kind of ahead of the visit.

And in the sample here you can also see through the liquid markup that we're also using the students visit preferences to personalize their arrival time. So if the student is, let's say, going to sit in on that class, they need to arrive at 12:45 versus as the student is coming to just take a campus tour, they can arrive at 3:00 o'clock.

So next, when it comes to the day of reminder, we love utilizing you know text and you know or SMS for this. And of course, the only way you can really administer and do this is making sure mobile is required on that event template form. So that's in my mind it must have field and you know a good place to collect.

And it's good to, in terms of doing it, kind of the day of right before the event, because not everyone, especially students, check their email throughout the day. Personally, I'm guilty of this. I'm kind of amassed a leader in the morning, and then I kind of catch up on my email right before my personal email right before bed, but a text is guaranteed. You're going to get immediate attention and response. You know if needed. So in the text you're going to want to include parking information, a link to a campus map, and then, depending on your COVID-19 guidelines, you could also link to this if you have it.

Informational page about that and additionally, if you are requiring, you know any sort of health screening. You know questions make it easier on yourself and the student, and do this via a slate form you know. Again, oftentimes we see this form hosted in in other places, like let's say Google form and again kind of circling back to that user experience. You know who they are. You've sent John a text, but then you send them to a Google form where John has to let you know who they are.

Then you know, in order to kind of fill out that information. So use this platform pre populate that with hidden fields and then make the process as simple as possible for the students and simple for YouTube because it's all managed right there within one platform.

So pre event communications check now we're kind of on to post event communications and again other audits. I would say this is probably where I see the biggest opportunity. You know all of the other instances that we've talked about. You know people have something in place today and they need to make like a change or an optimization. But here I there isn't a lot of consistency. I feel like a lot of institutions could really kind of bolster their follow up communication across all registration statuses, you know attendee.

And no show.

For attendees, we want you to acknowledge the visit and bonus points. Again, if you can use liquid markup and tie it back to that personalized itinerary. Hope you enjoyed XYZ everything that you kind of you know experienced across your visit.

And then in the spirit of optimization, always making things better. You're visit experience is critical, you know, to the process that ask them to submit a survey. What did they like? What didn't they like they like and from here continue to kind of fine tune. You know that visit experience.

And as with any email you know in your instance, regardless if it's an event communication or not, encourage them to take the next step through liquid markup and content box would be really easy to do this too. Personalize this per entry term so juniors and underclassmen, those sophomores push them to learn more about campus life. About the admissions process and seniors. Of course, you're going to be pushing them to apply. You could even have content blocks here that have deadlines that can kind of cross out based on the current date and time. Again, we're thinking about how to make this.

Evergreen, but also how to make it very relevant for the student you know based on based on kind of where they are in the cycle, and you know where they are in the process.

For no shows here, you just need to give them a sense of foamo. What is it that they exactly missed out on and then encourage them to sign up for an additional visit opportunity? You know, we all know it's an important step in the college search process, and you know, admittedly, we know the metrics behind you know students that visit, so it really shouldn't be missed and you know we want students that previously registered to and not attended to. Of course, register again.

So some quick examples here. Another thing you can do with your attendee communications is to continue the conversation. You invest a ton of time in your social properties, so encourage them to follow you accordingly across Facebook, you know Twitter and another thought is to to encourage engagement of this email is to provide them with a promised waiver fee code. If you have an application you know waiver fee and if they visited and you promised them a scholarship, let them know, say good news you've been awarded the scholarship.

Now it's time. Now it's time to apply.

Next up for no shows and as this is, you know, just a quick example of no shows. Again, kind of encouraging that visit and another great tip here and you probably saw it on the attendee. You know sample as well. Do you see how we're inserting the VP signature here at the bottom? It's via content block with a specified kind of hard coded key, and this is paramount because if there's a shift or a turnover in this position, you can update it in one place in a content block.

And it will update across all assets that are of course using this content block. So your deliver messages, your RFI, your form communications, your event templates, they all should be utilizing a content block like this so that it can easily be updated in one place. You know if there's any change that has to occur.

