Email Community of Practice-20260422_110244-Meeting Recording
April 22, 2026, 3:02PM
1h 21m 18s

Loschiavo, Mindy started transcription

Loschiavo, Mindy   0:09
Okay, so hi everyone. I'm Mindy Leshavo, the Associate Director of Email and Automation in the marketing team. We haven't had community of practice in a little bit, and there's a lot to discuss today. There's just a lot happening in email overall. AI is specifically impacting that, and we'll talk about some of that today, but
not a lot, but if you want to see what Gmail and Yahoo are doing in the inbox, it's worth a Google search. And it's kind of nerdy, I warn you, but we're going to get started. So everyone was discussing my graphic for the opening slide. I used Gemini to create this.
And I was very specific with my prompts where I wanted the agenda for today represented in Ohio State brand. And I asked it to remove things like three times because they always present something very busy. So just tell them what you want.
and the specs of what you want and then describe more of the content usually, but each tool needs to be prompted differently and make sure you specify brand colors. That's the key to the kingdom, I think, specificity. Okay, so today is Wednesday, April 22nd, 2026.
Here we go. Email Community of Practice.
I always open with this slide. All of our training has this slide. Email at a university is a team sport. Every email message we sent impacts how we're represented out in the wild for email. And it's a shared responsibility of everyone sending email to think about our sender reputation and to
build constituent trust and loyalty, and protect the organization from regulatory penalties, the big old can spam law. To reach the inbox, it requires thoughtful collaboration of the audience, content, reasoning, and frequency of every cent.
Today's agenda, Salesforce Marketing Cloud training and other email tools brought to you by yours truly. AI and content creation for email brought to us by Chad. The DAM, a Primo and email assets brought to us by Mandy. And marketing journeys made approachable in Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
By Kayla.
So we're going to talk about Salesforce Marketing Cloud updates and training, plus some other tools.
So university community updates. This is our internal audience. We have a new CRM match tool. The testing is complete. I am developing the training right now, but it is available for everyone to start using. The link is available on our university community training page, and I'll talk more about that.
in a couple slides. And then we have single journey send training is also just about ready to be put into Buckeye Learn. I will be assigning this to anyone who sends in subscription or university community business unit. It's just a nice refresher for anyone who's been sending for a while.
And it records in Buckeye Learn that you took the course.
It should only be about 40 minutes.
Subscription capability. Subscription 1.0 has been live for over a year now. I think we have close to 100 subscriptions live, something like that. And that training will be available very, very shortly. And then subscription 2.0 is just entering the pilot phase. So hopefully we'll have that ready for everyone.
Very quickly.
We have a new intake queue for Salesforce Marketing Cloud use cases and license requests. It is 1 queue, so you'll go over your regular use case, what you're doing now to send emails, and how many people you need in Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and then one
license case per user.
We have a subscription request queue that's been available for a while. I just wanted to reiterate that we have that. And a reminder that we have sender profile request queue. If you need an update to your sender profile, a new one, something removed, it's okay to enter it in this request.
queue and then myself or my team will be able to support that. Everest and Litmus requests are available. There's a whole webpage dedicated to Everest and Litmus. I'm not going to cover that today, but these are very cool tools.
PR Community Tool, I just want to cover a new tool that's available to us at Ohio State, the purpose of it, and you may request a demo.
So first up, I want to cover our new contact match tool. There's a contact match tool live now. It will be sunset this fall. So Brian Foley and our tech team developed a new tool for us. This tool is a little more robust than the current tool. It matches on more than one parameter.
You can have the employee ID, their name dot number, their Salesforce ID, their email address. You can match on one of those, two of those.
There is some matching on OSU dot OSUMC dot Edu and Buckeye Email dot OSU dot Edu.
But we have to specify that in the tool. And the instructions for on this web page, the GoDot page, walks you through all of that. But there will also be Buckeye Learn training soon for this tool. One of the robust adds to this is error messaging. There's an error message that tells you why something didn't process, if it's your file.
If there's something else going on and there's a support option there if we need it. It also will dedupe. So email addresses that are duplicates will.
disappear from your list. That way you'll know if your list count has been reduced before you upload it to Salesforce Marketing Club.
This is the Salesforce Marketing Cloud Single Journey sends. I'm just reviewing this for you all. There is a full webpage for the training currently available to anyone who needs a refresher or wants to learn about this. The Buckeye Learn will be available in the next two weeks. So hopefully
I'll assign all of that to you all. Salesforce actually does a good job of walking through the steps for you, and that's what this screenshot appears here. It's pretty simple. One of the big factors that I like to have everyone be aware of is please name your single journeys the same.
that you may name your emails and email builder. This helps you in the reporting area. Otherwise, you're going to see new single journey or something like that on repeat, and you won't know what's yours.
And the web page for this is go.osu.edu single journey training. If someone could share that link for me in the...
Chad, that would be great.
So let's talk about subscription capabilities.
Subscription 1.0, those of you using MailChimp Constant Contact, this is a capability that's available in those tools. And if you move over to Salesforce Marketing Cloud, this is the capability presented in Marketing Cloud.
This subscription 1.0, once we build it for you, there will be a standard form available that's attached to your sub ID. This is your unique identifier for your subscription. This form gathers basic information, first name, last name, and email address. Any list
that we import into subscription needs to have at least first name, last name, email address. We validate all of these contacts in Everest.
the contacts. So in the subscription for Salesforce Marketing Cloud, you have your form where everyone comes in to opt in to receive your email. That information feeds into the back end of the Salesforce CRM, and then it feeds into Marketing Cloud as a list. And then it refreshes automatically every evening.
so that your new contacts are pulled in.
and the unique ID for each subscription I've mentioned already, and the data extension is updated.
I'm going to review subscription 2.0, which again is in pilot. This is a more complex subscription offering. If you have more than one subscription and you want to create almost like a preference center, we can go that route with this tool. And we can also have categories or tags.
enter it into your form for segmentation.
Again, there's two options for this form. We have one that will automatically populate with the information you provide on the build. And
Um...
Then...
Brian, I just saw what you shared. Yeah, Brian shared a sample form for everyone to look at.
So anyway, it'll populate the form and it will feed into Salesforce Marketing Cloud and automate your contacts also. And same process with subscription 1.0. We validate email addresses and a tool called Everest. We make sure that the email addresses are real, so we're not uploading.
Invalids.
And then it connects to the CRM and there's a unique ID for sub ID. It's a little more complex for subscription 2.0. So we'll talk to you about that in your use case discussion. And then the, you know, the data is automatically updated. This is the standard page for subscription information, go.osu.edu, Salesforce Marketing Cloud dash subscription.
It walks you through the use cases and shows you the sample form for 1.0.
There's also a little blurb in there about 2.0.
And this is a sample of what Brian was showing that link. This is a sample of the form. This form is for our University Staff Advisory Committee. This is the mobile view of the form. It's branded nicely, simple. And again, we create this for you.
There's also an option if you have a web team in your college or unit to have your team build a web form. We would need to talk to your developers about it. But if you want it to be embedded in here web page and not just a link or a CTA to this form, we're happy to help.
help you do that.
So a couple weeks ago, we set up a new marketing website and we had some chatter on the Community of Practice team page about some links. Everything should be working now, so please let me know if you find something that isn't. But I've created a bunch of Go links for you all.
First of all, we're going to cover some Salesforce Marketing Cloud Request Queue pages just so that you guys have record of it. Our sender profiles request queue, which we spoke about earlier. Subscriptions, we just went over that one. There's also an ADF, Alumni, Donors and Friends, advancement list request form.
I just want to make sure everyone is aware of this. Sometimes I accidentally get the requests in my queue and they need to go to advancement.
And then this is how you request access to Everest and Litmus. This web page will give you an overview of Everest and Litmus. So if that's something of interest to you, this is where we validate those email addresses for lists. And Litmus is where you test rendering of your email creative.
