Empower your Higher Education Institution with the Nurture Marketing Strategy for Higher Education

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[Music] today we are going to embark on a conversation that i think is going to be really cool um cornell university secret sauce for higher ed marketing and with ashley budd who are going to bring on just momentarily so thanks for being here for this especially the day after a holiday mike why are we doing today's episode um why are we doing today's episode well i don't want to spoil what um the secret sauce is but ashley budd is one of the most gifted marketers in higher education you can find all sorts of her content on ashleybud.com i'd recommend signing up for a newsletter as well it is probably one of the most um voluminous newsletters but in a way that is still accessible with lots of actionable items so i am somebody who signed up for it um greg are you signed up for it yet i am before we bring ashley out real quick i just want to remind everyone have your questions loaded use the chat for your questions if you want to come on and answer question just put it in the chat and lexi will bring you in at the appropriate time i always forget to do that i'm so sorry so stay muted until you're called upon um this episode of fyi of course brought to you by mongoose we are makers of higher ed's premiere engagement platform cadence and we're super excited for this one so i i always forget about that microphone muting thing and i wanted to bring that on with that being said and it was such a terrible lead-in for such a wonderful guest um we want to bring on ashley to say hi to everyone and tell a little bit about yourself ashley thanks for joining us hi everyone uh well thank you for having me um it's great to be back in my office um i've been out of my office for a couple weeks and um you can see if you're looking at my screen how sad my plant life is from leaving my office um but it's good to be back and talking about marketing with you all um i have been at cornell for almost 10 years which is crazy um uh and i've been in a few different roles but all within their advancement division um i started as a social media strategist in 2013 um and our team kind of quickly evolved into a social from a social media strategy team to a digital innovation group when we started onboarding new uh communication technologies um things like crowdfunding um doing cornell's first giving day and we were starting to move out of just the social media space which cornell advancement was really far ahead on when i joined that team in 2013 i was the third full-time social media strategist just with an advancement um i i don't think there are teams of social media strategists that big at many places let alone in a alumni and development unit we don't have three full-time people doing social for cornell alumni anymore that has evolved with the innovation path that we're on but um just kind of gives you a sense of how how much investment they put into digital communication and um so started as a strategist um i moved i'm a remote employee and i've been remote since 2014 um so i've got this remote og thing going on for myself um and then i am currently the director of marketing operations for advancement in uh at cornell um and so i oversee all of the alumni communication um that are is for the broad base um so all of our alumni and um the broad base of donors think about like all the signature events that will happen at the university like reunion and homecoming and those big things that involve alumni um but our group is also responsible for broad-based giving um so all the gifts that are under a thousand dollars um were were responsible for that participation strategy too um and the marketing operations team um it's only two years old um we're a relatively new mini org within this bigger massive org and we um well i'm gonna share i guess when we get into the questions a lot more about um how we get the work done but sometimes i like lovingly will refer to marketing operations as the factory um or an internal agency i think it's kind of more fun to use a factory analogy because we create a lot of the content um and then we also ship it on all the different platforms so direct mail text messaging email social media um that's that's the unit that i oversee that's we are going to have something for everyone on this one i can tell just from that background alone that's awesome mike um before we get into our first question just adjust the view um as per speaker view um and uh let's get into uh the conversation with ashley this is this is awesome and don't forget get your questions loaded for the chat we are going to get the q a a little bit later in this conversation go ahead mike yeah so uh first off um you know ashley let's not keep the people waiting what is the secret sauce yeah well um the secret is um really in our writing style and how effective our communication is and we have moved from kind of this like formal writing style that you find at a lot of institutions not just ivy league institutions but a lot of academic institutions um from a formal kind of writing style where a writer would sit down and craft something and send it out to be read um and it's red and then it's done um to a more conversational writing style and so i would say that our our secret sauce is a conversational design or a conversational voice and tone where uh in even the things that you think would be something that you would write and leave for someone to absorb and move on that instead we're inviting a conversation in all of the writing that we're doing and this uh approach is engaging um but it's also really effective in uh helping to make your communication feel personal and one of the things that we um for years have been trying to tackle uh from a digital strategy perspective is how do we personalize how can we make things more personal um from the days that i started you know we were talking about well amazon and netflix can do this right like how do we how do we personalize how do we personalize and we know we're not amazon or netflix and we've really found that you don't need to be a tech behemoth you don't need to have all the data