So we've kind of given some very I would say detailed and specific examples here as it relates to overall communications and John's gonna kind of follow up with some overall best practices.

Yeah, I think yeah, I just will echo a little bit the importance of the follow up communication I remember from my time on campus. It was all the effort on the front end and all of the coordination of the visit itself. The promotion of the visit you just kind of maybe ran out of steam for the follow up. It's not highly technical per se, but it's just I think more of a discipline to to make sure that there's the the post communication file, because you can capitalize on that.

Momentum very easily and then like you are saying, you know, capitalize on that FOMO and and make sure that they know they miss something. So I just think that is so critical and like you said. I mean, it's really a pretty simple way to stand out from the your competition, so another screen grab moment here best practices outlined here be relevant. Snippets and liquid markup can help you accomplish this.

Include parents because why not? Parents are making a lot of the decisions. They are the transportation oftentimes, and the helicopter parent thing is real, so certainly include them. They'll be your ally throughout the recruitment. Easy to scan. This is, I mean this. Look at how you, your browsing habits just is it easy. Is everything easy if you're not easily scanning it, then you're not doing it right? So we always say just make it quick easy, because we're all.

Getting our attention spans or shrinking each day that passes and then multi channel use email text. Use everything you can to promote these. So these are some of our best practices. Take a picture of that. Pretty simple.

But as we move on, none of the stuff we've been talking about will matter if if no one knows about your visit options. So this is. I mean, we've got to promote that. And and when we say, promote them not like the day before, I mean at least a few weeks out to get the momentum going using these multi channels. There's a variety of different tactics to get the word out. That's the most standard email, digital advertising, print text. These are all at your disposal that you can do relatively economically.

But the more touch points that you can get that the better chance of getting that that word out there.

Yeah, and I'll kind of take over here for email because as John said, an integrated approach is is critical, but email will be. It is now and will be for a long time. You know the king, you know when it comes to reaching your audience, you just can't beat the ROI to communicate a direct message to a direct audience at a very specific time, either based on date and time or based on, you know, a specific kind of triggered action and within your instance it's administered via those two ways via an automated drip campaign.

Or via a kind of batched one off scheduled message within those drip campaigns you need to ensure that the main call to action for your junior and underclassmen within those flows should be to visit. That is the main call to action. That is their next step. That is what they should be doing.

For seniors, though of course you're pushing the application, but within that you still should have dedicated prompts to visit as well dedicated message solely around the visit and even having secondary calls to action P signs with with you know visit opportunities. You know that that makes sense for them.

And of course, you know, aside from these, you know, kind of automated campaigns. You'll also have. Like I said, those kind of scheduled messages for promotions for open houses you know, admitted 2 days, etcetera. You're really looking at an 8 week promotion period, whereas a virtual you know session would likely be more of a four week promotion period. You know. Drip campaigns both of these options. Drip campaigns are great because they offer Evergreen content to population members as they become eligible and consistency.

You know that students are going to be receiving these messages at a particular defined cadence, but of course it's hard within a drip campaign to make it very relevant to date and time. You can do some things with content blocks, but ultimately that's what's scheduled kind of 1 off. Messages are for application deadline deposits, and of course you know events.

And how you do this via email, you know can vary. You know, across you know the different populations your user types. So let's take a look at an example for parents. Here's a sample message here, and this sample message is actually a form confirmation message throughout our inquiries here is that we build for our partners. You know, we collect parent information all along the way at beginning sophomore year, junior year senior year, we have a dedicated email that we're collecting paired information for all the reasons we noted earlier, we want to build out that data set.

You want a surface it leader via relationship form widget on the application and we want to be able to communicate with parents all along the way.

Well, in our confirmation appearance as you see here, we let them know that hey John, Alley wants you to learn more about you, know new College of Florida. Here's some information about us, some quick hits. And again, what is the next step? The next step? Bring your you know, family to campus. We'd love to meet you. Come on bye for a visit for students, though, the approach is a little bit different. We've talked about how it might change, you know, for sophomores you know versus seniors, and it's really about painting the picture. How many times have you heard?