It will show you different inboxes.
And then there's also a revoke access queue. So if you're someone who is in Salesforce Marketing Cloud and you're no longer with the university or your role has shifted, please let us know. This helps us keep our licensing count in check.
And then here are some standard go links. I think this is supposed to just be support, so my error. Okay, so this is the Salesforce Marketing Cloud tool page. This next one is the migration page. If you're moving from Constant Contact and MailChimp.
or any other third party thing, or if you're still using Outlook, which is fine. This is a webpage to kind of review what you need to be thinking about before you move over to Salesforce Marketing Cloud. And then we have a handy tool called a pre-flight checklist.
This one is specific to Salesforce Marketing Cloud, but the first part of this checklist is really applicable to any email process if you're sending bulk emails.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud audiences. This is an overview page for all of the audiences available in Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Our audiences can be a little complex because the data doesn't live in the same place. So this helps everyone understand how those function and what they're for.
And we have this new match tool. This is the link for the new CRM match tool I covered a couple slides back.
A good reminder for everyone in Salesforce Marketing Cloud, the naming convention for your email is the UTM code. The UTM code is a tracking code appended to the backside of your links after the email is sent. That's what appends to your campaign and follows engagement metrics.
There's also a page about Salesforce Marketing Cloud training and the specific list of courses available for that. And then there's the Single Journey web page that shows step by step how to do that. And our favorite team up calendar
I'll cover this a little bit later. The team up calendar is where everyone can put their email campaign sends on this calendar to help us understand if we're overlapping audiences on a single day and actually get an overview of.
what we're sending, how we're sending. It's a good thing to keep an eye on as an email execution person.
So now we're going to introduce a new optional tool.
It's called Agility PR Solutions.
This came about because Salesforce Marketing Cloud may not be the tool for your specific use case. And we wanted to research adoption. This tool is already approved for use as a vendor at Ohio State, which is if you've been through that vendor process, you know that that's immensely helpful that it's already here.
Agility PR provides a simple interface and a varied support models to match your team's needs. This tool combines real AI driven media indexing. There's a team of like 150 researchers on the back end verifying journalists for contacts for
PR and communications.
So there's already an established OSU presence in this tool. Wexner Medical Center and Veterinary Medicine are already using this tool. And I believe we have three or four partners getting ready to be onboarded. So I just want everyone to be aware, maybe reach out to those teams.
to see how they're using it, if that's of use to you.
So consolidated workflows are available in this tool instead of going from one software for sending your email and then another one for looking at social monitoring and listening and analytics for all of these things.
There's all of this is available in the Agility PR Solutions.
They also allow manual list upload, so you can send bulk email from this tool.
The interface is intuitive. It has a WYSIWYG, drag and drop, and their technical support staff.
is just amazing. So this is something to keep in mind.
There are some AI driven shortcuts, like all the tools nowadays. They have co-pilot to help with drafting your content. They have different levels of support, and some of that includes brand templates. Some of that includes building an email for you, if that's the level of support you choose.
And it's really a low barrier for entry. This one just, this tool reduces manual labor by automating the matching of stories to relevant journalists. So it helps you curate your contact list. It's very, very helpful. Yeah. And Brian saying targeting journalists by region.
by topic.
And.
It's very robust, and I think many of the use cases here, these lists are being managed manually, and that's okay. You can append your manually managed list with their generated lists.
Does anyone have any questions about this? This is a new tool. It's kind of exciting for me, but maybe not for everyone. But it offers an opportunity that Salesforce Marketing Cloud does not.
So here are some use case examples of who may be interested. One of the important pieces to this tool and where it handles specific email address types differently than Salesforce Marketing Cloud or a bulk marketing tool is
for role-based email addresses.
Role-based email addresses are created to message a function or a group of people, or it's a role that maybe has...
Turnover, I guess is the term I would use, maybe like representatives in the government. So there's examples are sales at, support at, rep 10 at, which is more of a government one, or newsroom. So if you're trying to get a hold of all the news channels, those email addresses are not sent to from.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud because of the challenge to manage opt-outs. If it's a group inbox, we can't manage opt-ins as well for those. So the audience segments that I wanted to point out for use cases, newsroom and media, so important updates and stories.
representatives and government contacts. So briefing notes, some legislative information that needs to be shared. Research overviews, the ranking process for universities, media monitoring, and social listening. If you want an aggregated
email sent to you at a specific cadence from this tool that is listening for your college or for Ohio State in general and what's being said out in the world, they offer that option as well.
Yes, Cision was the tool that I think was used before and that's been sunset. So agility PR is replacing Cision.
I'm covering role-based email addresses. I just already covered that a little bit, so I'm going to glaze over this for you all. This is just putting in writing the can spam compliance concerns with the bigger tools. And
What we have learned through our processes is that it's best to have more of a personal approach to some of these role-based email addresses. So if Agility PR isn't a tool that's of interest to you, some of these email addresses need to be managed in Outlook as a personal conversation.
We're going to move on to some brand information. Just a few reminders of things that we see a lot in the marketing team and specifically for email some things.
Just an overview. So OSU's brand collateral is a productivity win for everyone. The benefits of the brand support are great. Aligning to brand templates for email saves your time. It saves your time for your whole team. It's meant to help with the lift.
Um...
This allows you to focus on your content specifically and not the structure of it.
Our brand brings instant loyalty and trust. That's something that's really hard to come by. So our brand has been around for a long time, and the big block O brings everybody's pride, right? Creative energy can be focused on the imagery and the copy.
Another thing in email that's really special about our brand is this supports our email delivery. In email, there's a lot of back-end variables that support how your email reaches the inbox and the actual brand identity of your template supports that as well.
It helps the inboxes understand that we are not, we are the actual official senders of Ohio State's emails, and that we're not phishing, we're not trying to spoof, we're not a bad actor trying to act like we're Ohio State, we are Ohio State. So things that may not match our brand,
could land in the junk folder or just not be delivered.
All of these details help our brand. So and it helps you reach who you want to reach with your email communication.
This is the brand website. Thank you for sharing, Kayla.
There's more information there for email templates, but there's a whole lot more information on the brand center about our brand overall.
And so just a little reiterating, doing the Big Block O Proud. So this is an example of an EHE newsletter that has some swag for purchase. Just respect the system. Let the brand guidelines do the heavy lifting for you guys. It provides visual continuity. Keep the fonts, keep the colors consistent.
build on the recognition of our brand.
Unity over anarchy. We are one university. It helps us to appear like it. Like I said, it's all about the loyalty for our constituents. And protect the legacy of Ohio State. Every email is a chance to reinforce our shared identity.
And again, Brandcenter.
These are our brand colors. I think we get questions about this as support. It's always a good idea to refresh that for everyone. In our email templates, the Scarlet we use is the hex color BA0C2F and the grays vary, the footers 1 gray.
The text is another gray.
Yes, shout out to Sonya from EHE. I didn't let her know I was using her sample, so thanks. Brand fonts. Brand fonts are important for email. For email, the fonts available on each individual's device, so your desktop computer, your laptop computer, your iPad, your phone.
The fonts available on those, if it's locally stored, can change what your email looks like in the inbox. So I just want to remind everyone we have...
you know, sans serif and serif fonts that we use for our brand. In an email, it's mainly Helvetica, Arial, the sans serif, and Georgia, and Times for the serif. Locally here at Ohio State, if you've loaded our brand fonts, Buckeye Sans and Buckeye Serif,
Those will show up for you.
And another reminder, all caps and email is considered yelling. So please use that sparingly for something super exciting. Sentence case is the preferred associate press structure for Ohio State. So just a few reminders about comment.
Copy.
All right, I talked A lot. Does anybody have questions?

