Bri Loesch is the Associate Email Marketing Director, and Elaine Armbruster is the Senior Director of Omnichannel strategy, at The Ohio State University. They both bring some unique insights about email marketing in an educational sector. Bri and Elaine also contribute several articles for their university’s blog, and they can be.
from ²վ Campaigns connects avid email marketers to the experts in this space, and help them learn some best practices and tips. Our aim is to connect email geeks and form a community that learns email marketing from one another. Check out ouramazing line-up of Season 1.
Also listen to Expert Diaries on:
Audio Transcript:
Aishwarya: Email marketing empowers educational institutions by helping them build a strong student network, connect with faculty and alumni, increase admission requests and hence the overall engagement.
When a renowned university decides to share their best email marketing stories and strategy, there’s no way we go without listening!
Welcome to the ²վ Campaigns Expert Diaries, and I’m Aishwarya, your host. Today’s episode is special because we have two experts with us—Bri Loesch and Elaine Armbruster from The Ohio State University. Bri is the Associate Email Marketing Director, and Elaine is the Senior Director of Omnichannel strategy, and they’ll be sharing their insights about email marketing in an educational sector.
Hello, Bri and Elaine! We’re glad to host you today.
Bri and Elaine: Hi, thanks! Yeah, thanks for hosting us.
Aishwarya: Yeah, so, let’s start with Elaine.
As marketers for the education industry, which is very specific, we’d love to hear about your experiences handling email marketing for a university. Can you detail about that?
Elaine: Yeah sure! So, I thinkit’s interesting we have a lot ofdifferent audiences of students,prospective students, faculty staff,alumni, donors, patient athletics. And,
that’s not abnormal—a lot ofbusinesses have different audiences, thepeople that they talk to, but what’sunique about higher education is that wehave different goals and priorities foreach of those audiences. So, for aprospective student, we’retrying to get them to apply or to enroll;with students then you want to keep themengaged throughout the process help themto graduate; with alumni, it’s keepingthem engaged afterwards and makingsure that they know about events thatare happening or how they can connectwith our alma mater; patients, you know,connecting them to the Medical Centerand the care that they can receive there; so there are a lot of different thingsthat we can say to these people.
And,the challenge then is how dowe do that knowing that you could be oneor you could be many of those things. Then the unique challenge on top of thatis we’re very decentralized, so you’vegot different colleges andunits that are speaking to all ofthese. And so, part of what Bri and I dois to help bring that together and helpkind of coordinate some of those touch-points and messages. But, the great thingis that with all of those differentaudiences we are able to learn, test, andexperiment what might work forone audience may not work for another sowe’re all about the test-and-learn, andour leadership really empowers us to dothat, which is great. So it’s a funenvironment being talking to all thosedifferent audiences.
Aishwarya: Wow! That’s reallyinteresting because you have veryspecific goals, and in fact, consideringthe diverse nature of the audience, whichyou listed, it’s going to be dynamiccontent for each of them. And it’simportant that each email goes basedspecifically to that particularly-addressed person.
And now that you mentioned about the target audience, say that you havecurrent students, alumni, prospectivestudents, faculty, and many such nichegroups, how to create and maintain suchdifference, you know, different audience segments, Bri?
Bri: Yeah, so I would say it’smore about managing the experience amongand across those different segments. And,as I earlier mentioned, we do have a lot ofniche groups that we have targetedmessaging for, but most of our audiencemembers actually fall into multiplesegments. So where the real fun begins istrying to figure out how to talk to eachperson as all of the things that theyare to Ohio State. So, for example, I’m analumni, I’m a student, a staff member, andI’m also a patient. Elaine is a two-timealumni from two different colleges; she’s also apatient, a vet-medclient, and a fan. So we’re a lot ofdifferent things to Ohio State, and havea lot of different affiliation.
Andthe fun part is figuring out how to talkto someone knowing that they’reaffiliated with us in multiple ways. So then Ithink for the most part, our audiencesare in separate databases which helpskeep segmentation clean, but I think thatcan also bechallenge for us. And when we go to tryto do integrated marketing efforts,we’re really working towards moreadvanced personalization and accessibledata, so we can provide a morestreamlined experience according to allthe things that our audience members areto us in the relationships with us, andalso what they’re interested in.
Aishwarya:Great! As you said, yeah, people come withdifferent affiliations and a differenthistory. It’s important to connect andfind a common pattern and put them intodifferent segments, so that personalizationand orchestrating all of your email andworkflows would get easier. So good pointon that, Bri.
So, Elaine, what are some commonly used engagement materials in your emails, and what uniquely have you found that works well for your university?