to do hyper variable messaging personalized messaging to have a personal conversation with a person to make it sound like it's personal um and so that has been our secret and i'm excited to share how we like are putting that into action it is interesting and i think whether someone's a writer or not if you give them a task to write they'll think about what they were taught in seventh grade english you know dear sir or madam so i think the tendency is always to follow that template and some people have life so i'd ask you um when did you first get turned on to conversational marketing and realize that there's a different way to reach people that doesn't have to stay inside of that template when did you learn to call colorado the lines because yeah um so we did a web redesigned project um started in 2015 and we shipped the new site um right around early 2017 and we worked with a fantastic group in san francisco called mule design um and our lead strategist on the project is erica hall erica hall is my professional spirit animal she's amazing she wrote the book that's on my desk um just enough research one of these nice book apart chap books just enough research um and then she was writing while we worked together she was writing a book called conversational design and so we did a a writing workshop with erica where she started laying out in such a logical way why a conversational voice and tone was going to be a critical part of the way we wrote all of our web copy um and it's so logical that we started um implementing it in in in all of our writing styles across all of our our different platforms um and another thing that i'll share is i mentioned that our marketing operations team is only two years old that team came out of a merger of three different communication teams the digital team that i was on a annual giving marketing team and a brand of communication team that existed with an advancement and when we merged those teams we put one person in charge of messaging and that one person is maintains the voice um and that really helped us logistically start having that same conversational voice and tone across all of our messages because we had someone one person who the same person who was responsible for the messaging for reunion is now responsible for the solicitation copy um and so we were able to have the kind of control that we needed um to start this conversation with people um maybe in an engagement communication and then finish the conversation with them um while we're stewarding them after after gifts and so um so that was also i think part of the awakening of how um a conversational voice how how we can put a make a conversation with folks and how we can think about instead of just we're gonna send this we're gonna tell people to save the date for something how can we start the conversation with this group that can be difficult for other um people to follow that like that's great you get one person that really has that voice captured um would you say for schools that don't have that type of control um would a brand guide suit that like how do you um how do you tackle that for a team of people that have to write yeah yeah and um and you're exactly right the the style guide or what all uh in individual campaigns we call them messaging frameworks but between a messaging framework and a style guide that many people can use that's what we point to and so in our writing style guide not a visual style style guide for writing um we we talk about this conversational voice and point of view um and we'll also hold training sessions um at least a couple times a year for staff members to learn how how to use our how to use the style guide but how to also write in that conversational voice in tone very good are what are the the parameters or i guess the guard rails you have up on that conversational so it doesn't get too off-kilter or too informal um well i think people will be surprised at how informal our writing is um and i think the guidelines are um you know we tell people to write how they speak um and um i think i'm trying to think of how to guide you on this um authenticity is one of our our pillars um and that means um trying to show that we are people that we have emotions and that we have points of view and that we can make jokes and um as long as it is real then kind of anything goes um so uh one example from just this past week we sent out a end of we just finished our end of year we wanted to get a quick communication out to all donors thanking them and reporting back on what we did in the previous year and we have a capital campaign right now where the tagline is to do the greatest good um our subject line for that stewardship email was you did good this year ashley and from like a formal writer like if you had your formal writer hat on no way does that subject line get sent out from cornell university i saw some people nodding their head like they're like yeah well but if you were a part of if you understood what doing good meant in our campaign context if you understood our voice and tone um you would know that that was that we knew what we were doing when we wrote that subject line so um it it really does make formally trained writers uncomfortable the way i love it i i love taking chances and i'm i'm probably obsessed about it by the way mike authenticity was mentioned again everyone do a shout out no um every episode we have like pee wee herman the like but it's super important but um i love uh conversational tone and subject lines and i guess i would ask you to respond to this actually but also to have the audience think about this we are in such competition in a higher ed span to like compete with all these other emails and texts that are going out to people so you almost have to um take chances with it and you know stay um you know decent and professional but just taking chances just talk about like how you told that line at cornell and i love that you're coming from like an institution that's you know well recognized they obviously have a reputation that you have to abide by but how do you toe that line or balance like taking a chance but also getting people's attention yeah i guess we wouldn't uh the la we try to get