Batzer, Lauren   26:34
I have a quick question, Mindy. The conversation around the single send journey training and the, I'll say how the current training is where you go in content builder and then click send. Is there a reason to change out of sending from?

Loschiavo, Mindy   26:42
Mhm.

Batzer, Lauren   26:55
I I can't like just the general single send versus flipping it into the journey, or are we now trying to transfer into the single send journey?

Loschiavo, Mindy   26:56
This is.
Or.
So, yes.
So let's talk about this a little more. Thank you for this question. If you are sending it from advancement ADF and you're using TAS data, you can send as an ad hoc send still.
So if that's all you're sending, which I think Lauren, you are, but there's other people on your team that are, yeah, for you. And for other members of your team that will be sending to university community, it is important. So in the setup of Salesforce Marketing Cloud,

Batzer, Lauren   27:22
That is correct for me.

Loschiavo, Mindy   27:37
Taz has separate user IDs for all the contacts, right? So the contact IDs are the Taz ID, which is a shorter digit. I think it's 9 digits or something.
and the Salesforce Marketing Cloud digits longer.
For internal audience, recruiting audience, and subscription audience, they're all sharing the Salesforce CRM, and those contacts will have the same Salesforce ID.
And the way the back end supports these sends is, let's say, Kayla's team sends a recruiting email to someone who is a parent and a member of our faculty or staff, and they're sending a recruitment journey to them for their children or their self.
if they want to take a course here or get a masters or whatever they're doing, they may have sent that email to their personal email address and not their osu.edu email address. And let's say that that journey was sent at 10 A.m. And then someone in university community.
would like to include that same contact in an internal email.
and they send with an ad hoc style send instead of the single journey send. Salesforce may have queued up their personal email address for that ad hoc send instead of their OSU.edu send. So sending with a single journey send, tell Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
send to the exact email addresses in my data extension, where the ad hoc send will select the latest email address that was contacted.
That was really nerdy and detailed, but that is why, and I explained that in the training, but those of you sending advancement.

Batzer, Lauren   29:30
Okay.

Loschiavo, Mindy   29:39
ignore the single journey send in that business unit. I don't think it would hurt if you did send in a single journey send, but you don't have to.

Batzer, Lauren   29:50
Okay, so if it's non-advancement related sends, like sending to university communities, that just needs to go over to the singles journey send. And then obviously the recruitment and other pieces, but if it's advancement related, that can be those ad hoc.
Okay, thank you so much.