Elaine: Yeah, Idon’t think this is really unique touniversity, right. We’re talkingabout personalization and we findthat works obviously, but yeah, easiersaid than done when our data is all overthe place, when you have decentralizedpeople executing these campaigns. So,we’re taking an approach where it’s baby-steps and instead of trying to boil youa whole ocean, it’s where can we step inand try something in one area of ratherthan trying to solve for everything.
So,one of my favorites that we did lastyear was for our ‘Day of Giving’ Campaign. And, prior to that, somebody could receive up to four emails in a single day, and that was just because there were a lot of different messages that we’re trying to get to people. And so, being a very clerical environment, you want to make sure that your message gets to all the people, that it should get through right. In the past, it was multiple emails that go to those people, and it was kind of a poor experience for the recipients. So what we did last year was, we said— what are all the messages and how do we then bring those people within one email. So, we use dynamic content to put those relevant messages in front of people so that all themessages still got out there but theywere in a single email. We ended up with over 5600 differentpossible content combinations for anemail. And, we were able to reduce sendvolume by 36% but still increase butopen volume period of the day by 9%, andthen the click volume increased by 151%. And then,even better, our conversion was up 140%, so this kind of shows the powerand personalization, and that sendingmore emails is not always the bestoption. I think that was kind of aneye-opener for some people at the university.
Another cool one that we did is personalization with our insights newsletter. So there are a lot of different topics within that email, so like ‘health and wellness,’ or ‘science and technology,’ and what we do is we trackyour clicks. And so, if Bri is continuingto click on ‘health and wellness,’ then inthe future we’re going to show her‘health and wellness’ subject lines. And, weactually saw a 25% higher openrate by doing this and that translatedto a 22% higher click-to-open rates,because once they open, they saw thatthing that they were interested in.
Sowe’re doing a lot of fun personalizationthings to try to engage our audiences.We’ve tried a few things that haven’tresonated as much—we’ve triedcountdown clocks and then we found that the urgency wasn’t just doing itfor the audience, but again that’s thenlearn and try to figure out what works andwhat doesn’t.
Aishwarya: Wonderful! I can’t thank you enough for stressingon the fact that marketers need to takecontrol over data, because, currently Ithink one of the most common challengesfor us as marketers, putting myself intoit, is having data in multipleplaces. And, having it in silos that youreally have to take some time to bundle them uptogether.
So, as you mentioned, sending about four emails per day to aperson is definitely overwhelming, andthe solution that you guys resorted tois very interesting, at the same timevery encouraging for email marketers; howdo you find those niche topics, how doyou find those interests of the studentsor whoeveris receiving these emails, and how do youput that information to use in reducingthe number of emails but at the sametime having a better impact. Thosestatistics that you mentioned about—9% open rate, about 151% percentclick rate—that’s amazing! It shows theamount of effort that you guys areputting into building a centralizedtargeting system for your university, andthis definitely encourages a lot ofthem to try this approach.
Elaine: Yeah, exactly!
Aishwarya:
So, what are your thoughts about the use of storytelling emails, because now we’ve discussed more about dynamic targeting, personalization, which finally boils down to powerful storytelling in emails.
Elaine: Yeah, we’re definitely all about storytelling, andwhat’s cool about being in highereducation is that we have no lack ofcontent. So, name a topic, and we’re ableto find content on it, and I think ourteam does a great job of than helping usdo some storytelling and thentranslating that into email. It’s a greatway to really keep your audience engagedwithout really asking them for something,but rather you’re kind of priming themfor that next step for what you mightneed from them down the road.
Briand I are all about it, like I said, wewrote a blog post for our universitymarketing site about storytelling inemail, and just how it can help build brandperception, really focus in on the trust that you want to build with youraudience, and help them see you asauthentic. And so, we try to do that witha lot of the emails that we send out, andreally just make sure that we’re focusedon the recipient, how they can get thosestorytelling messages in thebest way for them.
Aishwarya: Really happy to see you as the thought leaders for content, because you specifiedhow content isimportant for emails. Content plays thespine of emails, and as recipients, peoplewould definitely want to receive relatable content.There’s a lot ofeffort that you’re putting on content,and happy stating that your team is actuallygiving content on all fronts.
Elaine: Yeah!
Aishwarya:
Do you have any successful ongoingemail workflows that work exceptionallywell and savea lot of time for you?
Bri: Yeah, so a couple ofthe examples come to mind that we’veworked on recently. One of which is aproject we worked on with our Business Intelligence (BI) team, because our baseis so large and decentralized. All of thecolleges and units are responsible forhandling their own marketingcommunication efforts and that includesemail. So they are putting in listrequests with our BI team, and there arenumerous lists that are coming in at anygiven time, and the BI team is fulfillingthese requests.
