Personalization, Segmentation and Automation: Remembering Why You Chose Slate

Well hello everyone, we want to welcome you and thank you for joining us today for our session on personalization, segmentation automation and remembering why you chose Slate. We have two awesome presenters from way better marketing.

We have rich whipkey with us, who's the President, and Lindsey Ferraro, who is the Chief Operating Officer. And before I turn it over to them, will go through just a few housekeeping items first. This webinar is being recorded and it will be made available for viewing to festival passholders and home slate. Also, there is a closed captioning option and available for you if you click on the CC button in the top right. Your full screen sharing or viewing can be enabled by clicking the expand button. Also in the top right corner should you need a resync.

Any of the audio or video just hit refresh on your browser and any questions that you may have, please put them in the chat and we have a team that's willing and ready to help you. Lindsey rich. Alternate over to you guys now.

Thank you so much, Amanda, and thank you everybody for your time. We're always amazed by how many of you join and it's it's truly a pleasure to have you today. As she mentioned, I'm Lindsey Ferrara Way Better's Chief operating officer. And I've been with rich and the team for five years now. Prior to way better, I worked at a few different digital marketing agencies, one that was focused on the hospitality industry. Working with National Best Hotel brands, one that was focused on the restaurant industry working with national restaurant chains have always worked to bring. Kind of the strategies and wisdom.

From those outside industries here to hire Ed and in Slate and through way better campaigns pertinent to this group, as I'd like to share, I had two organizations that had their own proprietary marketing automation and CRM tool, so I was used to building up strategy around a tool at those organizations and have been very happy to do it here at way better with our slate clients. I'm joined today by the wonderful rich whipkey. I'll let him share his story.

Ah, the wonderful which we got. They always try to throw me for a loop on these things. I think that's what that was all about.

Thanks, Lindsey, and thank you all for coming here today. I'm rich whipkey I started way better back in 2008. Now right before the Great Recession, which probably wasn't the best timing in the world. But we made it in my journey is to this point. It's kind of a long one when it comes to marketing automation and things of that nature. Got my start really in during the desktop publishing revolution. Kind of by accident and then in the digital printing where we were using a lot of data.

To drive basically different people seeing different things that were relevant to them through digital print ended up purchasing our first marketing automation platform in 2005. It was this cloud based platform. I honestly didn't even know what the cloud was then. I'm not sure most people did, but it was a lot cheaper than the server they wanted to put in our offices. So that was really my foray into marketing automation and.

Using data to drive interactions across multiple channels, uh, it just so happened in 08 we did it all through this entity called way better. So again, thank you for coming.

So on this journey with us today, and we're going to try to do a great job for you and today, like like we said, you know, remembering why you choose Slate, right? So we're gonna try to accomplish 2 things in this little plan. What you've accomplished so far. Let's we'll spend a little time talking about what you've actually accomplished to get to this point, right? And then more of a focus on what can you do? What more can you do? And trying to give you a bunch of ideas to kind of take it to the next step, right? It's a hard journey.

To kind of accomplish a lot of things to get started, and then it's hard to keep going down that path, right? So we think there's two big reasons most folks buy a tool like Slate and the first is kind of a streamline operations process improvement path. Those are extremely important. Anybody that's heard myself or anybody from way better's talk, we always talk about process, great process.

Drives great marketing, uh, and it also drives everything in a business, right? Business OPS in process are crucial to success, and then the second thing is more, what we're gonna talk to today, hopefully about Slade. Or hopefully you'll want to go down this journey to continue to better engage students. Better engage outside constituents, better engage alumni, maybe better engage existing students, right? Using this as a marketing automation platform to talk to many different groups in many different ways.

And so that's what we're looking to accomplish today and get rolling.

So we believe, and we talked to many folks that had grand visions in both those categories, streamlining operations and better engaging students. And then the brick of tados related to slate implementation hits their desk and they quickly lose sight of that better engaging students. Because there's just so much to do to frankly, just get this instance up and running and useful to your campus. So first you attend Launchpad, and that's merely the beginning. You have so much more work to do, you have to create that underlying.

Data foundation or that data structure that drives literally everything else, and that's that second line there that's creating the fields and the prompts. And you all know this well and it just cannot be overstated how much of an effort that is 1. Mine truly doesn't do it justice.

After you have that solid data structure and foundation, that will work well with your SIS and other platforms, you create the RFI and all the communications off the RFI. You then configure your staff assignment rules and you create your application and all the associated processes related to the application, whether that be the reader workflow, the decision release, etcetera. You create a status page or a portal page. You create your events, you and templates and you create your email templates and so much more, but that's just the initial implementation.

And frankly, you can be exhausted by that. We have a colleague that we've worked with who spent four months, 12 hours a day locked in a conference room with his colleagues doing a slate implementation and nothing but that. And that's a speedy implementation when you're doing it in house for months. It just shows you how much effort and passion and thought process has to go into something like this. So it truly is an accomplishment. And kudos to all of you.

Yeah, it's huge. It's no small small feat. Congrats right? And that list some of those things on that list are some of the best reasons why you have this platform, why you bought Slate right? But we're really going to look forward to the other things you can do. I mean, one of those things on the list. I think we talked a little bit about is maybe not, but building the app building the application I'm going to tell you Kate here has been here almost 11 years. She and I would have given anything to have that 8.

