Dive Deeper with Net Natives: Using Your CRM Data to Make the RIGHT Decisions

Background noise from someone.

It's probably from.

Yeah, it's really loud.

Hello everybody.

I hope you all can hear me. Welcome to our 2:00 PM edition.

Of Slate stage on this Thursday. I'm Steve Daley. I'm a senior program manager here at technicians. I'm here with our wonderful presenters Marie and Jennifer from Net Natives. We do have a couple of things we want to talk about, but we're very happy to have you here.

Some housekeeping rules, we're glad you're, we're glad you're in attendance. But we do want to let you know that if you or your cohorts cannot make this, this will be recorded and will be available for viewing more than likely tomorrow as we released videos as we go along. For each instance of slate stage, you can enable closed captioning. I'm just reading from this slide, but you can enable that closed captioning on the upper right hand side with the CC button and you can enable full screen if you would like.

You do need to resync video. You can refresh your browser. That seems to be the most effective way to resync sessions. If it happens to come to that and we try to have people post their questions in the chat, we will go back and we will ask those questions at the end of the chat of this presentation. So if you do ask a question in the chat, don't don't mind us waiting until the very end to know when it gets answered. So without further ado, I will let Murray and Jennifer pick up the microphone and share with you their information.

Thank you guys.

Amazing. Thank you, Steve. So first, we just want to thank Slate and the Slate community for allowing us the opportunity to present to everyone today. We're going to kick this off with just a really quick intro so that you know who we are. And then I'm also just going to give you a quick quick introduction to Nut Natives so that you get a flavor for who we are in general and kind of what we do.

With that, I'm just going to let my colleague Murray introduce himself.

Great. I hope everyone can hear me. My name is Murray Simpson. I'm the Chief Growth Officer for Net Natives. Don't let the British accent fool you. I'm based out in New York City and have been working with our US partners over the last four or five years. So I'm excited to present some of our visuals and dashboards that we've been using from data in slates to help with your marketing efforts.

And unfortunately, I don't have a fantastic British accent like Murray, but my name is Jennifer Loncar. I'm the Vice President of Strategy and Partnerships at Natives. I've been in enrollment marketing for about 14 years now. And I'm excited to really talk to everybody about some of the challenges that we're facing today and how we can help and how you can better use Slate to leverage some of your data. So let's jump into that.

So the keyword is data, data, data, data. If there's one thing that is not missing from Slate is data. I think we can all agree on that. Slate really captures that endless amount of details about your perspective students. But I think the question really is for everybody is, do you really know how to leverage that wealth of information to really inform your marketing campaigns and to help Dr. Admissions. So could you possibly be wasting important?

Dollars on marketing and advertising that is not boosting awareness and driving those conversions. So today, Murray and I are actually going to share with you how we've worked with current and prospective clients to help them marry their CRM data with their marketing data to make the most informative decisions on really where to spend their marketing dollars. So when we talk today, you're going to learn which best practice data points together, where you might be missing potential market opportunities and how to really use your slate.

Data to inform all parts of your funnel. So we're going to start talking with the initial engagement at all the way at the top of the funnel and we'll work all the way down to the cost per enrollment and even more. So we'll help to show you how to capitalize on that data that lives in your CRM and how to use it to transform your enrollment marketing strategy.

So let me introduce you first to net natives, so that you know who we are and some of you may already be familiar with us, but I'm sure that many of you have not even heard of us before, but that's OK. So I'm going to fill you in. We're a student marketing students specialist marketing agency. Sorry. We we actually use data and research as a basis for everything that we do including all of our marketing campaigns and this is to help our clients ultimately Dr. enrollment.

And really put those butts and seats, which is what we all need. We've been in the higher education space for over 15 years and we really only work with higher education institutions. And this is important because this means that we understand you and we understand the problems that keep you up at night. We work with about 30 different higher Ed institutions here in the US currently running domestic campaigns and we've run campaigns for clients in over 50 different countries.