But, we are finding thatsometimes there were marketing questionsthat came through either from therequester or from the BI team, while theywere working on these list requests. So,then they would come to us with thosemarketing questions and it would createkind of a triangle of communicationbetween us and the requester and the BIteam. So it just kind of barked down theprocess and created somemiscommunication or confusion, and that madethe process take a lot longer.
So we tooka look at how we might be able tostreamline this process, so we created alist request form so that people couldfill out this form and ask list-specific questions and marketing-specific questions depending on the purpose oftheir messaging. That enables our teamto kind of have some visibility at thefront end of the request and get anyquestions and answers out of the way,first before the BI team, and itjust gave visibility to everyoneinvolved and really is help cut down onthat process. And, it’s also given us someopportunity to discuss segmentation withthe requester, so overall it’s been areally great improvement to that profit.
Elaine:I think what’s also interesting aboutthat is that we then have seenopportunities to maybe combine emails,where there’s two different people fromdifferent units might be requesting avery similar list for a very similarpurpose. And so, then we can connect thosetwo groups and say “Hey, it makessense to combine your efforts so thatyour audience isn’t receiving twodifferent messages about the same thing.”
Bri: Yeah, yeah! I think that’s very truebecause of how bigand decentralized we are. Sometimes, it canbe really hard to coordinate messagingand it’s hard to know what all is goingon across the university. So we do have acentralized email calendar that helpswith that, but this is definitelyanother process that helps with thatvisibility.
Elaine:Yup!
Bri:And then the otherproject I was thinking of for our emailreview process—we use Workfront as ourproject management tool and for universitymarketing. And, they have a proofing toolthat we use for email review, and thisallows us to collect all of therevisions and approvals in one place andit’s also interactive, so you can evencheck the links on the email and itreally helps to make that process muchmore efficient. Or before, wewould send out an email test and wewould get feedback via email frommultiple people. A lot of times to do the same feedback justwasn’t efficient, so that proofing tools really helped us cut down on time with email review.
Aishwarya: Mm-hmm. That’s great to know!I mean, having centralized system woulddefinitely help because as you statedstudents would not want to receivemultiple emails on the topics thatthey’re interested in. Also when you havelike a huge team or when you havemultiple teams working on email as it is,it’s important that there is astreamlining between things teams tomake sure that not one team repeats thesame template as the other. So that’s agreat thought that you listed of having a centralapproval or a central systemthat’s always informed about what kind ofemails are going to the students and howto combine emails at the event of havingtwo or more topics that relate to thestudents.
This brings me to this conceptabout Email Design Systems. So, I’m curiousto know if the Ohio State Universityhas such a system, and if so, can you sharesome tips on whyshould anybody buildsuch a system?
Bri: Yeah, so, I definitelyrecommend implementing a design systemespecially if you work in adecentralized organization like we do. But, I think you can really find someworkflow efficiencies either way. We use ‘Atomic Design’ principles for our design system, and what is Atomic Design is really taking your template and breaking it down into the smallest pieces in parts, and using those as building blocks that are interchangeable and just plug into each other seamlessly. So, these are really easy to add, to remove different content modules, and creates a lot of flexibility.
So when we created a designsystem, our primary focus was really onmaintaining brand consistency across theuniversity, and creating flexibility becausethere are a lot of different messagingneeds for everyone in the differentcolleges in the unit. We wanted to createa flexible system that allowed them tomanipulate the templates, to meet theirneeds, and then we also wanted to makethem usable. Beingdecentralized, there are people who sendemail every day, there are people thathave the email just a really tiny partof their job. So, we wanted to make surethey were easy to use, and I think weachieved those goals, and we wereable to reduce our instances of brokencode and troubleshooting, which washelpful and it also helped us to justbuild our emails a lot faster.
And, one ofthe things that I liked most about thisproject was we were able to make sureour templates were accessible which isthe huge focus for us, especially beingin higher education, and we just feelgood knowing that all of our emailsgoing out, no matter where they’re comingfrom, are accessible to our users.
Aishwarya: You madethe entire process of designing an emailsystem to be just a plug-and-play job. And, if I have to sum them up inthree words, I think it would be—consistency, flexibility, andusability across multiple teams in anorganization.
Bri: Yeah, yeah! I think that’sexactly what we’re shooting for.
Aishwarya: And,this shows the effect on the results—because when you just stated these openrates and click rates, a couple of minutes back,now I’m able tounderstand where the high stats come infrom. It’s about streamlining your whole processand having some clarity on the plansthat you as an organization develop.