910 years ago and we were had to build some custom app for some schools that couldn't use common out that app and they needed an application right? And we had to go and build our own application and all the triggers and rules and everything from it. We had to give an anything to have this slate platform at that time and to have that application. So you've done a great job and you've gotten a long way right. But now it's time to kind of go forward.

Lean into that other side, so here's a preview of way Betters audit. We do audits for institutions. It's a very common engagement for us. We use our own exclusive scoring rubric. It has at least 500 points of criteria that we we score, and we give these institutions and lengthy presentation about what they're using and what they're not using to its fullest and what they should be doing as next steps. Quick wins, long term, etcetera.

And a very common story is displayed here on the slide. The features that they're using to their fullest tend to be the ones that benefit the institution and your internal processes, whereas the features that they're not using to the fullest tend to be the ones that would actually better engage students. That second bubble the thing that would help with student outreach, and would help with that user experience. So again, in our audit, these tiles go both ways, and they're they're manipulated based on what we find at that individual school, but a very typical story.

This institution process related ones fully leveraged ones that deal with outreach personalization, student facing things not fully leveraged.

And that makes sense because those constituents are around you every day. They're the ones peeking their head in your office saying, hey, are you done with this yet and you help me with this, so it's just more natural. And there are also things that you need to do building blocks that you need to do to take it to its fullest extent. So it's just very natural to kind of go through that progression.

We have a little stat up here that I think is interesting and this this doesn't. Is this not slate specific right? This is CRM specific in the B2B world, right? Fortune 500 companies Fortune 5000 companies, small businesses, medium businesses, big businesses, right. They all have some sort of marketing automation or CRM, right? And the stat there is only 28% of those organizations are satisfied after initial CRM implementation and I would question the 28.

Percent that say they are. I think those people maybe have an imagined it enough. Or imagine what this can do for them fully if they're content at this point. So you're not alone. If you haven't finished this journey or the journey, never really is finished, but if you haven't moved far along right, I will tell you one of the big differences I see coming from the B to B world that I see when it comes to software or platform implementation in that world, they know immediately that if they spend.

X amount of dollars on a new software platform. They're going to spend three to five times that cost implementing right right off the bat. That's what they expect. That's what they know, and that's what they're planning on, right? The other thing they also have is yearly budgets for improvements. They're constantly going to be pouring more money into that platform to continue to drive ROI out of the back end, right? It's like any relationship you have. The more you invest in it.

The more it will return for you right, the more you put into it, the more you'll get out of it. So if nothing else today you get out of this, right? Maybe some stats that you can go to your constituents with and say, hey we need more budget. We need more help. This is a journey we need to go on and it's never ending all right. So let's get into the nuts and bolts here. We promised you some easy wins, some quick ideas on why you bought Slate.

They.

Go ahead.

So was it? Ohh sorry so yeah. Slate is an extraordinary tool, right? But it's not a strategy you could give me Lindsey and I like all the tools it takes to build a house. I can guarantee you none of you would want to live in that house. Be associated with that house like walk near that house. You would get injured, right? So you can have a great tool, but without the right people without the right strategy.

It's it's not really gonna be effective, right? So let's take this extraordinary tool and this is where you come in on how we drive it to make it work and do the things you want it to do and accomplish for your university.

Yeah, you're a slate practitioner. We feel for you because we've had a lot of them convert from the institution side to coming here on the way. Better team. We obviously talk to them daily through our slate services and we know you get very bogged down with query management, application management, event management, integration with the SSIS, you name it. It's all that kind of you know. Nuts and bolts things as Rich said, or you know really operational things that keep you busy, but we want you to lay lean yourself into that better engaging students.

And that side of the strategy. And keep in mind that a good implementation is never over, so here's a whole bunch of ideas coming at you hot and fast for the remainder of this presentation. They're all going to be in the vein of personalization, segmentation, and automation, just as our title suggests. But kicking it off with a bit of an unusual one just because we see it so underutilized when we do our audits.

Yeah, Voyager, right? Uh, this one sticks out from some of the other ones that we're going to show you. But Voyager is a great tool inside of Slade, it's ready for you. It's set up. It's just waiting for you to use it. We use we deal with a lot of schools throughout the entire enrollment cycle. With Slate without Slate and one of the first things we do in those larger engagements is use a tool called batch Geo and batch. Geo really works just like Voyager. And what we do with batch Geo is map out.

Prospects inquiries uh.

Incomplete apps, apps deposits right. We put it in a visual form. Where are these people coming from? Who are these people right? We do it over multiple years, right? A lot of it's applicant data right? And what that allows us to do is really put a visual to datasets so and says hey we need more students in California. It's nice to have a visual to see that hey, we've only gotten 10 in the last five years from that area, right? So we think Voyager is a great tool for you to use to help your organization.

Right, I can tell you a real world scenario where we used it where we use bastio, which is basically just exactly like Voyager where school.