people's attention yeah that that's true i think so there's authenticity is one of the three pillars i talk about in in effective email communication and really it goes for effectiveness and trust building anywhere um this triangle that we use is trust triangle and we try to build trust as much as we can with our audience so that they know if we're going to send them a communication it's worth their time they can trust us that the information is good that it's the information that they want and it's on the channel that they want and so authenticity is a big part of that it's the top of the pyramid for me um and that is being honest in what you're writing showing that you're human showing that emotion and we use emoji a lot um to help convey emotion um the next is empathy so the other end of your triangle being empathy and the way we think about empathy is um we want our audience to know that we're we're sending the communication to be helpful to them um that we want them to succeed um and so whatever it is it's um we want you to know a date ahead of time so that you can plan we um want to offer you a giving opportunity that matches your philanthropic interest you know the empathy part is um you know we're here to put a smile on your face today we want you to have a good day um so that's part of building trust that they know that when we're sending something to them that it's because we believe they want it um and that it can be helpful in a lot of ways and then the last piece so authenticity empathy and then the last piece is logic um is it logical like why am i should they they shouldn't be asking why am i getting this communication or how how do i take action next making things really easy making sure that they can follow our logic and so if all of those things are there then we have a really strong we've built a strong trusting relationship with our audience and they can trust us to um to surprise them they can trust us to see a subject line that makes them go huh um because there's there's a little bit more to it when they unpack uh what the communication is so um those those three things help guide a lot of our decisions on you know are we doing it as a gimmick um that's okay like i can we can talk about clickbait all day i love i love gimmicks um but if um if the gimmick is there serving a purpose um a lot of times our gimmicks are just to make people smile um because if we can relate opening one of our communications and putting a smile on their face the chances that they will continuing to open our communications are really high um so yeah um uh other you know other things that you'll see in our style guide are um i mentioned using a using emoji for emotion we feel really strongly about that from um not just not just a stylistic point of view but also to help convey communication more effectively using emojis in our headers help people kind of skim information quicker it helps people have a lighter cognitive load when they're trying to understand what we're telling them um you know it can help if we're trying to make a joke um it can help and make it clear that we're making a joke if we're using an emoji that reflects that um but it can help like re-emphasize what we're trying to say um and also helps people kind of skim for information and highlight things that we really want them to see the metrics on emojis are amazing like the responses that you get when you use them i mean just a little telephone and a subject line people automatically know you're talking about maybe a phone-a-thon or a little video you know that they're about to watch a video it's amazing what one little emoji can't do yeah it scares me when institutions tell us they won't use uh emojis i know there's a few i work with and i'm always like oh you're missing out on opportunities but good um i had a quick question for you ashley so i put out um the link to alumni.cornell.edu because i am in love with your website i love the design um it seems like when i look at most alumni pages there's a very distinctive give now or you know these are alumni we want to recognize with their stories and there's certainly a giving link and you'll see it on the side but um what can you talk about snack bar and where that came from because i love that yes um so this this website's amazing like i mentioned we work with mule design to pull it all together and it was stood up in 2017 and we have not had to make many changes and if you can have a website living and breathing that long without many changes you know they've they've hit it hit the nail on the head so um can't give enough props to mule i do think we were one of their last web design customers um before um erica and mike decided to go write more books um so if you're writing them down for your next rfp i'm not sure that they will show up um but uh the snack bar is um the snack bar is interesting so prior to this web redesign we didn't have a a place of our own for alumni storytelling it happened at the central university web properties we found that there were sometimes things that did not need a full length news article um and um that there were a lot of things that our college and unit partners or alumni themselves wanted us to promote um there was also just like a ton of really awesome content coming out of cornell and so um we saw the snack bar as a place to deliver time like tiny social sized snippets um rather than long-form storytelling and we thought of all the different kinds of snippets that we might share we might want to share quotes we might want to share photos we might want to share social posts we might want to share data points and so you see all those different content types reflected there uh if you were on our campaign website uh which is greatestgood.cornell.edu we rebooted the snack bar idea there as well in a section called goods stories and so um these content types are super super helpful for us just to be able to communicate quickly that this is a thing that we're connected to um and we think it should it would be interesting to you so um it acts similar to a social feed i guess in the way an audience member would behave behave with it um it's in chronological order of when we post things but it's