The students say you know, or you know their family. Subsequently, when they got to campus, they just knew they had a feeling. Ultimately it was the visit that sealed the deal and we need to ensure that through our messages that we're conveying that that getting to campus will. It's a benefit to them because it will simplify their college search. They'll get answers to all of those questions, and instead of having kind of no direction on where they want to go, it will really help to give direction you know ultimately to their college.

Place.

Next up, John's going to talk about digital advertising.

Yeah, my approach to the digital advertising is just again be simple and be clear as to what you wanted them to do. I think again, it's something that I've fallen into the trap of, like over designing or overcomplicating. When you can usually just use a simple image with some direct text that tells you exactly what you want them to do and then make it a very visible click button you can see. Here are my friends at Albion, my Albion bias there to our beautiful campus in person and a big block there to click.

That cannot be any any quicker and and that and the reason is as I was mentioning earlier in the presentation, is that we've got, you know, the attention span. So when people are scrolling, they've got to have some visual hook and the same goes for print. I don't recommend overthinking it over doing it, just revert back to what you wanted them to do and then show them how to do that. I think it's it's. It can be very powerful if done in a very clean.

A clean way.

And I know over this last kind of 43 minutes we've we've thrown a lot at you, but don't feel like you can't get started on some of these recommendations right away. You know, way better if you sat through sessions before you probably seen aside similar similar to this, we really have one role, and that is to do something and to make it better. Just like with your slate instance, you know when when we talk to folks we understand the implementation process for your instance for personally is never really over. You're always iterating, you're always improving slates, always releasing new features.

So it's this constant adoption method, and so there's really no better time, especially as you kind of head into cycle prep season. You're out of, you know, you know yields still kind of going on, but you're kind of moving out of that into cycle prep. It's a really good opportunity to kind of take a look back at your visits and see how you can be best managing them.

Yeah, and and in terms of all of the marketing too, there's no hard set fast right way to do it. And I mean you can. You can AB test you can continue to refine, but I wouldn't get caught up or paralyzed by the fact that you've got to get it just perfect and that goes across all the different mediums. I think you know and we are going to work. We were working on like statistics to kind of wrap this presentation up, but I we just decided it wasn't really necessary because you all know you all have your percentage.

That the percentage that visit campus yield at X amount higher so we know the importance of this presentation. We understand you all know it. So just know that putting this emphasis on your visit programs before, during and after all are going to help you drive enrollment.

Absolutely. So if you'd like to hear more from us or just about to move on to questions. But this is just the first stop in our slate Innovation Festival tour. We have two upcoming sessions on the 11th and the 16th, and of course you can find us in Nashville as well at the summit. So don't be afraid to stop by the booth. We'd love to talk to you, and with that, you know, truly, you know, we always include kind of this slide, but please don't be shy. Reach out at any time. You know. Fun fact, John and I both have a daughter's name Charlotte, so that's always a good conversation starter with us.

But we really love talking slate. We love talking enrollment, you know marketing. So please reach out and with that I know we had a couple of questions that came in via the registration ones that came in via the chat, which I know some of our way better. You know. Colleagues have been answering, but John, do you have some of those initial questions and help answer?

I do, yeah. The first one has to do with undergrad versus grad. So how does all this differ for graduate students and their visit options?

So great question. Yeah, it's and apologies that obviously kind of very focused here with with an undergrad, but for grad a lot of the same, a lot of the same rules apply, you know, and especially for for graduate students. You know when kind of doing anything when developing email content when developing a portal page, you have to understand what's important to their decision. Ultimately, it's you know the program, the the outcomes. Of course you know perhaps the faculty or program director, but it's flexibility and that needs to start with the visit. Need to ensure that your.

Offering flexible kind of modes and formats for them to visit at times that work for them you know is likely working professionals and in terms of the registration form. Don't need to collect parent information of course, but in terms of major of interest depending on how your prompts are set up, may need to drill down into some more you know specified concentrations so you can again kind of tailor your communication down the road to even be more specific. You know in terms of that interest, but generally same same rules applies. It will obviously lean.

Much more virtual for those information sessions.

Alright, I have another one here. Any best practices for event folding?