They were using predictive modeling, right right from the time they bought a list from the College Board to say who we should reach out to and they were taking that list and they were taking a percentage of it and they had modeled it and said, well, these kids are never gonna come here. So we don't want you to talk to them at all. All right. And sometimes that happens right? The enrollment and everything that we do is part science, part art, and sometimes the science takes over too much. And sometimes the art takes over too much.

In this case, the science was taking it a little too far. We actually used a tool like this to have them look at two students. These two students actually lived across the street from each other, right one student. They said zero likelihood they would ever come. The other student. They had a high predictive probability of attendance, so we could talk to or blue in the face. But when you see it like that and seeing those visualizations really helps the conversation that you're having with folks.

Yeah, and visuals have helped in similar ways as we do it in our organization because you can pull a query to see who's coming from New York and plan your travel that way. But what you'd be missing without a visual are the students that are right across the border in Pennsylvania. So as soon as you put in the map, you actually open yourself up to more students for travel planning, long term planning, et cetera. But it's kind of that visual that will show the proximity and the closeness there that you can't necessarily get from a query or a raw data file, so.

It's right there in Nate within the tool for you. That data is already there, it's just simply pulled in. When we use batch Geo, we have to manipulate the data and make it work for batch Geo. That's not the case with Voyager. It's right there ready for you. So definitely recommend you loop utilize it for both short term planning and long term enrollment strategy planning.

Moving on to the next tip and again, these are in no particular order. The tip and suggestion here is a progressive RFI, or a two step RFI. The idea here is that you're going to start with a basic form on the program page, requiring very little from the student in order to increase form conversion.

This is not to take the place of your big normal RFI, it's just to be an addition to that, to try and increase the number of students that will fill it out. We do recognize that when you ask for less information, you might have to make some concessions. For example, you might have to do a default staff assignment, but the increase in form conversions, as we've seen from our own experimenting is well worth it. The reason it's progressive or it's two step is that you're going to circle back after that initial form completion, and you're going to ask For more information.

Making it easy for them by using the email form link code to prepopulate what you already know about them. So that's essentially using Prospect ID through email or text message to prepopulate what they've already told you about themselves lowering the barrier of entry for them to tell you more about themselves again, increased form conversion, better user experience, better for all. Take a screenshot of this. This is not something that's Prospect ID incorporation and pulling that through an email and text message.

It's not something we're seeing commonly used in audits. Would definitely suggest you start leveraging. There's a lot of use cases for it, aside from just the progressive RFID.

The key is regardless of how or where you're collecting student information, whether it be the main RFI or this progressive smaller RFI, you need to collect it consistently. You want to make sure that the data is coming in as it's in the same way, and the same format. If you want to be building a consistent student profile so that you can actually make it very usable in your communications.

Yeah, we talked to a lot of schools and we always use this term forms rule your world right and that starts really hearing out there. Hey, we have a lot of stealth apps and things of that nature, right? Well, we don't think you have that many stealth apps. It's limitations on being able to cleanly track interactions and having that leaky funnel. So we want to avoid.

Having that leaky funnel forms rule your world right forms are your gateway into Slate, right? The RFI form right athletics program page forms, which we just showed counters on the road. They meet somebody. How do they get in right? Alumni referrals, forms rule your world right? And begin to kind of help you track along with some pink stuff. We're going to talk later. Help you track all these different people and at the same time those forms.

Have to have consistency, right? Consistency leads to being able to use marketing automation to talk to multiple groups in a different way. If your forms are consistent or you're tracking different things every time, you're not going to be able to build relevant communication flows down the road. So forms rule your world and you've got to be consistent in what you're gathering.

Data drives so much it drives relevancy and personalization, and it drives a whole lot of that in a portal, so that's going to be our next tip, Ali Shriner, who's our director of Slate and I hosted a portal webinar. I see a lot of you saying registrants on this one today if you didn't catch it, it's available on our website. Also in Slates directory and it's a very in-depth look of the best portal page strategy by the numbers as we dialed and test it into it it it shows you all the features comprehensively but for the purposes.

Today, our recommendation is simply think about where the student is in their journey. By the time they're seeing a status page or a portal page, they're either in the application phase or the admitted student phase, and those are critical phases. They are literally in the final stages. They're having their last final touch points before they decide where they're going to go to school, and we need to make them count. So our recommendation is to move from a status page, which is the off the shelf slate option, and it's powerful in and of itself, but move to the portal page.

Option that is much more customizable so that you can be fully on brand, fully consistent with everything else they've seen and completely customized to them.

A few more slides related to it. For those of you that weren't on that last webinar, here are the things to notice on this portal page. First of all, fully customized content. What Rich will see is different than what I will see. It's based on their application status or their admission status. It's based on their major. It's based on their student type and other factors. Every single module, every single block of content is different for every student. Also, the defined checklists are strategic. We're allowing items to fall off.

Based on criteria that the student fulfills or the steps that they've already taken, we're not going to simply show as checklist and have it be static. We're going to have it actually kind of be dynamic based on what they've done, and that's going to be how we best Dr urgency.

And then finally a topping. The notice on our portal page strategy is how transparent we are with financial aid. We want to put their merit award right out there front and center if we know their need based aid. We want that out there front and center. So get it all out in the open so they understand the true cost of attendance at this critical step and critical touch point.