Loschiavo, Mindy   30:07
Yes.
And thank you for the question. And it all just shows how nerdy this all gets, but thank you.
Anyone else?
All right, Chad, you're up. Are you ready?

Rutan, Chad   30:22
I'm ready.

Loschiavo, Mindy   30:23
OK.

Rutan, Chad   30:24
So ready.
Thanks, Mindy. Great presentation. I didn't really understand most of any of it, but I'm sure it's very helpful to the people on the call.

Loschiavo, Mindy   30:26
Here you go.
I know, Chad. Welcome to email. You're in the fold whether you want to be or not now, but thank you.

Rutan, Chad   30:36
It.
It's great. I'm just happy to be here. Yeah. So anyway, hello everyone. I'm Chad Rutan. I'm the copywriter at the Office of Marketing. And just some backstory. When Mindy asked me to do this, she was furious. She admonished
almost every single one of you by name, which took forever. She was crying, using expletives that I've never heard before, and frankly, am afraid to say out loud. So that's why you're sort of stuck with me for the next 10 minutes or so.

Loschiavo, Mindy   31:14
This is hilarious. Get hold on, everybody. Hold on to your seats.

Rutan, Chad   31:16
Yeah.
That's not true. Thanks for having me. Let's do it. You know, let's have some fun or at least just get through it.
So, friends don't let friends drive drunk or send really, really long emails filled with AI slot.
At least, I mean, that's at least what I always say, and you can ask anybody. I'm just walking around saying that all day for no reason. So act one is broken into two acts. We'll start with the first one. Act one is sort of the benefits of brevity. Why write less and not more? So we'll go to the.
Next slide.
Okay.
You're ready. You woke up.
You feel refreshed, you got a great night's sleep, because both of those things are totally real and not just complete myth. And you're ready to write. You sit down, you crack open your favorite word processor, and then what do you do?
You know your audience, you know the project, you know what you want to say or what you want them to do, but what do you do?
Well, I can only tell you what I do, and honestly, this is a mantra that I apply basically to almost everything in my life, and it works out great. So what I do is, we go to the next slide, I do as little as humanly possible.
Just the bare minimum. And again, you can apply this anywhere and it works out great. Cooking, relationships, exercise, it all works out wonderfully. But seriously, when I do sit down to write, my goal is to evoke an emotion or get someone to take an action.
with as few words as possible.
and we can go to the next slide. We can see why that's important.
So, I see a lot.
I see a lot. I see a lot of emails like this.
everywhere, from other brands, other companies, and from within the OSU institution. But I'm not going to sit here and like name names of who writes like this, Ross Bishoff. But it's a lot. There's a lot of people that do this. And it's surprising to me because it's just so much. You can maybe make it 1/4 of the way through that.
until you're just gone. You're done. You've moved on to looking at something else. TicTac, Instagram. I don't know what people look at these days. Truth social, I have no idea. But in reality, if we go to the next slide, this is what the copy should look like, right? Top level benefit-driven information.
and a clear CTA because your email isn't necessarily the entire journey. It's basically the front door to get someone to continue on, right? So.
Why in theory does this work better than the previous slide? So if we go to the next slide, we can look at some absolutely horrific numbers. These terrify me, frankly.
On average, your average email reader takes 3 seconds to decide whether they're going to read, archive, or delete your email. And that's like no time. Can you even say 3 seconds in the span of 3 seconds? Probably. I don't. Let's say you do engage them. You have 47 seconds to keep them interested.
Now, people who know me know me as an optimist, clearly. But from what I've found, that 47 seconds is actually on the high side of things. It's more like 30, so let's go with 30. If you can't keep them engaged for 30 seconds, they bounce. You've lost them.
The last number is particularly interesting. 305 feet of scrolling. Your average email reader on one device, their phone, uses their thumb to scroll the height of the Statue of Liberty every single day.
If your email requires folks to scroll down to get the point, they're probably not going to use that allocated thumb motion to get there, right? It just doesn't, it doesn't work out.
So, if we go to the next slide.
How to do this? How to accomplish more by doing less? So obviously, the most basic thing is keep it brief. Stick to the most important, impactful, benefit-driven information you can. Emails with benefits. I'm sorry if this is the first time you've ever heard this, but
And I have to be the one to tell you, but no one cares about you.
No one cares. All of the I and we language, no one cares. The only thing people care about is themselves. So if you use more you language, more benefit-driven language, you have a better chance to keep them interested in what you're saying. And then the last part there, be a Sherpa. Again, like I mentioned,
Most of the time, the email is not the end-all, be-all. You're just trying to get them through the door to continue on a journey.
and astute viewers will see that those icons there, they don't have anything to do with the copy. I just sort of left them in there because they were in the template and people like stuff to look at. I don't know. So that's how I do that. Those are things that I think about when I'm writing. So if we go to the next slide.
We're going to move into Act 2 and the fact that AI is a soulless and terrible writer. But it is cute. It looked kind of cute. Shout out to anyone who knows where that robot's from. So before we bash it too much, AI can be a huge help to writers. Like depending on what you're working on, it can
streamline your work incredibly well. Brainstorming, editing, proofreading. You can see it's really good at some things, but there's a catch to that. And Mindy alluded to it earlier in the meeting. If we go to the next slide.
It's only as good as your prompts. Now, everyone who will present on AI will talk about all the myriad ways to prompt it and what to do. I'm not going to do that. It includes some links there, which I find very helpful, but...
You have to put in a lot of front end work to get it to work for you. I have there, you know, your profs are a creative breach for a robot. I honestly, when I use AI, I treat it like a drunk student worker. Right? You have to sit it down and be like, okay, get it together. We're going to do some work now.
I gave it all the background, all the minutia I possibly can, and only then will it spit out something passable, right? It's really about how much time you take in the beginning to get a passable result. And again, those links are super helpful. I use them all the time.
So, next slide.
no matter what it spits out. It is not a good writer at all. It is soulless. The copy it spits out smells of like ozone and ionized air, and people can see that. Like, there's this growing mentality where they're like, oh, I don't know if it's AI generated or not, but
It really, people can really tell because it reads lazy and it is lazy. Like if you don't put, if we don't put any effort into making it better, it just comes off as like dribble.
flat, bland. And so with that, I think this is my favorite point in the meeting where I want us all to take a second and think about a hot dog, right?
So if anyone's having trouble, we can go to the next slide.
Yeah.
Wow.
Those are great.
So those hot dogs spinning there.
are the rough drafts that AI spits out to you, right? They're actually not great. They're mostly filler and kind of mysterious because no one knows what's in them or where they came from.
But you, as the writer.
You're the chef. You get to take these bland hot dogs and make them better. You get to add the condiments, right? The ketchup, mustard, bellish. If you're feeling spicy, chili cheese.
You're the chef who takes these hot dogs and turns them into something worth eating or breeding. I don't know, something. We can go to the next slide.
So this is what I use AI for the most, right? Like.
I find it very helpful with these types of things. It can generate outlines, it can gather all sorts of information for you from across the internet. You know, creative ideas, writing prompts, like it can give you terrible lines of dialogue to sort of jumpstart your creativity. It can go beyond Word's built-in functions.
beyond words, built-in functions. It's better able to tone check, proof your work, and really it helps me. I feed this a lot. If I wrote something, I'm like, hey, does this resonate with X, Y, Z audience? And it will be like, yes, no, here's why or why not. So that's how I use it the most.
If we go to the next slide.
No matter how you use it.
whether it spits out something good, something bad, you're using it for generation, you know, whatever. The thing that everyone needs to understand.
and it's not really talked about much these days, but it's still there, is that AI is a giant. If we go to the next slide.
Liar.
It is a giant liar. It is a racist, sexist bigot that will spit out complete nonsense to you as if it's just pure fact. So the first time I had it hallucinate on me, I was given a task. I had to rewrite like a bio for a researcher to go on a separate
Part of a site, and there, you know, just like, you know, had to say the same thing, but different. I was like, okay, yeah, my drunk student worker can do that.
So I told her what to do.
It spit out. It created a completely fake foundation for this person. It was like the Earl Scruggs and Glenn Danzig like foundation for plant science that like this, it said this person was a chair on. And I was like, I don't know about that. So I researched it.
I researched our sites across the internet, came up with nothing. So I asked it, can you send me the source for this bit of information that you gave me? And it said no, that it couldn't. So if you take nothing away from this, like, which probably everyone will take nothing away from this, please, please, please.
Please just fact check what it gives you. Bare minimum, please. I beg, because it gets weird out in the streets. It really does. So we go to the next slide.
So I'll leave you with one very important thought. I've been in a real like...
metaphor phase. I don't, what's that about? Like, I turn 40 and I'm like, oh shoot, I'm gonna die, so I better use more metaphors. I don't know, it's weird. But...
Think of AI, right? Yeah, I know. But think of AI as a mirror. It can only reflect what it's seen across the internet and what people give it. And let's be honest, that's not very.