To also help in attract an international audience, we have an office in New York, We have an office in the UK and in about 3 years, we've actually gone from 7 staff members here in the US to 27 members based here and about 100 different members globally backed on on top of that 27. So we have been growing. I'm kind of taking the world by storm over here, so hopefully we can use some of this data to really help you with some of the challenges that you're facing.

If it will let me.

Get to the next slide.

Oops.

Here we go. Hold on. There we go. OK.

So.

Why are we here? Not that my slide changed. Murray is it. It's the right slide. What's the challenge, right?

That's the slide I can see, yes.

Yeah.

OK. That's that's what I want. It just had there was a lag time there. So I think the question is why are we here, right? What is the challenge that's facing us? And maybe some of you are just here killing time eating lunch, maybe some of you joined just to get out of another meeting today. But hopefully most of you joined because you want to learn how to better utilize that data that you have in slate and maybe you struggle with understanding how to make better marketing decisions or maybe you're not even involved in those marketing.

Decisions and would love to be able to provide your marketing team with additional enrollment data to help them. So I think a lot of us struggle with how to break down the silos that and the communication that lives between enrollment and marketing and we want to figure out a better and easier way to do this. So I want to talk through that a little bit and then specifically how you can use that slate data to better inform across your teams.

This next slide is my favorite. And if you've been in any of my presentations in the last year or so, you've probably seen this slide because I love it. I've actually never had so many head nods and laughs when I used the slide in a presentation to talk about the relationship between enrollment and marketing because it doesn't exist. In a perfect world, meetings between enrollment and marketing would look exactly like this. And I know I probably have some Anchorman fans out there and you're laughing because you can totally relate to this meme.

Unfortunately, this is more of the reality slide. Our reality looks like this. And if it's hard for you to see what the little bubbles say, one of them says, So hey, we're all on the same page, right? And one person says yes and the other person says what page. I think that that's pretty accurate in terms of when we pull our marketing enrollment teams together. In my 14 years of higher Ed and over that time, I've had tons and tons of meetings with clients I can probably count.

On two hands, the number of schools that I've met with who have amazing and strong consistent communication and true shared visibility between their marketing and enrollment teams.

Oftentimes, it looks more like this UM marketing holds the majority of the budget and controls the different campaigns that are running. They're focused on leads, right? But strictly the numbers coming in, they really focus on the brand and driving that awareness and events. They typically don't have access to Slate and the enrollment results or the data enrollment. On the other hand, we all know what our focus is there. We're putting butts and seats. That's the goal.

Enrollment knows about the leads, but really more so about how those leads are converting into students. Everything they do is handled through the CRM, So what about this Gray area in between this no man's land?

A lot of times marketing, when marketing is handling the campaigns. When I've talked to them in the past, marketing is handling the campaigns and they say well, we don't have access to slate and we don't know what happens to the leads when they come in. That's up to admissions. Enrollment says to me the leads come in and they just go into slate. We don't really know what marketing is doing to bring them in or what they're doing to target. But they are converting or maybe they're not converting. We contribute some of our budget too, but we really don't know where it's going and.

The marketing results that we're getting from it, So there's definitely a disconnect there.

We've got a little bit of a lag here.

Hold on.

There we go. I don't know why it doesn't. I have to go back and look for it anyway. OK, so.

I was talking about no man's land and tools. So communication is not only an opportunity for money, and I like to say opportunity instead of problem, because an opportunity really means that there's a way that we can fix it in a way that we can make things better. But really making sure that you have the right tools to slice and dice and spend and track all of that enrollment data and advertising is also really, really important. I actually took this slide and kind of tweaked it from I was at another conference.

I attended a session where the person presented, she shared all of the tools that they're using to track their digital campaigns, all their marketing campaigns actually, and create custom data dashboards, do e-mail marketing, poll, research data on new courses and demographics, track Google Analytics performance, and obviously a lot more. Honestly, when I looked at this slide, it's exhausting and I'm sure that many of you can relate to this and the budget dollars that you're actually devoting to having to have.

All of these platforms in order to track things.