A closer look at that decision widget and financial piece. We're layering, layering this in a very wise way. Here we're putting the dollar amount right with the other things we want them to do. Strong calls to action to download the admit letter and the financial package all right towards the top of the page. Make it front and center.

And then finally we know that in the admitted student phase you're leveraging a lot of different platforms to do a lot of different things to drive engagement and community. You're probably using something like Facebook to allow that student community to flourish. You're probably leveraging a platform to drive just general brand engagement through giveaways and trivia.

And then you may be leveraging a platform to understand the students intent to enroll, meaning to understand if they're a yes student and no student, and maybe student and using that to arm your counselors, we're trying to do all of that within the portal page asset, something that you own that you can comprehensively manage and a one stop shop for the student.

A couple features to notice here on our list portal page, permanent slide.

Pictures one and two we're allowing a student to submit their information. A photo of themselves, as well as some kind of interest from a predesignated list and then after they've submitted their information, they're able to see what other student students have submitted so they can toggle by their interests and see others like them. This gives them a visual for how they can fit in an on campus before they're ever actually on campus and enrolled.

That third is related to just the brand engagement through giveaways and trivia. Drive them to the portal page many times over and over again to get a particular giveaway or to participate in the trivia for a giveaway.

The 4th is just a general social feed that can be taken from the school social feed, or if you have a hashtag that has wonderful student generated information, we can pull that in as well. But this is a social media generation and we want to pull that in and give them everything in this one stop shop to drive a lot of engagement with your brand at this critical stage and then finally. And very importantly we want to connect them with other humans that can make a difference in their lives. So connect them with the professor or a faculty member that's pertinent to their major.

Allow them to connect with that that Professor.

Yeah, but what I love about this, besides all the dynamic content because dynamic content right is relevant. Relevance drives engagement. I just love how sticky this portal is. This portal page is right sticky, sticky, sticky. That's what all marketers are trying to do. Create something that's sticky. Could create something that people will come back to over and over again. If you think about this process where.

You're describing here that this is accepted student phase, right? Uh, if you think about success for many of our schools in this phase, two out of 10 kids will say yes, we will fail on the other eight, right? If you might be lower than that, that's alright. It might be one out of 10. You might be really fancy, and it might be 4 out of 10 are coming, but no matter what you're failing at a higher rate than succeeding, right? And so if we can just move that metric up just a little bit, right? We can help really drive.

That that class or the enrollment in that class to be more successful, right? And stickiness and relevant is the way you do it. And this is a perfect opportunity to really go all out and go all in and try to win them over at the very end. You've already spent three years in undergrad who knows how long and grad trying to get them to come don't trip over the finish line, as these folks here. Way better than like to say.

Exactly.

And moving on to the next tip, one of the top ways that students actually get to your portal page is through system emails, app submission, app completion, password reset, things of that nature, and they are some of the most engaged with emails from your instance. So we need to capitalize on this just as we were talking about with the portal page building, brand engagement, building brand affinity, growing the love of your brand. You can do that here with system emails as well brand them. They don't need to be generic and just like all of your competitors.

Brand the system emails that is possible in slate and it's just an easy quick plan.

Aunt or uncle had been badgering them to do right, be excited, and don't miss that opportunity for positive, good engagement and lay out the next steps. What do you want them to do? What do you want them to learn more about? Where do you want them to go right? Don't miss any opportunity for good engagement because they're fleeting and you don't want to pass one by and you don't want to let it go right and system emails you can take them up a notch and do a better job with them.

Yeah, and and we got in and we've even tried it. Weaving in personalization and system emails. It's tough because the rules don't have time to run and they're way too real time for that. But you can, as Rich said, outline next steps and you can be on brand.

Also related to emails, simply because we'd be remiss not to mention this. It's something we see a lot in audits, and it's some of the greatest schools out there are still doing this. They're sending image only emails, and this is extremely problematic for a whole host of reasons. First and foremost frankly, being email deliverability and inbox placement, but also for these other five reasons. First of all, if a user has images blocked by default, they're not even seeing the message. Second, it's not good for email accessibility.

Because readers cannot read text in an image.

3rd, it's absolutely impossible to weave dynamic content into an image because it's static, so you lose all opportunity for personalization.

4th, you cannot scale an image properly across device types, and it doesn't always appear well in dark mode.

As I've mentioned on previous webinars, we run a enrollment focus group where we follow students on their enrollment journey and we do it year round and one of the things that our team members have found and learned from these students is that they're using dark mode almost exclusively. So if you're doing anything that wouldn't render well in dark mode, a quick tip for you is to stop doing that thing and using an image only email is one of those one of those times, and one of those things.

Yeah.

And finally, actually, importantly, emails aren't searchable if they're in an image text and an image is not searchable. I cannot go say what's the summer session and X university and actually pull up the email. It will not surface itself because it's embedded in an image, so HTML emails are a must no matter what you're trying to promote, even if it's a quick shot at it. Do it in an HTML email, and if you know of anybody sending images on campus, let's move away from that. We do see it commonly still, so hope that tips.

Else.