Loschiavo, Mindy   42:51
You're not old. Stop that.

Rutan, Chad   43:07
But you, as a writer, have access to a window.
And through that window, you can look and see your...
Recipient.
And you can connect with them on a very human level that AI never can. So that's your power. I hope you use it. If you don't, that's okay too. But that's the leg up you have to make your stuff better.
And as you saw, that's my last slide. We can go to Dr. Steve Brule. That was a lot, you know. Does anyone have any questions? I can't imagine that you do because the presentation was amazing and not just total rambling.

Loschiavo, Mindy   43:44
It was amazing and entertaining. And thank you for your unique approach to this, because I think we all could use a little levity. So I love it.

Rutan, Chad   43:48
Yeah.
Before we move on real quick, I know we're below on time. I have a quick question. You buy something online, the first thing is like, enter your email address, right? And then below it, there's a little checkbox where it's like, you know, receive promos and offers. And the first thing I do every time is, is say no. But it, but it.

Loschiavo, Mindy   44:10
Yes.
Yeah, same.

Rutan, Chad   44:14
It never fails that a week later I get an email where it's like, you're in the club. And I'm like, I didn't want to be in the club. How is this legal? Why do you even have the button there? Can someone answer me that?

Loschiavo, Mindy   44:24
Yes, they aren't following can spam compliance and you have a right to market as spam and they deserve that at that moment.

Rutan, Chad   44:31
Yeah, well, apparently that's everyone because it's crazy.

Loschiavo, Mindy   44:35
Yeah. Spam will, if you hit the spam button in your inbox, everyone, it'll tell tools like Salesforce Marketing Cloud to opt you out of everything. So it's definitely a thing. And also, for on campus, do not hit spam.
You receive on campus because you are employed here or you are a student here. That's my public service announcement. And there's important things communicated in that newsletter. Maybe put it in a folder or reset a rule for it if you don't want to see it. But please don't hit spam. All right.

Rutan, Chad   44:59
Yeah.
Thanks, everyone. Sorry in advance.

Loschiavo, Mindy   45:15
Li.
That's right. And Mandy, are you here?

Groszko, Mandy   45:20
Yup, I'm here.

Loschiavo, Mindy   45:22
Okay, great.
Thank you. You were going to be a little late. Wanted to make sure because we could skip ahead. All right, here we go.

Groszko, Mandy   45:31
And my presentation is nowhere fun as fun as trouts. Sorry.

Loschiavo, Mindy   45:34
It.
But it's exciting nonetheless, Me.