So then to add insult to injury, we also have these everyday challenges that are constantly weighing on us. So we recently did a higher Ed marketing survey and we asked people to tell us some of their greatest day-to-day challenges. So I want you to take a look at these and think about this and how many of you can actually relate to these different challenges. The first one, increase enrollment rates, but no budget increase of course, that's huge. Number two, we already talked about the lack of visibility into how enrollment and marketing data.

Performed together.

3rd increased need to generate more leads and or brand awareness, but budgets aren't increasing so that makes it really, really hard. The 4th one was poor conversion rates and the funnel, so the leads are coming in but they're not converting. Why is that? Five was the lack of technology integrations and then six was the high cost per enrollment. So those were the top six challenges that we heard from higher Ed marketing and enrollment people and that they're faced with on a day-to-day basis.

And then with all the technology out there, there's still isn't a great way for us to find out what it's actually costing you to bring in your classes. So I definitely don't want to leave out all of the worksheets where we're manually combining all of this data to track cost per enrollment and to get to the true ROI on your marketing efforts. So the problem with this is that it leaves out some really crucial elements. So first, it's all manual.

And with many of you already short staffed, this is obviously something then that gets pushed to the side. But not to mention that any time that you have manual data manipulation, there's always room for error. So that doesn't work. Second, you're really not able to split out your paid leads versus your organic leads, which really isn't going to give you a clear picture of your ROI. And finally, when you're doing things manually, there's no way to segment by channel to actually see where you're getting the best.

ROI So it's really easy, I think when you're looking at enrollment and marketing data to give credit to that final touch point when a student requests information. But I assure you that there were many, many, many touch points that came into play before that last click. And if you could slice and dice that enrollment data that lives in Slate and marry that data with your marketing reports, you would be able to not only tell a story, but really start to create your own.

The.

Narrative and really make those true data-driven decisions when it comes to your enrollment marketing. So with that being said, this is the part where I let Murray talk to you and his amazing access and you sit there and just go over everything that he says. With that I'm going to turn it over to you, right?

Thank you. First of all, I do want to say apologies for the lag in the slide transitions. I'm, I, I think I'm, I'm trying to move them along and for some reason they are not moving at all. So some of that may have made sense, some of it may not have made sense. We will, we will, we will make the slides available. I'm hoping it will work for the rest of the presentation.

And I think it well as if that's just gone over to the next slide, I think this is going to work from here on out. So I would say that what John's spoken about really bringing marketing and admissions together. This is what we've developed our platform Akiro for and we've got 24 developers over the last 12 years developing this with the two way integration into slate and it's been built for the education sector. So we can do exactly that, really bring marketing and admissions together. The system itself is really built.

Post all of the media, all of the spend, all of the activity that's out in your market, as well as you know tracking parameters for your organic activity. You know, backlinks, wherever you URL as whatever it may be.

What the system does is actually captures that data, integrates it into Slate and then pulls that data back from Slate into a hero so we can actually assess how our media organic and attribution efforts are working across the board. So I'm really excited to show you how this works and how it moves throughout the entire journey from that first click through to enrollment.

Murray.

I'm hoping you can see the slides. I hope they're moving through correctly. So in Akira, we've actually developed a yeah.

Which? Sorry, I don't think they're moving. Which one do you want it on?

And the performance platform slide?

OK.

That's the one I think it is.

There we go.

Yeah, everyone can see.

Yeah, just I think it's working for me. So just tell me when you want me to click it, I'll click it.

OK, everyone, everyone's now saying that they can see it. So I'm gonna keep going. Thank you everyone. I'm OK, great. So, so many marketers and those in admissions would like to see all of their performance in one place and that's really what we've been building with both the two way integration and Akiro. So it produces a performance portal that allows you to look at all of the different facets of your activity. So if you want to see how your landing pages are performing, what point of the form.

Students drop off out and what your cost of acquisition is, where your choke points are in your funnel, even how attribution is going for brand awareness and all of that is built into the system. And I'll go back to again our our slate partnership and that two way integration is set up pretty seamlessly with a variety of our partners. Now it all starts with a brief and I hope it's on the brief slide now. So if someone can say it's working that means it's working on my end, it's just not working on gens end. Yes it is.

