Welcome to this Alumni Donors and Friends audience session where we detail how we send to this robust audience from Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
Now really the main difference here is right here in this manage preferences link because to obey CAN-SPAM law, we need to allow people to unsubscribe from these messages and manage their preferences with us.
So I'm gonna go ahead and click this link because that test we were looking at of the Alumni Association magazine email was actually a test to an actual person, except it didn't go to their inbox.
It went to mine in the testing process, this is a hallmark, an important part of email marketing to test and make sure all things are right.
So what we're looking at here is the actual manage preferences page of an actual person who did receive that email when we sent it.
And if I click things here, I could unsubscribe them from things.
So I definitely don't want to do that, but this is proving the point of how connected all this is and that you are sending emails to actual individual people.
So over here in Marketing Cloud, we are looking at an email that was sent out back in April and has some personalization in place so we can see how this all pans out.
So right here we've scrolled down to the bottom.
Once again, this managed preferences link is populated.
We know that because we arrive at an actual manage preferences page.
Now this map does match the contact that we're looking at here, as well as that first name being reflected in the subject line.
Well, how do we get there? Well, for one, if we're sending here and Alumni, Donors and Friends, all requested lists have the Name Casual Salutation in place.
Now where we get this, well you can request lists.
That's how we get lists in Alumni, Donors and Friends, is that you send a request to advancement and we get things in place for you.
So this would imply whether you have a, what we call a static list, a specific list of people that you want to bring into the system, maybe a list of registrants for an event, and that you need to have a one-time list created for you, a static list so you can send to them.
But in addition and perhaps more popular these days is to have an automated data extension that ends in underscore a and that allows you then to sense that list over and over again because it is automatically updating based on the criteria in place.
So it's a great team there that you can help, that will help you with this.
So fill out this form and be ready to get some questions and the answers so that you can move forward with getting your special list that you want to send to.
But back over here in Marketing Cloud, we have that first name in place.
So a great thing here is that if you want to use first name personalization, it is right there.
So let me actually back up in this email, the content tab, because as always, if you're in here in Email Studio and you want to edit an email, you literally just click into edit.
So you click an option on the right to then edit that block on the left.
Same deal goes all the way to the bottom.
If we needed to make any changes to this footer, we could click here to do so.
Now right here, if you see this AMPscript in place, these percentage signs, that's all of that personalization I'm talking about.
So in this example here, personalization comes into play in the name up here in the subject line, that year code in the footer, because that too is based on the contact.
And then as well as that managed preference link at the bottom, all of that is populated based on the contact's data.
So I show this to you so you can get some perspective of what is all coming together here.
Again, we go to preview and test.
So what you would do, you might come to this page and this would actually be Xed out.
And if so, it would not let you proceed. Let's actually try.
So if I was looking at this email as is and say I wanted to go ahead and send this to others, we recommend that you send any and all tests emailmarketing@osu.edu because everyone on our team will see your test too.
Now before I proceed, let me scroll to the bottom.
So you can see that these percentage signs are here again, here and here.
And actually if I click this manage preferences link, watch: it goes to a generic page.
It's just no longer personalized.
And that makes sense because we're not looking at an individual at the moment for my example here.
So let's pretend I want to go ahead and press send, press send on this test.
Let's see what happens. It doesn't work. Now why? Because it says emails containing subscriber specific AMPscript can't be sent.
So that's great.
Because what this is telling you is that you can't even proceed with previewing and testing without looking as this would actually look to an actual person.
So that's a great bit here because then you go, well how do I do that? Well, you go back to the test send tab, and this is where we started that when we first loaded this page, there was already a contact here.
So all of this loaded on its own, but the first time you come here and other times you come here, this may not have loaded for you.
And in addition, you want to make sure you go through this step to connect to your actual list you send to.
So let's go through those steps now.
So click the blue folder.
It doesn't say to do that, but clicking the blue folder is how you will get in everything in Alumni, Donors and Friends or any other business unit that you are using to reach this audience is going to be under Shared Data Extensions.
See there's a lot of options there, right? But we wanna click Shared Data Extensions, then it's Advancement Data.
Next it's Colleges and Units.
So everyone is going to click those three to get into here.
Then you'll see as I even need to click a more button, all of those units' folders.
In my example, I'm going to get down to this folder here, open that, and you'll see now that we have targeted and excluded, we'll talk about that a little bit more shortly.
But what this is about is who you're sending to and also who you are not sending to.
Exclusions are an extremely important part of sending from this business unit because there are, we need to exclude people who have asked to not receive emails and those sort of things.
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We'll talk more about that shortly.
So as I went through those folders, hopefully that looked familiar to you because what I clicked on is actually what we detail in the Who and Audience video.
So that's great.
It's just showing how connected all of this information is.
Now once we are on this step, we can now see how it looks to an individual.
But we want to go a step further and press this Send Test button.
Now this is where we actually send the test.
So we've connected the data, now we need to decide who is this going to.
And we recommend that you send to your own email address.
But as I mentioned earlier, please include our team.
So if you click this blue person icon right here, it opens up a list where you can then select your test list.