Groszko, Mandy   45:39
So, visual assets in the dam for your Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
You get to it by going to damn.doshu.edu.
We have everybody on campus has access to the DAO. What you see is based on your permissions. Everybody has access to Signature Gallery and brand assets. Signature Gallery is highly curated content, and it is on brand.
Brand assets are PowerPoint presentations, fonts, icons, logos.
These links all are on the Brand Center, but you can also search for these items within the system.
If you have more of a marketing and communication role, you can get access to shared assets. There are almost 10,000 photos and videos in that collection there.
Some, they're branded, but some of them are not. Some of them are stock photos. We have a license with Getty, and if they've been downloaded by somebody, I throw them in there. What they were used for, I'm not sure, but you know, it may have been for one little line. So
more caution is needed for items that are in shared assets.
Ohh.
So searching. There are several ways to search. The top search bar searches everything that you have access to. If you select one of the galleries, it automatically narrows down your search results to a collection. So if you search on Signature Gallery,
That's just what you're looking at. You are not going to find any logos or fonts. Same with brand. If you click in there, you're not going to find photos.
If you do click available, you're going to see whatever you have access to. And this, Mindy, is where I'll take over just to kind of show folks.
Some searching.
Okay, hopefully everybody can see my screen.
Um, I, I have a few more things in my...
home screen than most people do. Like I said, here's the top bar that you can search everything that you have access to. And there is a little bit of AI that a Primo, our vendor uses. It will give you some suggestions, word suggestions of
files. If you're searching for Brutus, it also gives you some visual searches. These are based on keywords that are already in the system.
I.
probably because I have access to a lot of things. I actually prefer to come into one of these collections and start my search that way.
because I don't want to see everything and its brother. So when I went to look for the fonts earlier, I came into brand assets.
And...
So I narrowed my search down automatically to 880 items. And then I came over here to fonts.
And it's pulling other things other than just the fonts folder because the system is actually reading these PDFs and seeing that there's fonts on these files. It's one of those great AI.
I personally know that the fonts are in a zip package, zip file. A primo calls zip files packages, so I narrowed it down to a package.
And then I can scroll through and see where it is. And I know it's called Buckeye 2. And so there's our file. And I can.
Download.
the original file and it will go to whatever place you have. As far as
What Mindy is really excited about is the email links.
Um...
You can get to them here by the public links, or you can just scroll down.
Everything in the signature gallery has.
pre-populated these links so that you can copy and paste these files into Salesforce Marketing Cloud. And these are pre-cropped as well.
To whatever I want to say.
So hopefully they look okay for you. Yep, yep.

Loschiavo, Mindy   50:57
Yeah, they're cropped to the template specs already. So those of you that are maybe not as adept at cropping your photos or creating digital files that are the proper DPI for digital and or the file size itself is over a Meg.
We shouldn't be putting anything over a Meg in an email because it has to be sent to an inbox and downloaded. And the inboxes have limits on file size for your email. So that's why this is super important.

Groszko, Mandy   51:33
Most of you won't be able to do what I just did as far as open that up and edit it. That's for a few people who can upload the files, but that is just to give you an idea of what it looks like, the predefined sizes.
and what not, and what the ping in the RGB, so it is, like Mindy said, small enough for it.
And then all you have to do is copy.
Hit that little copy button and then paste that into Salesforce Marketing Cloud. And I can actually just, you know, put that in the chat.
And you guys can open it up and see it. We called it email, but it can be used in other.
instances as well. The same with, you know, the original file and whatnot. If you ever have any issues, oh, I forgot to throw this on the slide, you can reach out either, you know, how you normally do for Salesforce Marketing Cloud or through
Website Support.

Loschiavo, Mindy   52:48
Yeah, we're running a little long. So Kayla, I don't know if you want to do a quick overview. We're going to skip ahead. I'm going to share now again.

Groszko, Mandy   52:49
Uh-huh.

Loschiavo, Mindy   52:59
If you can stay and hang out a minute, please do. We have 5 minutes left. And Kayla, let me know what you want to do. This is the last slide for Primo. And so it shows the information she showed in real time.

Smith, Kayla   53:06
Firth.
And I can do the, I can be speedy online.

Loschiavo, Mindy   53:19
You can be speedy. Tell me when. I'll be your van.

Smith, Kayla   53:23
Yeah, go ahead. Well, but I'll be quick. I think for journeys, I could talk for hours honestly about journeys, but the core slides at the beginning are probably the most important. So folks know the difference in single versus multi-step. But for those that don't know me, I'm Kayla. I work at SEM and Marketing and Strategic Communications. I have worked at Ohio State for nine years.

Groszko, Mandy   53:23
Yeah.