Lacking, OK.

I just I just changed it for you.

Ohh, I changed it too. OK, well this is we're we're we're double teaming the changes. There we go.

Say it all starts with submitting briefs and and when I think we always say this with our various partners, but all good things start with a brief. So in Akira you actually put in the campaign brief. So it might be that you want to promote an executive MBA program or you want to do a brand awareness campaign for an undergraduate audience that goes into the system and then the system actually produces media plans. So these are looked at by media advisors.

Media strategists who put together plans and recommendations with benchmarks against sector averages. And now I would say the big differentiation point here and why this is so important is against every single tactic. It will integrate into Slate and show you those that have applied and those that have enrolled and it gives us that extra additional insight into how things are really performing.

Within the system, it also has all of the assets with previews, which really enables our partners to have more quality assurance over the the media campaigns that they're actually putting out there. And and really just ensures that there's nothing in market that might be out of date. You know, there's nothing more embarrassing than having an advert live that says start in 2022 when it's 2023. And so having that ability in the platform is pretty unique.

I'll just show you kind of like the first part of the the puzzle. And what I really want to talk about was the advanced optimizations and the views that we've been building from Slate that we really wanted to show you to give you some food for thought and ideas of ways in which you can better utilize the data to tell a story. OK. So we put out on Twitter question about how do you measure ROI.

And so many individuals, um, on Twitter basically saying it's really complicated and it's not a linear process. Um, you first have to define what the return on investment means for your institution and whether spending money in market is even worth it. You know, for an online program, it might have much higher profit margins than an on campus program with low tuition and high scholarships. So.

Making decisions on how much money to invest is a really key component of any strategy when it comes to universities and really, genuinely asking these questions, how far through the funnel can you quickly and easily track? So the pieces I showed you earlier were more the kind of CPM, CPC, cost per click, cost per lead metrics, but how do we know our cost per application, our cost per admissions?

And our cost per enrollment and so those metrics I think are really helpful when your finance director is saying to you.

Here's your budget for 2024. And by the way, your enrollment targets have gone up by 50, but we're not going to give you any additional spend. That's an issue. So I'm going to start by talking through the process we go through when we do get this set up with our partners. So what we do at the beginning is we work with our partners to really help clean up their data and.

Sorry, minor, minor change there. Yes. So the first thing we do is we clean the data. We make sure that the data is valid and robust and then integrate the data from Slate into our systems so that we can accurately see all the way through the funnel. We also really want to make sure that the right data is being captured. This is a really important point. I've seen so many different institutions in Slate, sometimes capturing demographic information.

You know, like age, ethnicity, location, zip code, That stuff's great. But many of them are missing things like cancellation reasons. You know, why did our applications cancel and from which regions did we lose students at the inquiry stage. And that kind of consultative approach that we give with our partners allows us to ensure that the right data is being captured throughout. And then #4 is the visualization actually visualizing this information all in one.

Nice. So you can really delve into everything at a program level. So I'll start by really showing once we've done all that. So picture this in your institution, your data is cleaned, integrated, it's in the system. What does it look like? So in a Cairo, you've actually developed funnel reporting and we've built custom education filters so that you can very easily go in, click on a program a term and a year which is typically.

Our institutions want to look at how performance is going. So let's say I've got a a MBA program that's got a spring start term in 2024. And putting those filters into here will then generate a series of reports for you automatically that you can then discuss with program directors and internal stakeholders and your advertising vendors, whoever it may be to be able to show them really.

How things are going and give the reasons why things are performing in a certain way.

So there's two views that really come up when you click on that. And and we love talking about funnels. And I could probably talk about a funnel like all day every day, but there's two different types of funnels. One is a cumulative funnel and the other one is a current funnel. Now I go back to that example again of the MBA Spring 2020 for example, just by putting those segments in, what our views do is actually calculate how many students have passed through.

These stages and what were our conversion rates from the top of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel and our conversion rates between each of those stages. Now what's really interesting with these views is the year on year comparisons that this draws up. So you can see these funnels side by side for 2021-2022, 2023 and you can go, oh, the issue is our conversion rates are great but our lead volumes really gone down. So we need to act on this now.