That's a great one. I was actually hoping someone would ask that. You know, we I was trying to see if we could kind of work it into the slide because it's especially with slate. It is such an important kind of piece of event management in terms of filtering. We've been talking with a lot of folks again as they head into cycle prep. Some are looking to kind of unwind and redo their folder structures and at the end of the day first to understand the importance and you guys all know this. It relies on queries reports on you know, checklist rules. Perhaps you know any sort of recipient list.

Some suppression, you know, all all could be pointing to specific event filtering, so a bit to unwind there, but really kind of focusing on you know your different campus visit options in terms of mode on campus, Off campus, virtual and then having subfolders you know beneath them and then in addition to that you know when thinking about maybe the larger events like an open house maybe making that a top level folder because you're going to have subfolders underneath them, perhaps for different sessions like in.

You know in same goes for like an admitted student day. So for those kind of early on in the instance you know, really, make sure you're having a lot of careful time and strategy and attention to your event filtering because it is going to be the foundation of which so many other things are built. And for those now that may be rethinking it. It's again, the pandemic didn't induce any favors for a lot of reasons, but the the virtual options kind of tripled overnight and you were just kind of. You had to make do and you had to make do quickly. So now kind of unwinding some of that and making sure that the.

Before you know, options have a good home you know to support reports in the future is really important.

This one may be a bit of a curveball for you alley, but group visits. How do you manage group visits?

Group, and that's a great question. Yeah, and it kind of lives outside of event templates. We would always recommend having your group visits managed via via asleep form a likely. A guidance counselor is, you know, filling filling this out or some other type of similar type of user. You don't want that creating a record within the instance, so you're going to collect this data via the form submission. You know data that's coming in and same rules apply. You still need to ensure that you're asking the appropriate.

Additional questions in the form giving them a lot of choice. You know when it comes to what's your first visit? You know option, what's your second having conditional and liquid markup within the confirmation email to remind them of that and then to follow up as appropriate. You know to get that kind of scheduled offline. But yeah, group visits definitely kind of living outside the event module more just within a slate form you know to to best manage that.

And and I think I'm gonna kind of go back through I saw and folks have been trying to keep up on the chat, but I saw some folks had questions specifically about seeing parents on, you know, communication and someone had made mentioned that be very careful with that, because if you see parents on Advent communication, they can unsubscribe. It will unsubscribe the student if the parent unsubscribes. And that's absolutely true. So the recommendation was to only include for transactional reminder confirmation type messages, which we would absolutely agree with.

And then when it comes to those dedicated flows you know across statuses they parents need to have, you know their their own messages just due to the the opt out wouldn't want to parent, you know, inadvertently opting out their student, especially if they're kind of early on within the funnel.

I just wanted to add a couple of the chats. Made me think of, you know this marketing automation. It doesn't have to be the end all be all with a couple of the questions. I mean, you can reach out personally, I mean that's that would be ideal too to ask additional questions like what they want, do pronouns, things like that can be done after the fact to start building that relationship. But I mean this you don't have to make it all automated, and if you do reach out, that is a another opportunity to check.

A lot of boxes.

Really.

Seeing a question here from Diane, I'm seeing research that argues that there's typically kind of two main calls to action, visit and apply. If they're outdated, I would say, you know we talked a little bit about within that kind of attendee communication. You know, for following up permit events, softwares and juniors, it's really much more of like a learn more, and you can kind of tailor this, you know, based on what you want to do, learn more about academic programming so you can specify that per major of interest you can, you know, do it more to your application process so they know what's upcoming when the time comes.

And then for seniors you know pushing them to apply, but again making sure that they have all the information they need to take those steps. We often find a lot of success. You know, giving students checklist. Here's exactly what you should be doing. Senior year, the tests you need to be taking and when, when you need to, you know, start thinking about, you, know, applying and then when you'll get your decisions. Kind of clearly mapping it out to them in more of that calendar format to again make sure they have it missed a step.

There is also another question that just kind of came in to Allie and John. If you want to we have a couple minutes here. Dylan was asking do you advise building post event communication on event templates or within deliver? There seemed to be pros and cons to either.