Smith, Kayla   53:44
I came from the Mansfield campus in admissions, college credit plus, orientation, a little bit of everything. That's how it is at the regionals. You wear 100 hats for one role. And of course, we do that here too, but at the regional, it was a different level. But I work on the CRM marketing team over here. So we do all the recruitment sends. We work with all
that touch recruitment data at all. Whether you want reports or dashboards in the CRM, or you want emails being sent to them, postcards being sent to them, you work with us and we train you until you're independent enough, and then we still kind of peek at your journeys afterwards. But I always like to start with this slide to kind of tell you Salesforce. When folks say Salesforce, I'm like, well, what part of Salesforce?
Are you talking about the CRM side where there's reports and dashboards and the data? Or are you talking about our next slide, which is Marketing Cloud, where all the emails come from, the bulk email? Because in Salesforce CRM, you can send email, but it's one to one. Whereas Marketing Cloud, it's the bulk email where it's one to many. There's single multi-step journeys. There's intelligence reports, automations.
We have automated Blackthorn journeys. If you all use Blackthorn, I have journeys for the whole university set up for confirmations, 10 days, two days, reminder emails and texts, as well as post evaluation messaging. And then there's also parent communications and some other unique things that we do. So we can hop to the next one. So multi-step journeys, what are they?
I was kind of thinking about this and I've never actually sent an email that was not through a multi-step journey. So it was kind of interesting, like kind of thinking about this and how I was trained that way and why, and then thinking about all the ways I need to express the whys. So you'll see some of those on our next slides, but multi-step journeys essentially gives us the ability to have longer communication flows.
emails and texting in there. There's some WhatsApp features that we don't use, but there are conversations starting about that for especially our international folks that use that a lot for recruitment. But yeah, the automation exit criteria is crazy important for us in recruitment because if someone cancels their app midway through a flow, we want them kicked out.
Um, and lots of other attributes, but we can go to the next slide.
I love this. We never said it and forget it. I've heard that statement when folks have a long journey. I don't like that statement. I'll tell you why. All the things in bold on this slide. There's bounces, opt-outs, general analysis, exit criteria monitoring, all kinds of splits you should be testing, validating and testing everything.
You can't set it and forget it with a long flow because there are lots of things that can happen, and you should be monitoring all those things. Even with a single email, you should be monitoring all these things pretty closely to the activation of it. But there's a lot to do with the multi-step journeys as far as kind of keeping an eye on things.
I always like this kind of tidbit, multi-step journeys are required for recruitment because of the exit criteria piece that we need. Because you, obviously we worry about the can-spam laws and we don't want people who are not opted in, syncing to marketing cloud, so we don't allow that. But once they enrolled and they're past the 15th day census date.
they're no longer considered recruitment. They're considered current students. So things change for them at that point. And I don't want to say you can do whatever you want at that point, but it's kind of out of the scope of where I work with you. So things do change, but it's not the same. But I have there the biggest reasons these are required for recruitment, exit criteria, weight by attributes, so the college comms don't
collide with what we're sending. Object activity steps, sometimes we have steps where we write back to the CRM to say this person's no longer a prospect. They're an inquiry now. I think journeys in general are way easier to diagnose issues. If you're telling me that someone didn't get a message, sometimes even journeys will show something that's not entirely true and I can still dig into it in the journey and figure out what's going on.
So, next.
The perks, so there's a lot of perks, exit criteria. If you have an attribute that's on your data extension, an attribute that's in your data that could change at any point in the process. For us, we have some standard exit criteria if they ever cancel their app, if deceased is true, if unfortunately we do have that with our undergrad and graduate population, some students might pass away.
We don't want them getting contacted by us in any form anymore. So we have some other things we do besides the email side of things. We don't want them getting postcards or anything, but we'll put, if deceased is true or active is false, get them out of the journey. Because we don't, if they're not an active student recruitment anymore, get them out of here. Also some other things, like if stage is equal to applicant and it's a prospect and inquiry journey,
kick them out. If they applied, we don't want them to get messages about applying anymore. And then automations on the filtered data extensions. So we get really complex with our, and granular with our data extensions on the specific populations we want to pull in, and we have an automation that might run for so many months to continue pulling them in.
Ability to diagnose issues, I touched on that. But versioning journeys, this is something interesting. Versioning is not copying a journey. If you copy the journey, the data is now separate from that original. If you version a journey, what happens is maybe you have a flow you want to change for people who the automation might pull in in the future. You can version a journey.
and you can change some things about your flow. You can update exit criteria. The data extension stays the same, but essentially you can have multiple versions of a journey active at the same time. And anyone who's in version one will continue flowing, and then any new people the automation picks up will then flow through version two.
Lots of complexities. The goal setting, that's something we don't use as heavily, but it is kind of cool. If you have an attribute you want to measure, like I want 30% of the people in this journey to apply, it'll keep track of that goal and kind of show you before you click on the journey like a bar on how close your goal is to being met. Behavioral triggers are some of our heaviest using.
Heaviest attributes that we use, engagement split, like if someone clicks a specific link, have them flow to this path to get a different email or a decision split. There's a lot of cool journeys, some screenshots in this. With this being recorded, you can kind of go through and, for if the deck is shared, you can look at some screenshots I have of journeys where those are used.
But decision splits, any attribute that is in your data extension, you can filter on that in a decision split to send them down different paths. Whether it's a date-based attribute of when they inquired with you, or they took some sort of action on the filters that you have. Whether it's with recruitment, a lot of folks, I see them take, like, if...
the app program or app plan, if their major is a specific thing, they can get a separate path for just that major. But you can also use dynamic content to do a lot of the similar stuff you do with the decision split.
Object activity, I touched on this for a second. If you have something in the CRM that you want to overwrite, that's a great thing that we use. Adding the campaign steps, we don't require those due to storage anymore. We used to make it whenever someone had a recruitment send. If it didn't write an IER back to an individual email result back to
to the CRM, which is also another storage suck. So that there's a policy we rob that now. Our business unit for SAE, we're the only ones that have access to that. So we don't really share that business unit with other folks and other departments. That always writes the recruitment sends IERs back to Salesforce. So if you have a contact, a parent that's talking about emails or a student that was.
Now in alumni, you can see everything that we've ever sent them for the last couple of years. Multi-step journeys allow for long and complex flows, but I will say this, it doesn't mean you have to have a long flow. We talk all the time about people getting lots of emails. If you just have like a few separate flows that you can put all like a few emails in one journey, this is the perfect way to do it, especially if you know the cadence and timing that it should affect this population.
I know we're at 1204.
I could run through the whole thing. If people are staying, Mindy, I can leave that up to you. I can just do the perks.

Loschiavo, Mindy   1:01:53
I think we could record it. I think this is just, let's get through your next two slides in detail and then let's do a skim. And you can hit the highlights. And if people need to drop, which they have, we're down to 85. We were at 121. So thank you guys for staying, if you're staying.

Smith, Kayla   1:01:56
Okay.
Okay.
Cool.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, I'll blab and we can record it, and people can just leave as they need to.

Loschiavo, Mindy   1:02:16
That's right. And thanks to all the presenters if you have to leave. Thank you all for supporting us today.

Smith, Kayla   1:02:18
Start.
Yeah, it was fun. I'll always use that meme, Salesforce is better than Outlook. I know that some folks do mail merges in Outlook. If we hear about this as recruitment, we do get upset about it because of consent laws and like recruitment emails or marketing emails. There's always the consent tracked in the CRM. There's no reason that your data in the CRM can't be used for a data extension in Marketing Cloud. So we will make sure if there's a training gap.
we can kind of get you trained, get you up and independent in Marketing Cloud, and then we can work with you on training you on journeys and data extensions. We do send SMS via journeys in multi-step journeys along with emails. A great example of that. Sure.