Yeah, and I would just say we know you know you're going to have images inside of email. We know we're going to have header images in there, for instance like don't go crazy. Don't make them so big that we have to Scroll down to get to the meat of the email. I think might be a little outdated on this, but around 90 pixels for that header image. Sometimes we go over, sometimes we're under but just keep that in mind.

Hmm.

When you're building an image as well and you know I saw a question come through about, do you have a way to make sure the emails don't end up in promotions tab? That's a very long deep conversation about deliverability and a million things you have to track, which we do it way better. Or do you have to track to try to be successful in that world number one? And to do that, you need engagement. You need engagement with your emails. You are all being judged on where you go in the inbox.

Jump to spam to promotion on the amount of engaged in Gmail on the amount of engagement you have with your emails. So you better be relevant. You better be better. Be short and sweet, right? And you better provide value or you won't get engagement when you don't get engaged.

Write an opportunity to click as well, yeah?

Yeah ohh absolutely. I you know like the you know happy New Year card that goes out to everybody. Every alumni you have. That's an image of a New Year's card that you can't click on is a killer for you and none of you and no one really thinks about that. So it's looking at that across the board and being meaningful and engaging content that's relevant is what you need to do to ultimately get in the right places in Inbox.

Yeah, and and off track a little bit but but worth saying when it comes to email, the whole goal of an email is to get the click. It's to get the user to go to the next step and to allow the landing page to do the hard work and the full explanation. So your email should always have something that they can click on. It drives engagement which helps your inbox placement and it's it's just best practice not to put it all in an email.

So a couple couple good things for you to keep in mind. Next tip is related to populations, and as you all know, populations are the first step in creating a campaign. Or as others may know it, a drip nurturing series. Depending on your nomenclature, because of how they're created, we're only seeing Slate users for the most part, use them in association with a campaign and our tip here for you to do today is to use it in repeated criteria logic. In other words, to use it like A tag, even though it's not.

As you can see in the first screenshot, I have an admitted student that has not yet deposited, and I have 7/8. I can't see the tiny screen, but I have a lot of different points of criteria in there to form that population. Of course, I'm going to use it as a target audience for my campaign, but I'm going to also use it in a query down the line to understand the admitted students that have not deposited but also have not sent their FAFSA to us yet.

The the important thing about this is a. It's easy and more manageable because you've already put all the work into the filter with all the different filters and the population, but two it can create some consistency across the organization. If I go to understand the population of students that have admitted but not deposited and then rich does it separately, we're going to probably come up with a different number because we're going to use slightly different logic. If you're leveraging the same population you're starting from the same starting point in baseline, so for consistency sake.

Also, just for ease, leverage populations in repeated criteria logic and not just in campaigns. Something we're not seeing very often.

Yeah, I love it because I I feel like it's almost like a way. It's really a way to simplify. It's this is all about working smarter, not harder, right? Like I can sit down, and we've done this. Like I mentioned Kate before, I think and we talked, remember we were talking about logic to build a query on something and she did it one way and I said well, can't you just do it this way and she looked at me and we went through and she's like Oh yeah, you could do it that way too. Which is great now. But what happens when you're doing this over and over again? What happens?

When Kate and Rich aren't there and somebody else comes in and does it like how do you keep this consistency? How do you have a better process? How do you do it once, not 100 times right? And populations will do that for you and that's what you want. You want the machine doing the work for you, right? I really, I'm a big fan of the populations, insidiously.

Next up is dynamic content.

And this is something that's very near and dear to our hearts. That way, better everything that we do both in and out of slate is highly customized to the student, so we're very familiar with all features that allow us to do those things. Obviously, you can have somewhat dynamic content through field merges, which is just simply pulling in a field's contents into an email or portal page. But you can also do it through liquid markup and content blocks, and we know all of you have heard of these things, but we're again just kind of going to lean into some ideas that we're not seeing being used to their fullest.

Extent in our audits.

The first is liquid markup and the idea is showing different things to students based on their status, so you may show a different intro line to a transfer student. Then you would show to a first year student and this is all through that. If then logic that's written right into the email itself.

Different things for different people to drive relevancy.

Yeah what I love. I love building messaging that goes. That's one kind of flow. They can talk differently into multiple groups. It's a process game again. How do I simplify? How do I work smarter, not harder, right? And you can have that flow. You can throw a little bit of liquid markup in there.

And then all of a sudden your message can be a little more relevance without doing a whole lot more work. And we know and I'm a broken record and I apologize, relevance, **** activity and that's what we all want. That's what we all.

Yeah, and a lot of times these students have given you this information. Whether it's on the RFI or other and we just need to make sure to use it if we know that there are transfer students instead of a first year student, let's display that we have that understanding and talk to them slightly differently. That also is going to resonate better too.

Relevancy is not only driven by what you know about the student, though it can also be driven by time of year, and this is an example of switching out header images using. If then logic and letting the system run it for you and change it out for you based on time of year.

And the whole reason for doing this is to kind of paint a picture for the student if they haven't visited yet. You're showing them how it will feel on on campus in the fall. It's springtime, you're showing them how it will feel in the spring on campus, and it's a nice. It's a kind of nice add-on, and it's the system doing all of the work. It's nothing that you need to go back and maintain. You set it up once with if then logic and it rotates throughout.