That's absolutely true. Yeah, I would say it. It really kind of depends on the specific use case. We've done both kind of depending on you know on what it is that and what it is that you're looking to do and the timing you know of it all so you know more often times than not, kind of easier to do, certainly within the within the event communications just to keep everything kind of concentrated within that template. But we understand that there's absolutely, you know, instances that you know it will have to be and deliver, and I think you know I'm trying to.

An example for us. This is kind of outside of events, but within our portal pages that that that we build for our partners we have yielding 10 forms so the students fill those out and we immediately notified the counselor, like hey John Ali is just said she's coming, you know, to XYZ Institution. Please follow up that personal Touch point is key to the student. Though we want to delay the communication because we want to allow John to to follow up but also through ping.

Activity and other, you know, just other activity. We can see that they if they said yes 50 to 65% of the time they're depositing in the same visit. So that's an example of we didn't want that message to be informed communications. We wanted it to be a deliver message so we could delay it and extra day so the recipient list was the base. Was that form, of course, and then we intentionally delayed it to give the student time to take the action that they maybe like. Later, we're going to take and then over time, if if they haven't, we certainly want to follow up.

Go to make sure they deposit.

Perfect again, I'm kind of looking back through some earlier chats that might not have been covered quite yet. Uhm, Magda did ask. How does a portal page work for the site SEO?

Little page work for the site CEO. I don't know specifically, you know in terms of in terms of the the portal itself. It's obviously built kind of been managed with with within Slate, but you know, just ensuring that it's properly kind of linked to all within your site map, ensuring that all the links you know as you saw kind of cross Juniata are going to that specific visit page. We haven't had any. We haven't had any trouble or anything that's come up, you know, just in terms of any redirects or vanity URLs that are redirecting, you know to our portal.

That's some questions on kind of data. Do you have any data? This is from Dillon. Do you have any data on how cutting down the number of questions converts more registrations?

Yeah.

It's a great question. I mean not specifically, we could certainly follow up. I would say overtime. You know we have tested into this, you know, and we've and you know. And we've done a lot of experimenting. I mean with that two step RFI that I had mentioned, our top level RFI is collecting first name, last name, email, mobile entry term and that's it. So what does this mean? It breaks one of the rules I talked about that we're not able to do staff assignment roles, but that's that's OK because we're following up with them immediately.

You know afterwards saying thank you for your interest. Please let us know this additional information collecting that school that you know address information so we can support the rules to follow. It's. I think it's always. It's a balancing act because you want to get the student. In your instance, you want to be able to communicate them, but you want to have workable and usable data to support. You know, like I said, all of the efforts to come, so I think it's just something that you're going to have to that you're going to have to test into. Certainly utilize Bing and Google Analytics and have.

You know different conversion goals to see how those you know overtime convert, but less is always better, and I think that's true not just a higher Ed, but you know certainly have any industry.

And we'll probably end with this one. This one came in from Sarah. What are your thoughts on including questions that are not required?

I think I mean I, you know, like I mentioned before, definitely always include the asterisk, so a student can know what is required, but I think it's OK because you know, again, you kind of wanna collect just enough. But also think about the different motivations of users like when when you think about conversion, there's so much that goes into it in terms of the landing page design the form itself. But I would say arguably the most important variable that it's could Trump all of that is the motivation of the user.

If they're super motivated, if they are very excited to learn more about your brand, your institution, and to visit, they're going to, you know, kind of complete all of that information. So it's really finding the sweet spot that collecting information from those students and getting you know a lot from the get go and then for those students that maybe aren't as motivated or distracted doing it. Maybe in between classes. Or you know, in between, like a soccer practice, you offer a quick and easy way to register for them too.

Wonderful, well, I know this is just about the end of our time for today. Allie and John. Thank you so much for everyone else here. You can see that their emails are listed. I know there are plenty of questions that did come in the chat, so feel free to reach out to them as well. As a reminder, this is recorded so that it will be available to Festival pass holders within a week. And with that said we hope to see you.

At another slate stage event. So thank you everyone.

Thank you.

Thank you all. Have a great day.