ours to control right and it's our and it's in our own environment and so um this these are snippets that we will share in email communication and push people to our website um there are also um there's also a pretty strong cohort of people that have now are now in the habit of just checking in on the snack bar and seeing what we're posting and so that's a good thing most of our traffic though is is from us pushing uh folks and again mike mike put that uh link in the chat uh while you're there just to remind you um definitely sign up for uh ashley's newsletter um you have her here though for direct questions that can um really um uh be customizable to your school and your unique situation so i would take advantage of that um use the chat to ask a question if you'd like to come on you can do that as well so just a reminder we are going to be getting the questions very shortly but i believe mike has another one before that i do so um it's interesting you said your website was designed in 2017 haven't had to make many changes um there's this big like global event that happened like you know two years ago uh in covid and it seemed like every school was uh was really pivoting and transitioning and trying to be more digital did did that have an effect on on really what you were doing or did you find you were you set up for something like that happening theoretically um we were really well positioned to operate digital first um and that's because of the investment that was put into the alumni affairs organization as early as 2009 at cornell so we had already been doing hybrid and live streamed events prior to covid um we already had a sophisticated email communication program not necessarily in the tool set but in how we organized ourselves how we use a shared calendar um how we shared resources so we were well positioned um and we leveraged um the moment to streamline communications even more so one of the strategic things we did with the email calendar because of the phenomenon that happened with an organization like ours where lots of the programming was happening regionally so there were events happening you know all over the world and now all of a sudden all of those regional events are happening in one space the internet um and now they can be communicated to everyone all the time and so we saw this as an opportunity to stop um i guess we didn't stop things things kind of stopped naturally we used it as an opportunity to streamline and we um picked two days a week that we were gonna send an all alumni communication and since april of 2020 cornell alumni have been getting two emails at least um two emails from the university from my team every tuesday they get a newsletter and every thursday they get a single call to action email from us um and that streamlining helps us create a kind of um a regular cadence of communication um and the consistency of that really helped our engagement efforts particularly in email but with email being our biggest driver of conversion on events and online giving is an important channel to tackle so we found with increasing the amount of all alumni emails that we sent um everything else increased open rates increased click rates increased um and it was the consistency of it um that really um and where the streamlining came in is like i said i didn't tell people to stop um but we told people to stop sending on those two days so on tuesdays and thursdays that was the only communication that was going out because it was going to everyone um and then it let all the other program areas kind of find their way either um many of them moved to weekend communication and found really great success instead of sending something on a weekday moving it to a weekend um and then others found that they could just give us their content to share in the newsletter and they didn't need to then have their own email that was going out that week so that's actually where we were able to lessen the volume of individual individual marketing communications by having this newsletter go out much more frequently so that was a that was that was probably the biggest move for us was really cranking up the amount of all alumni communication that we had and when we did that everything else rose disagree with me if you would um i would say though um if you're um on our um uh our series today watching um thank you um that doesn't mean send a me now every single day and all of your open rates like there has to be that combination that actually talking about where they have to be interesting emails or they have to be you know personalized they have to be good emails people have to like them and then sending more emails would equal to more open rates like the familiarity with them am i misspeaking there do you think that's like that i think that in combination of good emails and more emails is important not just more emails right yes quality is one of like one of the most important things and if we don't have content to go out on a thursday for that single call to action email we don't force it um and we don't have in our newsletter you know we have to have six boxes and they all have to be filled in if there's nothing for the six box don't force it because again we're trying to be helpful this is the empathy part that i think is really important um and how empathy is tied to quality somewhat i'm taking someone's time away from them for for them to read an email from me and in the grand scheme of things happening in a person's life the university is teeny teeny tiny right so um making sure that if we're going to send a communication and take that time away from someone that we know that it's going to be worth their time um so quality yes absolutely but i do have to say like on a technical standpoint um this is specific to email communication but um your sender reputation is tied to frequency um and so if you are only sending a communication to your audience once a month or less um your sender reputation is not going to be as strong as if you had multiple touch points to an audience within a month um because your email service providers and the big folks are doing a reputation review on a monthly basis um and a lot what happened during cobit for a lot of