It's not complicated.

Yeah, again, I love it. It makes everybody's job easier right? If you have to the the shorter the list of the things you have to remember to do to go in and change the more successful you'll be right? And so I love it. For that reason, I love it because it keeps marketers happy, right? They're going to see those messages that come out, and they're going to come and they're going to say, well, hey, why didn't? Why is it fall and you're sending out this beautiful.

Bring email and you know it makes them happier because they have a point, right? Like you want the image and the message to work together and to resonate with the end user right? But again we can solve this problem through liquid markup. I love this idea. I never thought of it. I never conceptualized anything the use it this way. I think this is like.

I think this is kind of like one of those things that maybe is simple, but I find to be kind of brilliant. So kudos to Lindsey or whoever thought of it, but I I really like the use of it here.

Yeah, it's a message that's always on. It's a drip message or an automated message that's changing itself out. Many different use cases of liquid markup like that, but you get the idea of how you should be using it in your email campaigns.

Next up is content blocks, and particularly using content blocks in student outreach.

As most of you probably know, it's essentially a bundle of content associated with the field.

So we have all the keys on major keys on the left and each one has a bundle of content that we've created it for it with a different video, a different paragraph of information, a different link away. And once we build this content block once, we can use it in email. We can use it in portal pages and it makes it again more relevant to the student. It's a, you know, the structure or skeleton or bones of the email stay the same. It's the content block that's rotating itself out, and it's great for displaying different content across student type.

Majors lead sources. The list goes on.

Yeah, a real life scenario of this is we were working with a school and doing other things and they said hey we want you to do it. A little audit. Can you audit our conflicts?

And they said they're great, we love them. We just want to make sure we're doing them right. We have over 100 com flows.

And.

Yes.

Well, it works.

You know, that's awesome. That's a lot to be proud of because they they. Yeah, they did a tremendous amount of work to get in there, but that kind of set off some red flags in our mind, right? And what was happening right is the logic was complicated, the.

You know there was way too many of them. It was way too hard to stay on top of them, right? And at the end of the day when we really looked, most of them weren't delivering to anybody, right? And it's also hard to tell that because there's so many of them, so you know content blocks using a population content and then some content blocks, right? Things of that nature would greatly simplify 100 down to maybe 6, but everyone is still getting even more.

Any content than they were before, right? Again, this is about process. This is about process control. This is about working smarter, not harder. And this is about being able to maintain what you've built, right? So for some it's a little harder. Maybe to try this out, but once you get going on it, it's going to save you a tremendous amount of time and work and be more effective.

Yeah, if you are kind of feeling like you've already done these things with content blocks, congratulations to you. This is a slide that sort of demonstrates what's commonly being done with content blocks today, and that's the staff assignment signature right now. This is how we're seeing content blocks being used. It's a staff assignment signature being pulled in, and the irony of that is that these are actually fields in the database that could be pulled in with field merges.

So what we suggest doing is taking your VP of enrollment information or your director of admission or your director of Financial information and putting that in the content block so that you can showcase it when needed in an email or a portal asset and keep the maintenance easy whenever you have turnover and you need to make a change, you simply edit the content block, not each individual asset. So again, this is the way that most similar to the way that content block is being used, but we're suggesting taking it step further with additional staff or faculty.

We did have a case recently where a partner asked us to go ahead and change the staff's signature and emails. We found that that staff signature was hard coded into each individual email. Of course we took the opportunity to change it to a content block at that point, but it kind of showed the maintenance that they had going on in their life up until that point.

Last content block, example and suggestion for you pertains to date and time. Relevancy. Again, reminder relevancy can be driven about what you know about the student, but it also can be driven about by timeliness or date and time. In this example, we have three different content blocks and it's showing that the different deadlines that are coming down the Pike. The first content block has all three deadlines available. Still the second content block has only two of them available. The third content block has only.

One of them available, the rest are struck through and this is driving urgency in a way that the system is doing all the work for you. We're switching out those content blocks based on date and time that we've configured, and we're slowly showing different kinds of content as time transpires.

Yeah, I love. We use that on the portal pages as well right? That same little feature there so you can do you can you can build one asset and use it in multiple places.

Exactly.

Next batch of tips relates to translation tables. When we do our audits, this is the feature I would say that institutions are using the most. They're just not using it for student outreach. So when we're seeing translation tables, we're seeing it in ways that help you talk better to your different systems, but not necessarily to do better. More relevant student outreach. So for those of you that don't know, a translation table is a way to create additional export values or values associated with a single field.

Without messing with your data structure or your data fields or the field properties itself, you're not interfering with the underlying data at all. You're therefore not interfering with any data integrations. All you're doing is kind of building out this side table, associating it with a certain field.

And here's a couple of use cases for how we would handle it. First, in something we're not seeing is personalize your outreach to athletes. We have all the different field values on the left for the different sports and what we're going to do is create a translation to associate coach information with each sport coach name, coach email address, coach mobile number. Now when I reach out to the athletes I can field merge in those different aspects so that they can get in touch with the coach easier and it's just easier for you to maintain.