Or the challenge might be wait, we've got a really good lead volume but the contact rates down and or it could be further down funnel. Actually our issue is between accepted and deposited and everyone has different definitions at their own institutions right. You were all going to have a different definition of what contacted leaders and potentially even what a cancelled inquiry is. But we really work with you at the beginning to actually define what those stages are so that it's.

Super clear throughout the journey what it is that we're tracking.

And then you also have your current funnel. So what's the cumulative funnel will show you how many people have moved through the current funnel, will show you who's currently at that stage. And that really allows you to do that internal pipeline forecast reporting in a real visual way to your Deans and academics. And you know we all know the the types of stakeholders that we're trying to engage here. Sometimes sending a spreadsheet of raw data can get quite confusing and.

Quite often it can be misread and misinterpreted, and that can cause more headaches internally than not.

So now that I've finished talking about funnels, when again, when you click on your program and you click on the term and the start date and the views that we've built will then also show you how the channels have performed for that specific program. So let's say we're doing Google campaigns, Facebook SEO and Snapchat, you might be doing some content marketing in the New York Times as an example. We can actually track all of that through the UTM.

Parameters and then see how are those channels converting through the pipeline. You know is Google a 10% conversion rate 3 to enrollment and Facebook only 1% conversion through to enrollment. Having that understanding of the channels means we can really keep them accountable, you know we.

Actually have Google speaking at our event in New York July 26th and and they're going to be talking about changes to cookies and the cookie list world and the platforms are going to be losing some of their tracking capabilities. So it's really important to be capturing first party data and leveraging that data now and this is part of that puzzle of actually ensuring that source has always captured.

And then understanding the why. So if we want to have a look at our cancelled inquiries by source and our dashboard views will also show you that it might be that they're invalid leads, it might be the relocation was a challenge. I'll quickly go back to these segments at the beginning again and you can filter it by region. So if we want to see if there's a particular state, let's say a Pennsylvania has a relocation issue or Texas has a relocation.

Issue for an institution in New Jersey, Well, if we learn that right from the beginning and we see that coming up from admissions, everyone's got visibility on it. And we can then take action top of the funnel to talk about relocation packages or to target the zip codes in the region that are more likely to move and take that big decision to change to out of state. So again ensuring that the data is in there in the first place.

Is the first part of what we do and then visualizing the output is the 2nd.

I hope you can see this OK, but this just goes into even further information that I believe is really important within these views. You can then see for that particular program what previous institutions they studied at, which I think is really important for feeder colleges and feeder schools. You know, so many programs, you know, have undergraduate degrees that typically feed into graduate programs, but in so many institutions you don't see that matriculation.

Coming through and it's so important for universities to have a focus on, OK, where are the feeder schools that we generate students from and how can we maximize that. And many, many, many times, many institutions I work with have hundreds of schools and there's no trends in certain schools that come to them despite having a lot of on the ground efforts. So I think that's really important and I also think ethnicity and age are a really important thing to be able to.

Lookout for each program and in the views. Again if we're looking at a particular program and we're seeing there are certain ethnicities who are cancelling and there are certain ages that are cancelling, we can look at the reasons why and say OK actually this is an issue and we've recently done some research projects into ethnicity and diversity on campus and it's becoming one of the most important things for students. So if we are seeing that in your own data and we're seeing students from diverse.

Backgrounds drop out. That's not only a marketing challenge, but an institution challenge. And again, you've got all this data in Slate hopefully, but it's about visualizing it right and telling a story from it, and that's what we've been working on.

Um, OK. Ohh, skip slide. OK. If you can also see the duration slide now I think you can. And the this for me is the most exciting part and this is where we want to ensure things are set up correctly. In your slate instance is understanding how long it takes students to inquire. Actually sorry not to inquire because they inquire straight away how long it takes them to apply and how long it takes them to deposit.