Now, we have a test list for our team, and if you haven't yet, we'd love for you to create a test list for your team too.
So what you do is you go through your folders, once again, the familiar folder structure.
And I have a folder under my unit for testing.
And I'm going to click this folder and then right here, I have my test list.
So I select that.
And now it's in place.
So if I were to keep going, I would click send test, and then this test would go out to everyone on that email marketing list.
But because it's kind of an unfinished email and it was just for testing today, I'm going to actually back out.
All right, so with that, that is the overview of how we work on setting up emails to test and practice and get to figure out how we want to get an email in place.
And then now we are to additional qualifiers.
So additional qualifiers are the optional fourth section of your UTM campaign or your email name.
And these are useful if you need to further define the email's purpose beyond those pre-defined lists that we just looked at.
So we separate each qualifier with a hyphen and remember the fourth section as a whole is separated from fiscal year by an underscore.
So you can kind of see that breakdown in the example at the bottom.
So I have a unit code, then the audience and the email type separated by a hyphen, then underscore fiscal year, then underscore, and then our two qualifiers here are monthly-june.
And notice both of those are separated by a hyphen.
So we have some general additional qualifiers that our analytics team has shared with us that are common ones.
So that's things like date, if you have a recurring newsletter, it's very common to use the month or the date.
And then location, if your information is specific to a campus, so like Mansfield, Newark, Wooster, et cetera.
The name of a specific event or a degree program.
And also the sequence of the email.
So if it's the first invitation, second invitation, et cetera.
So those are just some ideas.
But again, the qualifiers are really up to you for how you want to identify that email beyond those predetermined lists.
Okay.
So I put a couple examples here of how this would look when it's all put together.
So the first one is an EHE graduate recruitment email from fiscal year 24.
So we have EHE as the unit code, then grad hyphen recruitment as that marketing activity section, underscore fy24, and then underscore and we have our qualifiers summer-2023.
So that's just an example there.
And then the second example is a non-degree awareness message for fiscal year 25.
So we have our unit code, then our audience non-deg hyphen awareness as that email type, then fy25.
And again, that's lowercase because all of this needs to be lowercase.
Okay.
Any questions about the qualifiers or looking at the email names all put together?
Awesome.
So if you are looking at these and you're thinking, okay, this is a lot to remember, we actually have a naming convention generator for you.
And this is like an Excel spreadsheet.
And basically what you do is you select each individual section from a drop-down menu and it'll spit out the name for you.
So that way you don't even have to worry about the dashes or underscores or anything like that.
It'll do it all for you.
And that's located in our resource center.
And then I also added this checklist because it's nice to just kind of quickly check before you send.
Everything in lowercase.
No spaces.
Underscores between each section.
Hyphens within each section.
The unit code is correct.
Audience and email type is from that standard list.
And the fiscal year matches the date of the send.
And this is a big one.
So if you are working on an email at the end of June, so say at end of June working on an email that you plan to send in July, you want your email name to include the fiscal year 25 rather than 24, even though you're working on it in fiscal year 24.
Okay.
Any other questions?
Thank you everyone for coming.
Um, it's all the details and email, right?
Everything's nuanced, everything's super detailed and we appreciate you attending.
So thank you for tuning into this session on Alumni Donors and Friends.
You know, this was the first business unit that we had and the first audience that we were reaching.
So for three years now, we've been doing a great job in Salesforce Marketing Cloud of reaching this really robust audience that we really love and nurture and we want to make sure that we respect them when it comes to exclusions and things.
So definitely reach out to that advancement team if you need a specialized list.
But as a reminder, if you're sending from an individual unit business unit, you won't have the same access to these shared data extensions.
So it's just something to keep in mind.
But in general, most people are sending from Alumni, Donors and Friends.
So thank you for your time today.
And please don't hesitate to reach out to us at emailmarketing@osu.edu if you have any further questions.
One last thing I want to mention is the importance of the university-wide calendar.
As we mention in the When and How Often video, it is vital that we are all looking at the same calendar to see what's going out to our audiences.
This helps us avoid over-saturating our audiences with too many emails in one day.
So please be sure to update that TeamUp calendar with your sends.
It's at go.osu.edu/teamupcalendar.
All right, I think that covers everything for today.
Thank you again for joining us, and we look forward to seeing your great emails in the future.
Have a great rest of your day.
Bye everyone.
Wait, I see one more question in the chat.
Oh, just a thank you.
You're very welcome.
All right, take care.
Now I'm really signing off.
See you later.
Okay, actually, before I go, let me show you one more thing in Marketing Cloud.
If you go to the tracking tab, you can see the results of your sends.
This is where you can see things like open rates, click rates, and bounces.
It's a great way to see how your emails are performing and make adjustments for future sends.
To get there, just click on tracking and then sends.
And then you can click on an individual send to see more details.
This is really helpful information to have as you continue to build your email marketing strategy.
So definitely take a look at that.
All right, now I am definitely done.
Thanks again.
Bye.
And one more thing, sorry.
I just remembered we have a great resource for accessibility too.
It's on our tools page under the accessibility section.
It's really important to make sure our emails are accessible to everyone.