Next is to create field merges to personalize outreach in both portals and campaigns. This is based on a major so we know that the field value is accounting. Of course we can pull that in through a field merge, but if we build out additional field values or export values through a translation table, we can easily pull them in as well. In this case we're putting it in the business bubble. It's a major that kind of falls under that business type. We're also going to put a chair and their information in the different export values so that we can pull them in.

And then, most importantly, we're going to give a pertinent, very relevant link that we can put in our communications to students instead of just generally linking out we can pull in an accounting specific link for that student to go to the accounting specific page.

Write linkway personalized outreach.

Anything you would add there rich.

No, I think you said it all.

Set it all when it comes to translation tables.

We are running against the clock a little bit here, so we will be swift going through this next section, but it's a valuable section. It is all related to ping and ping pong, and judging from what we see in the forums and the conversations we have with our clients and partners, Ping is a bit of a confusing topic. So we first want to start off by just kind of setting the stage and letting you know a little bit more about what it is.

If you're aware of Google Analytics, think of Bing as being very similar to that. It's technicians version of Google Analytics. It's basically tracking a user's behavior across the web acrossthe.edu and assigning it to them. It's building a profile based on how they're interacting with your digital properties.

Ping pong goes beyond just measuring that behavior and watching that behavior, and it actually acts on it in real time. So it's taking a certain action and it's creating a subsequent action that's relevant to that user based on what they're doing and the whole goal of ping pong, of course, is to drive a student through the funnel in the way that you'd like to drive them through the funnel, asking them to take the appropriate next step in real time.

We have 4 examples here of what to do with ping followed by four more coming up.

The first one is around that measurement.

Biggest tip of all build reports, and if you're able, attribution models to truly understand the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

You need, you can use ping and you need to know if those ads with that partner are actually driving any action. You should know where you can put in more budget where you need to pull away entirely, where you may need more resources. All of this is very easy to see through ping once activated.

The second is that you can use ping in a demonstrated interest query to understand who could be converted from a prospect to an inquiry. That formula is completely up to you and your internal group to decide, but example would be hey, if a prospect comes from an email and clicks it and actually comes to the Edu and peruses, let's count them as an inquiry they're showing interest.

But you can layer that in into a demonstrated interest query and have some intelligence from ping built in there.

The third is to set up automated messages introducing faculty to a prospective student. If I am on the marketing page, I'm more than likely interested in marketing, so you can introduce somebody from the Business School or the marketing faculty to me to help kind of drive further allegiance and interest in the marketing major.

4th is to send print based on what the student is doing on the.edu. If a student is hovering over the apply page but has not yet applied, it might be a good opportunity for you to fire up some, apply print. Their parents will see it. It will also give them the nudge they need to take that next step. And of course, three and four are very flexible. You can think of a million different use cases similar to thosebywatchingtheir.edu journey.

Next example in living color is tracking admitted students visits to the portal page. You can use ping for this. This is how we at way better. We're able to decide that we had found a good engaging strategy for a portal page. It's because we use ping analytics. You can track their visits to the portal page and that's how you can determine who you're giving away top items to. If you have season football tickets, give it to the person that's coming to the portal page. The most track their visits visibly. Show them the number of visits like that 32 right there.

On the screen and on the portal page it will drive further engagement and further repeat visits. You can also get a counselor in touch if they show to be a highly engaged student and coming back to their portal page frequently.

Yeah, and why I like about it, especially in that portal page, right? Who do you call? Who is your outreach? Who are your counselors working on the most? I touch on this briefly again, but I'm going to touch on it again one more time. The greatest resource on your campus at the end of the enrollment cycle are your counselors. They are vastly underpaid and extremely, extremely crucial.

The operation right and So what we want to be able to do is line them up with the right people who they should reach. We can use that pig. Those pig analytics attached with the counselor assignment to that student to give them a better list to give them hey focus on these top 200 people 100 people right? This will help Dr deposits at the end of a long and tough cycle right? So it's a great tool.

Give him a hit list.

Emma hit list.

Ping example two in living color. This is an admitted student that visited the financial Aid play page but has not filed the FAFSA.

So there clearly having a little trouble getting going. Maybe a bit confused, so we're going to do two things thanks to ping one. We're going to incorporate ping logic into our query and trigger a real time dedicated email to them that has helpful facts or instructions. So we're going to show them the way. Explain it a little bit further to them. Not everybody understands the FAFSA.

And two, we're also going to use a query and ping logic in that query to trigger an internal alert to their staff member. Their staff assigned counselor will see an alert saying this student is having a little bit of trouble lingering around that page. That financial aid page they might need that nudge.

All possible with pain.

Similar example, different use case is a student is from our secondary market and they go to the visit page, but they continue to not register for an event. We can do two things with ping in our queries. One we can target them with a communication about virtual offerings. Let's make the assumption that maybe they can't make it to campus. They can't find a ride. They don't have time in their schedule. They need virtual options available to them and also trigger that alert to a counselor. Let them know they're having trouble. Get in touch.