Bri:I thinkstreamlining our processes has alsoopened up some time so that we are ableto do additional testing and learningand able to dedicate more time topersonalization. So, I think streamliningnot only helps us to be moreefficient in creating emails and sendingemails but also in and focusing ourefforts on other things so we canimprove our email programs overall.
Aishwarya: Certainly,that’s a very good point!As we’re headed over toconcluding the show, I would justlike to ask a quick question to both ofyou:
So, if you both had to pick fivetop email marketing strategies and putthem in a ‘Marketer’s Toolkit,’ what wouldthey be?
The whole listeners set is looking atyou for those five best practices that they can use!
Bri: Sure, so we both kind oftalked about it. So we we shared our topfive.
Aishwarya, Bri, Elaine:<laughs>
Bri: Yeah, so I what we had fornumber one, and we kind of went in order ofimportance starting with the most-important and cascaded down from there.
1. So, number one would be list hygiene. And, the reason being, if you don’t have a healthy list, I think you can really throw the rest of it away. So, list hygiene would definitely be number one.
Elaine: Yep, and that I mean, when Istarted at Ohio State, the kind ofthe focus is scan and cleanup the list because if they’re going tothe spam folder, if they’re getting blocked,like what’s the point of doing anythingelse?
Bri: Yeah, exactly! Keep our lists clean.
2. And, then at number two, I would saysegmentation. We don’t say the B wordhere—blast. We don’t like blastmessaging, so we definitely thinktargeting in yourmessaging and making sure that youraudience matches the messaging thatyou’re sending out is really importantto the email program.
3. And, then number three—strategic measurements, and that being just what are you measuring, howare you measuring it, how do youtell what’s good or bad, are your emails performing well, are they not performing well, so on. I think having some really-goodbenchmarks in place so you can figureout where to go with your email program,and also be able to use those metricsfor diagnostics as well as engagement. And, figuring out you know if somethingis going well or maybe not going so well,being able to detect that and kind ofplan around that to make someimprovements.
4. And number four, I would say testing and optimization which really just helps you to figure out what works for your audience and helps you build on incremental learning over time, so that you’re always improving your email program.
Elaine:And, we definitely use the strategic measurement piece to build our customer plans, so we have team meetings where we say what’sworking, what’s not working, and then we saybased on this what do we need to starttesting in order to optimize.
Bri: Yeah,absolutely!
5. And, then number five, I would saypersonalization. So, we’re alwaysworking towards that one-to-onecommunication and figuring out how wecan achieve that to better engageour audiences and be more tailored inour messaging. So I would putpersonalization at number four…five,sorry! Lost my count here!
Aishwarya, Bri, Elaine:Laughs!
Elaine: If I had to sneak in anumber six, I’dprobably sayhow email marketingconnects with all the other channels. So,that’s part of my new role andomni-channel strategy space is thinkingabout how emails connect with theother channels that we have out there. Sothat’d be my number six to kind of slidein there.
Aishwarya:The best and the easiest six-point checklist, I should say! And,I lovedthe sixth point that you added. That’s something of late even I’ve been talking around with people—the importance of email in the current digital space. Becausetoday, there are multiple marketingchannels, and you can’t deny thefact that email is a powerful channel. And how it threads with all the otherexisting channels is a veryinteresting thing, and it’s somethingthat the marketers definitely need to understand and implement intheir organizations.
Elaine: Yeah, definitely! I reada white paper it was about howomni-channel starts with email, and Ithought that was really interesting, andit resonated with me, being a one whogrew up in email marketing. But I think usually with an email address,you have some sort of information onthat person—it connects you to a person,so you can do things with email andconnect it to your other channels thatyou might not be able to do with socialor some others. And so, yes, it’s a placeto start in omni-channel strategy, andstart just thinking about how you thenpersonalize the experience acrossdifferent channels or touchpoints.
Aishwarya:Definitely! Emails give you thatflexibility to adapt data from anyplatform, and as you said, helps you ineasy targeting as well. So here’s that six-point checklist, something that anybeginner can use and even an advancedperson can use to optimize theoperations.
Thank you so much, Bri and Elaine! It was a very informativesession for me as well, because I’vealways been curious about how do universities use email as a chennal to engage their current audience, and the different strategies that go into it. I loved the way you stated about different touchpoints, marketing channels, mediums, some organizational processes as well as best practices.
And I’m surelisteners today would have got verydifferent perspectives which they canimplement into their current businesses as well.
Elaine:Yeah, thanks for having us!
Bri:Yeah,thank you!
Aishwarya:So, today’s session was the highlight onhow email can be used in a very-specificindustry such as an educational industry. Enough best practices that we can use inthe upcoming months of 2020! To listen tomore interesting stories, subscribe to the ²վ Campaigns Expert Diaries. Until the next show, bubye!
Comments