And then how long it takes them to enroll. Now this is really important because so many institutions are like, do we have enough leads for our 2024 intake? And if you know how long it takes students at each stage by channel and by source, it gives you the ability to do far more effectively modeling work. And that means that really you should be able to use this data to define your own lead volume targets.

Uh, looking at the conversion rates through to application, how many applications do we need to get within this? I think we found that social platforms like Facebook, as a good example, might take about two years to actually apply from their initial inquiry and I think from Google search we've been finding like 30 to 60 days they're going to apply within that window. So if you're trying to push an intake that's coming up in the next week or not in the next week, so in the next two months.

You're probably gonna want to be more active on the channels that convert faster than those other ones, but those other ones lead need long term lead nurture strategies. And again, that's where these views really come in handy, is understanding those durations to apply.

And then the final view that I have here is understanding the cost of acquisition. So in these dashboards, once all the data is integrated, all of the media spend information is also present by UTM parameter, which I believe stands for I'm going to get it wrong Urchin tracking module, I'm going to say in in my British accent, which makes it sound like it's correct. And that essentially means that from a direct response perspective, you know someone who's clicked on the ad and then inquired.

We can integrate this spend data all the way through to apps, all the way through to enrollments and make some really strategic decisions on where we're investing our spends and where we're where we're actually going to be focusing our efforts. And you know I'm from, you know the UK where it's a much smaller country and from moving over here about five years ago. It's a big market, the US and there's a lot of advertising dollars that are spent in this country and in my opinion are wasted in certain.

Regions and zip codes where you're just not going to get a return and your vendors and your partners need to be able to assess that with you in real time and do a lot of that heavy lifting for you. And that's exactly why we've been building this so that when we do partner with institutions, we can really make a lot of their advertising and marketing more accountable and make better decisions. So I think without further adue.

I think we did have a couple of questions in the chat group, but I have kept it closed so that I didn't get distracted. So Jen, I don't know if there's any that you wanted to.

Yeah.

Pick up on, Give responded to most of it.

Yeah, I've been responding to them. So I think everyone can see those. But the last one was everybody was very impressed with your knowledge of UTM and what that stood for.

One question and I I think this will be a question for Slate. I think moving forward is if we can provide that duration data for them, if they can pull that back into Slate then and provide that on the home page for users like the VP or the Director to be able to see what that duration is. I think that's a really great question. So I did make note of that we can talk to Slate about that obviously. And then there was a question about breaking it down the those cancels breaking it down by county or school and as long as that data is lives in Slate.

They can slice and dice it any way that that you want to get the data that you need.

Absolutely, yeah. So much of it is done through those master filters. So you can really slice it any way in which you want. We build the platform so that you can very easily log in, download a PDF, send it to your Dean. But there's slicing and dicing, I think is where I feel like with data, every question that you answer unlocks another question. And that's kind of how we've built them is, oh, I've got another question now let me slice it in this way to work.

Why? And it's almost like it's a constant. Why? Why? Why? Until you get to the answer. So that's a great question. And yes, you can. So yes, we have been partnering with institutions to help in a way, audit some of the way in which they've got slate set up and to ensure they're capturing a lot of this data in the first instance and then actually integrating that into a quiero so that you've got the visuals to use internally at your institutions.

So if that is something that you would be interested in talking to us about, I know it's just my face on here, but there is also the lovely Jennifer Loncar who is also out here with me in America. You can speak to either of us and we'd be happy to jump on a call and talk about your specific institution. But yes, if there's no further questions, I'll hand it back to Steve who I think is going to close us out.

Hi guys and I'm back.

I just wanted to give a virtual round of applause to Jennifer and Murray. I appreciate all of your efforts and putting this together. And for those who had a little bit of lag on the, on the, on the screenshots and the slides, I apologize. I hope that you were able to see everything but again we will be this has been recorded, we will put this up online for you to access tomorrow. I also want to remind you that there is a three o'clock meeting as well the operating a one stop shop at 3:00 o'clock it's coming right up if you want to jump into that. But thank you guys, I appreciate it and I wish.

Everybody, a wonderful afternoon. Thank you everybody.

Thanks everyone.