And finally, last example of the day and pertinent to ping right on time is using ping pong. It's pairing both what you know about the students status and what they're doing on the.edu to drive real time action, and this is a major one. If they're an admitted student and they're on the.edu, pop up a light box asking them to confirm their enrollment, or submit their deposit. That's example one up top.

Alternatively, if they're a admitted student and they have not yet signed up for the admitted student event, you can ask them to register through a light box pop up. This is all stuff that is automated through the use of ping analytics and ping pong.

Right in the nick of time.

Yeah.

Right in the nick of time. How did that work out, so you know. So that way better. We talk about this all the time and it's it's meaningful. It's impactful to us. There's only two rules right? And this really originated. Probably a long time ago when so much of this stuff that now can be done with clicks.

And widgets right is when this was all a science project was. The rules were well, I don't know how to do it, but do something right. Rule one do something you might not know how to build. The most complicated, awesome, calm, flow, right? But build 2 triggers do something right. Get started. Don't think so far ahead or make it have to be so complicated that you get paralysis by analysis so.

Paralysis by perfection. There is no perfection, right? There is no experts. There is no only way to do it right. You have to grow there yourself. So rule one. Do something you guys have already done it right and Rule 2. Just make it better. What's working. What's not working and then just keep working on it. Your journey is forever. Our journey is forever new. Tools come. New resources come from Slate right? So the journey is forever. Follow these two rules.

Will always be successful. What's next for us? First off, you can reach out to us anytime.

You'll want and then you can find us at the summit, right? Uh, you know we had a great opportunity thanks to technicians. They've been a great partner to work with. I'm spending a little time with them in New Haven and they were talking about a few features that are coming out.

Making me blush. Rich, thank you. Yeah, last thing we always like to include our personal email addresses here for you to use. We put them here for a reason. We like to hear from you when Allie and I got off our webinar on Wednesday. We had several personal emails in our inbox and that's exciting for us, so feel free to reach out with any questions about the use cases we shared. Hopefully these reminders of why you bought Slate resonated a bit. Just get going. Start doing one of these things and you'll be on your merry way. We only have a few minutes for questions and some did come in.

Personally to us during the registration process and through TECHNOVISION, so try to rattle through those. I know our team has also been moderating the chat and then also the way better way is to also answer all your questions via email that we didn't get to. So you'll definitely be hearing from us.

First one for you Rich is do your recommendations here. Change for grad or continuing studies?

Short answer no.

Go down in Nashville. It's it's exciting. They're excited. It's going to be a great event. I would highly recommend going and the last thing I will say before I let Lindsey close this out is I would like to thank Lindsay and Allie and Kate and Macy Allison and Rob. And you know, the whole gang here who we've done. Three of these in the last couple of weeks. We traveled up to.

To New Haven and we don't have. They don't have extra time and so I just want to thank them all. They've done a great job. It's a great team and they're the smartest people I know, so I'll let Lindsey finish this off here, Lindsey.

I.

No.

Yeah, the only the biggest difference right in grad and honestly, all of these things are for grad right. We might talk a little bit like undergraduate time, but they're all for grad. The only big difference is grad sometimes the cycle isn't as well defined. Sometimes you have to nurture a lot longer. Nurture forever, right?

Sometimes the cycles are quicker, so the the only difference. Well, there's differences obviously, but the big difference is with undergrad. We know at some date they've moved on right before we start adding them to our transfer flows, but that's really the only difference, right? It's who's your audience? How do I be relevant to the audience? How do I learn the data? I wish I knew about them, and then how do I speak in a meaningful way to them to get them engaged with the process? So in the grand scheme of things, no, no, not really.

Yeah, I would agree.

The second one that came through is. We've really struggled with our email templates and our instance. Where do we start and how do you get way better come up with templates for your partners and I I'll take this one. The answer is truly a whole lot of testing. We've been doing email for a long time. That's why we can speak to things such as email deliverability so well. It's a lot of testing and dialing into those strategies just given the data and what the data is saying, and also again keeping that key in mind that we remind reminded ourselves up earlier. The email is only supposed to get the.

Click one of the major things that you all can do is try to stop fitting so much content into an email and put it on a landing page or a non gated portal page instead. So keep it tight. Keep the text to image ratio smart and just continue testing. Start testing things and see what works best.

And don't be afraid. Don't don't come at it with any preconceived notions, because some of our best messages don't have any images in them at all.

Yeah.

So I followed.

Yeah, they're not particularly stylized all the time. Yeah, you can kind of change it up and see that even the change will create some success and some better engagement.

Follow the results. Not what feels good to you.

Hard lesson.

And then the third one I needed Ali Shriner for this answer, but it says we are setting up an engagement scoring formula. How can ping be weighted in as part of this strategy and she let me know here that just just like with your prospect status rules, you can layer in ping for engagement scoring too. So you can use time spent on site. You can look at key pages through ping and you can leave all of that into the criteria as well. So something that that she can help with. But it's all possible to layer into the engagement scoring.

Methodology.

I think with that we're going to call it a day. We're 4 minutes ahead of schedule and we really, truly appreciate your time so much. Hope to see you at the summit. I like to to kind of dangle the carrot that we are going to have a lot of fun there, so please stop by our booth and it'd be great to meet you in person.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.