institutions was that they pulled back and they said oh we don't want to bug people they said we've got to stop let's not communicate with them we got to pull back they don't need to hear from us and that tanked reputation sender reputations um because the communication stopped and then you had to build your reputation back up again um and so instead maybe it's changing the communication to that group leaning into the empathy what do they need from us right now how do we fit into their life but don't pull back um and i think so many people saw that when they did pull back they lost a lot of ground a loss on the ground on engagement and giving but also it takes it's gonna take time to build up um just even from a technical standpoint to get yourself out of junk or promotions and back in the inbox um so um so yes quality is important but frequency is really important too and i don't think we've yet so we're doing two all alumni emails um a week um there's other emails that people get and the more engaged you are with the institution the more email you're gonna get from different units but i still haven't seen the threshold for email pain um hit yet and i look at the unsubscribe rate really as our our primary indicator of when we've gone too far in terms of volume and we haven't hit that yet um if you think about the brands that you're most connected to or not maybe not even the brands that you love the most but the ones you let flood your inbox the most um there are some that are like amazon will send me six emails a day um and i'm not unsubscribing from amazon because there might be one of those six emails that i really need um so you know there's a there's a consideration there with you know how how much value can your brand provide um and i think i think there's a correlation with how much volume you can do i love it um i love that answer um and i don't think i know everything at all but i love um you know that you have the results to back up what you're saying but also it's different than what i thought that's i kind of just love that when that happens and the questions are pouring in one of them is one of my favorite questions ever but i don't think it's the first one so we're gonna get let lexi get to the questions um because people want answers so go ahead lexi yeah our first question comes from stephanie they ask how do you get leadership to understand conversational writing as opposed to formal writing that's a question i get every time i speak um this is like kind of a joking answer but i think one that is effective for some leadership is to say cornell's doing it um and they're seeing results um there is a lot of great documentation about plain language so um and you know like another quick google away um looking for resources that point to playing language and its ties to accessibility um accessibility in terms of um all of the constituencies that you have yes you know for me my my primary audience has graduated with a college degree but that doesn't mean that they need to sit down and read college level reading writing in their communication from us because it takes more time to process um and it's not even like using big words sometimes it's using acronyms that they might have been really familiar with as a student but a few years out it's taking you a little bit longer to process what that was um so plain language there's uh the best documentation out there is actually coming out of the uk and their government organizations have great plain language documentation um and sarah winters is another person that i would um point you to for plain language resources she's got a whole emoji guide um i can send some resources for your show notes um that will keep me from googling everything for you right now great awesome i love it um mike do you have something for fall up or should lexi get back into the next question oh keep going away with the questions we have a slew of them love the questions thank you so much so next question sarah asks how have you built awareness of what kind of content constitutes will see when they click on the link snack bar they love the content just wondering how you built traffic to the site when it's not immediately obvious what kind of content content snack bar will have yeah um we launched the snack bar on april fool's day um and it's um you know it's named snack bar because it's snackable bite-sized content which is like was very trendy in the content strategy world and we were trying to describe what this thing is um and i wouldn't encourage people to use trendy internal buzzwords for external marketing often but um at some point we just decided to run with it and um use french fries and candy bars and like all these fun kinds of backgrounds to help us launch it and then um when we had the opportunity to launch it on april fool's day um that kind of helped us make a splash with something that seemed like a joke um but was actually something that we thought would be helpful and fun um to deliver to the audience um and you can see where we decided to rebrand and not put a snack bar on our uh campaign site but instead rebrand it as good stories but the concept remains the same um i would say like all like all of our other content the primary way that people are getting to it is us pushing them there um and so we're pushing people there in email um in social media posts um i don't think we've yet sent anyone to the snack bar directly from text message um but mostly email and um email and social is how they would how they would land there otherwise it would there's a very small percentage that come to our website and explore there's some people who are curious but most of the traffic is landing directly inside the website somewhere and some of our most interesting pieces of content we'll put in the snack bar and then point people there some things that have worked well recaps uh i think if you're there now you might have to scroll a little bit at some point but we um in june had reunion and so there was a whole flood of reunion snacks and rather than doing a long form article what happened at reunion and here's a photo and here's a quote from someone we did no long form article um for reunion this year from the alumni team instead we did a whole bunch of snacks and then for our reunion recap we pointed people to the snack bar if you want to know what happened here's all all the things um we also will um grasp onto like pop culture um trending uh news and events um we tend to have uh more than a handful of olympians in the um summer winter games and so um we know those snacks always perform really well if we can do um a few of the different olympians so it's those kinds of things you know things that are uh would be popular on social media and then also thinking about how we can reframe what used to be a standard alumni story um and uh chunk that out into smaller bite-sized snacks great excellent excellent um i think we have more questions coming in um i know uh um i can see them there so uh hopefully we have time to get to all of them but lexi let's get to the next question yeah missy says hi there did you have any concerns internally with your move to a more conversational tone and did you perform any message testing to make sure your audience responded well to it prior to the change i love a b testing i'm not sure that if it happened here but um i love the idea of it yeah um so i'm thinking back to the initial writing workshop that we did with erica and it was her she so she was the first person to present it to us and then it was our job to then carry the torch if we thought it was a good idea and even within our own team our writers really had a visceral reaction to this approach um some of that like there were there was uh elevated voices um in the room um pushing back on on it to start even in our own teams and so we didn't roll it out across all communication at once we started in different pockets um and um one of our favorite places to experiment is with our giving day campaign um from the start that was a place where we decided we were gonna take a different have a different tone and it was gonna be more fun than our other communication and when giving day did well then okay well that fun tone works can we put that fun tone over here now can we put it in homecoming can we put it in reunion can we put it in our newsletter right so um it's slowly permeated um there are some places on our website where you see conversational tone there's a lot of places that you don't um so it hasn't totally penetrated all at all copy everywhere um we get direct feedback every time we send an email out um so um there are folks that really don't appreciate it um and we have to take that in stride um you know some of our um older constituents really don't like being called by their first name they're miss or mr so-and-so and how dare you call me ashley um so we had to make that decision of you know are all of these communications going to upset ashley from here out or do we change our stance because ashley doesn't like being called by her first name um and so um it's it's challenging um to uh to have to make those decisions um and i i know some leadership really would rather take the path of least resistance um but we have shown that there are a lot more people who enjoy it than the handful of people that are are truly getting turned off um and that and that is a difficult decision to make so the direct feedback we welcome it um we do try to incorporate what we refer to as self-aware messaging in our newsletters in our in our communication back and forth with folks and so when we try something new we'll ask for direct feedback um sometimes it's just a small statement with a little emoji thumbs up a thumbs down um we included student quotes this week what did you think of the student quotes and really quick direct feedback from people um and then if they have something to say we're welcoming that feedback um we have a whole separate footer at this point above our standard footer where we tell people why we sent them the communication um and give them an out um so rather than just then having unsubscribe change your preferences here we have a whole footer that's you know if this newsletter is too much for you we understand here's a way to put it on pause for six months or if this is now is not a good time to be sending you a giving solicitation please let us know will opt you out for the next year you know those kinds of it again it's a different way of thinking about conversation um it's anticipating my email team lead will uh will say this she'll she anticipates what that first um inbox message is going to be to her so when she gets something delivered from the creative group and something so here build this email for me she's sitting then down to anticipate wall what's the first nasty gram that i'm gonna get when i send this out because someone's gonna have feedback right and there's there's a way for us to inject a little bit more self-awareness into the communication we'll do that because we we think it's a valuable part of of the conversation with the audience and we see really low unsubscribe rates and i think that is due in part to us being really clear with why the person is getting the communication you can't make everyone happy all the time but that's conversational marketing it is not just about how you write it's that kind of thinking where the footer you talked about with the option to unsubscribe for six months like that's conversational marketing that's anticipating like you know maybe people want these messages but maybe they don't but the way you talk to them could influence them to put things on pause and come back to you later um so many questions and my favorite one is one away um but there's a great question on policy and um lexi's gonna set that one up next thank you greg derek wants to know does your campus have any formalized policy or guidelines about one too many in parentheses unsolicited emails to students they're helping craft theirs now and have been seeing a lack a lot of inconsistency there we have texting policies that we send out on because we deal mostly with texting and a lot of these questions might be about emails but it's really the same principle with that and we're huge on having a texting policy for your school so i'd love your thoughts on this so i don't communicate to students um rarely do we communicate directly to students from my division so i i think that that's a little bit outside my wheelhouse um to talk about how many messages should go to students and if there should be a policy around it i imagine there are really good reasons to have that um we don't have a policy similar for the alumni or donor base and um i think i mentioned already the the places where i'm tracking um you know we've got kind of we've got standard benchmarks for each of our communications you know what do we expect a response rate to be for a text message what do we expect a click through rate to be for email communication and these benchmarks that we track every communication that goes out um and the unsubscribe or the opt out is really um if if something it's so consistent does those unsubscribe and out opt out rates are so consistent that if it fluctuates that's when that's when the flag goes up what happened was this because there was too much communication is it because the timing was wrong um has something changed with this channel um and and to go back about what's changed in the pan with the pandemic i think digital communication habits really did change during that time um more generations became connected to digital communication so the amount of people that we reach grew that way just multi-generational um but the frequency and and how we um how often we check and where we check our email you know you're checking it in bed and in the bathroom and while you're eating and all of those things i think really um became exacerbated during the pandemic when it was um one of our you know primary communication outlets um for more um for more places you know you're connecting with more places than you had before through digital only where you were used to picking up phone calls or you're used to going into offices for for things um so i do think a lot of that has changed in our metrics um and the volume and everything um uh is reflected in that in that point in time things really changed did i answer the question i don't remember you did you did you answered two questions actually you went above and beyond for us so i appreciate that actually lexi let's get to the one that i couldn't wait to get to right greg's itching to answer this question michelle asks what kind of tips would you give for crafting compelling email subject lines greg do you want to tackle it first and then hand it to ashley once you give your answer i do want to say and we i have thoughts on this of course but like this is the same as like i said with the policy like with texting and email um subject lines are my passion i love the idea of like those first six words and how important because people see that on their phone text it's the same way you're gonna see three or four words right away are you going to make those boring like attention or are you actually going to make someone open that so um i don't want to tackle it i want our expert to tackle it but i might have thoughts to follow up i can like have my we might have follow-up thoughts i don't know but i i love this um i'm very passionate about text and subject lines in terms of the preview text so i'm talking way too much i gotta let ashley um so a couple rules that we follow um rule number one above all others is that they need to know that it's coming from cornell university so um if the from so we're gonna we're tying in from name with subject line at this point if the sender if the from name uh is a person we need to make sure there's like a comma and cornell university and their title related to that person because i will not presume that you know who even the president of our university is and we make way too many presumptions um with people knowing who's sending them a communication if um if it's not or if they have a really long name or if the you know it's not in the front name that it needs to be in the subject line um cornell needs to be in there somewhere so that is the most important somewhere they need to know where the communication is coming from um the next part of it i think really depends on what the type of communication is um and [Music] there are you know we've we've tried we've tested a lot of things we a b test almost every time things go out and i gotta say um i think it's due to the consistency um of our communication that people know what they're getting from us um that subject lines don't really throw our stats one way or those a b or we just have people writing really great a's and b's because the stats really don't swing one way or another um tried to prove that having first name in the subject line would do something for us and really didn't incredible that's incredible yeah yeah uh you know a first name or like a good pun they're they're performing pretty much just as well um so um i we try to include emojis in our subject lines to catch attention um we try to make it as relevant as possible um we try to put smiles on people's faces um so if it's an engagement piece of any kind what's going to make someone want to open that that engagement piece um and um trying to think some of the other so i do consult with other higher ed institutions and other nonprofits um and what i found through email marketing audits um recently uh is just the naming like um uh people might name what is in the email um uh maybe you have like end of your report like hey we have an end of your report for you um uh that could be fine for the first time you send that email um because you want to be clear and you want to be sharing here's your end of your report but if you're going to send two or three more follow-up emails about your end-of-year report and you're not seeing the opens that you want um you've got to change the title from being end of your report every time um so uh it's that's a nuanced ques i think that's a challenging nuanced question i think um my you know what i would tell a new email subject line writer is to kind of go with what you would send to another person if you were going to send this to a friend that you know if you have another student or you have an alum in mind that you know is going to get this how would you write it to that person how would they know to open it up like what are you excited about that's in that email to share make that your lead make that your your opening what if you don't have any friends yeah you got an imaginary friend persona in your audience but but yeah thinking about um because i think that brings it back to the subject line feeling authentic if you can if you can put someone in your mind that's going to get that and you know it's going to make sense to them and you know they understand the voice um that's when i think it works very cool mike i don't even know if we have time do you have four more hours and it feels like we need we need to extend this episode we need like a part two we can do part two yeah maybe we do a part two i and i don't even know i don't think um lexi will tell me lexi's in charge um so she's gonna tell me i don't know that we have time for one more question or um or not lexi yeah i think we can squeeze one more question in here one more question yes so susan agreed with you when you were talking about frequency and multiple touch points for communication um they say that their system bumps people if they receive too many emails in that week what would be your recommendation with that take that toggle off whatever is filtering that um [Music] yeah someone must have set up a rule um i think and if you are challenged to um yeah someone's saying yeah it is um so if if you're challenged with having to push back on that role someone established that role maybe years and years ago um talking about how behaviors have changed um um if people want to be receiving multiple communications from you then you've got to open it up um yeah i don't know what else to say other than um asking for it to maybe be stretched a little bit farther because you're seeing a significant amount of people hit that threshold um uh let me just share a couple other things that we're tracking um so we do track um both text message responses and um email click-throughs as part of engagement with our audience and we want to know who our most engaged people are and if you're reading and clicking through five or more unique emails with the institution with us we're we're considering you a pretty engaged person um if you're responding to our text messages if you're liking a bunch of content on facebook all of these things are really important touch points to know how active the audience is and and what they're paying attention to and it doesn't mean that they're showing up to your events you know it doesn't mean that they're making donations there's all these other ways that they're showing us that they're interested and that they are they do know what's happening and so um so really treating these communication channels as engagement offers i think will help change the um change that part of the conversation um i don't know what else i can say about that but yeah i'm happy to do a part two if we have more we'll just make it a q a though we're gonna make it a serious don't make me impressed this is wild well ashley thank you so much for joining if um if anybody wanted to condense this down to 90 seconds let's say what would be the key takeaways and actual items you'd want them to leave with today um i would say i'm thinking about that trust triangle that i described authenticity empathy and logic um when when you're crafting your communication with those three things in mind you will build trust with your audience um they will hang out with you for longer um the frequency i think is so interesting and if you're the type of institution that is just sending one email communication for one thing um you know like okay we sent it to them they must have received it um time to start re rethinking that um that what used to be one email communication might now need to be three or four or five um because people's habits have changed they're used to being prompted and reminded um and um i'll just share one more anecdote um we sent out a email um it was a solicitation at the end of the year this year to a group of really unengaged people but we had we had a gimmick we had something that we thought would get these unengaged people um to pay attention and email one got maybe 13 people to pay attention email two closer to forty email three ninety more i mean we only had three planned but i really wanted to see if it would like was three of the peak um was it not and so these are the kinds of things that i think we can we can test in trying to understand frequency um how many communications does it take to really get the audience to do to take the action um and because of the way even big brands are handling volume of email communication um we need to think about upping the volume too very good well on that note ashley again thank you so much if people want to get a hold of you ashley.cornell.edu right yeah and i do share a lot of the projects that i work on and the articles that i'm reading um in my newsletter and that's at ashleybudd.com very good well thank you so much for joining ashley greg any final thoughts no no just remember that this uh episode of fyi was brought to you by mongoose we make a higher end premiere engagement platform cadence um and thank you so much for all the comments and questions i'm sorry if we didn't get to you right um i know andy shared that great link to subject lines check that out in the chat before it goes away andy is always uh he's like the best friend of the fyi um but uh mike we're getting stickers in i believe yes yes so we'll have some reciprocal gifts to give out to our friends so we don't want you to miss out on that and speaking of not missing out our next episode is uh july 19th and look at the dates again um and that is with uh louis diaz who is recently joining alma base i actually you know louis i think right i think you've crossed paths yeah um so we'll talk about donor participation i believe the title he's said is the renewable revenue machine for institutions which i thought was kind of cool what's that we'll have to put an emoji into that title to draw i think a cog in a wheel although people don't want to be wheels you know typically but on that note thank you so much everyone for joining we'll have this recording out to you ashley thank you so much this was fantastic thanks for having me [Music]