Loschiavo, Mindy   1:02:59
I'm going to pause a second. SMS for those in the regular population, that's texting just for everyone to know that.

Smith, Kayla   1:03:03
Yeah.
I should have put that in there. It's one to many texting if we do it in a journey. It's not modern campus texting though. I always have to clarify that. You can't do SMS in a journey unless you have the short code in your business unit. So in SEM, that's why all the recruitment requests that have one to many texting do come to our team because we're the only ones with that.

Loschiavo, Mindy   1:03:09
It's great.

Smith, Kayla   1:03:27
permission there in our business unit. I know there's some other people that do lots of texting.

Loschiavo, Mindy   1:03:30
Advancement has some SMS. Just so everyone knows, texting is managed by the FCC. So that's a government entity if you're not aware, and it takes 6 to 8 weeks to get your short code set up. It may be condensed somewhere, but that's the typical timing. So plan ahead.

Smith, Kayla   1:03:33
Yeah.
Call.

Loschiavo, Mindy   1:03:50
You'll be in a hurry.

Smith, Kayla   1:03:51
Yeah, another consent thing. So we do like an example where we use email and texting in a journey is when there's Blackthorn journeys that we have, like a Blackthorn confirmation, we'll send a confirmation text to the student as well as the confirmation email.

Loschiavo, Mindy   1:03:54
Yes, for sure.

Smith, Kayla   1:04:08
We can go to the next one.
Journey settings. So there's not a lot of cases where folks can determine in journey settings like that you want someone to re-enter, unless it's an email that uses dynamic content like our Blackthorn automated journeys, where it will change the content based on like, oh, they registered for another event in the future. They now need a confirmation email for that event.
Re-entering can be dangerous. So if you ever are trying to think about doing that, I'm happy to be pulled in a call to talk about you might need some additional wait steps or some attributes in your data extensions. Something in your data needs to determine that folks are not unnecessarily being pulled in. And we're in a safe space here. This is where I can tell you I was a Reddit thread because of this once.
Not me specifically, but Ohio State in general was, and it was my fault. This was more than a year ago. It was in like January last year. We had not updated these journeys in years. We kind of did the set it and forget it thing. And I was doing a big audit, and we wanted to update things, implement some more best practices to make sure things were doing what we wanted.
I had removed a single wait step at the end of the journey. And what it did was it pulled people in every hour that next morning to get the confirmation email again and again until I fixed it on a Saturday morning, which was totally what I wanted to do on a weekend. So that's where I can tell you that reentering can be dangerous. I learned my lesson, and now I have
what I like to call trauma testing on every journey that I have to face. So, so if.

Loschiavo, Mindy   1:05:35
Yeah.
You should create a meme for yourself.

Smith, Kayla   1:05:42
I could. So there could be some other instances at the university where the re-entering could be valuable to you. They re-enter only after exiting, so it's not like they're going to keep doing that, but there is a wait step, some best practices we can implement there.

Loschiavo, Mindy   1:05:42
About it, yeah.

Smith, Kayla   1:05:58
Current common uses. So this is where there's a lot of screenshots if folks want to peek at some journeys that I went into that have some different complexities.
So we could do that. I'm happy to do live demos for folks anytime too. But conversion to us as prospects or inquiries at Ohio State, prospects haven't necessarily raised their hand. Maybe they were a name buy or something like that. Inquiries have raised their hand. Maybe they've opened an email and we overwrote to Salesforce to say they're an inquiry or they attended an event, registered, something like that.
So this journey screenshot here, this is actually a screenshot of the left-hand panel is actually a screenshot of the journey itself, where the data extension is pulled into the journey, and then under that, the schedule shows the automation that's connected to it. But this middle screenshot here is actually what a data extension to us looks like. There's some ands and ors logic and specific attributes that we're pulling from Salesforce.
on that student's student recruitment. So the data comes from Salesforce. This is why we tell folks Salesforce is the system of truth for recruitment data. So this is why we stress so heavily that you should be using Marketing Cloud to send recruitment email. Excuse me. So the journey itself, you can see this whole journey space. You can see there's emails, there's the click area's got engagement splits, decision splits.
You pull in emails, you determine the cadence, and this is why when we do training, we tell folks that we're not going to build a journey with you until you have your content figured out. Because I can't tell you how we're going to determine paths. I know we're working with some different folks that are a little bit bigger on the email side, like athletics is coming in soon, and they're working on content.
And we're going to help figure out journeys with them on what those should look like. And we want.

Loschiavo, Mindy   1:07:40
It's going to be super exciting.

Smith, Kayla   1:07:42
Yeah, so this is where I tell folks, if you're a planner and you've got a flow figured out, you're going to be really successful with multi-step journeys if you have the plan and the content all figured out. Because if you don't have a plan, that's where it's harder, and you're going to create more work for yourself, essentially, by having to do multiple journeys where you could have had maybe one or two big ones.
So this one, for instance, the automation, like you can tell it runs, it's pulling people in continually. It repeats daily. You can have automations run daily. I don't recommend hourly because it's a lot harder on the system and there are a lot of people running automations. Daily is perfectly fine for flows. You could do weekly.
I, but yeah, we don't recommend hourly. So that's an engagement or engagement split that is highlighted. So after 18 hours, Marketing Cloud's like, hey, these people clicked. You can figure that step to say if they clicked, move them forward. And that's where the decision split tells us, are they currently a prospect? If they are, take them to that blue step.
the object activity and change that field in the CRM to inquiry because they took an action in the email. So a little bit of that, I'm glad that this was one of the screenshots, got to show you an engagement and a decision split. So there's strategic delays because you don't want it to evaluate people right away. Otherwise, you're going to lose people after so long that may have clicked, but won't be pulled in.
You can have random splits to test email versions. Megan on our team is our like AB testing expert as well. So you can implement actual AB testing paths as well, where it can work on the subject lines. You can watch subject lines that might perform better. And then of course, Marketing Cloud, it will help pick the winner as well. So that's cool.
The.
And.
I'm like losing my voice. I knew this was going to happen when I was reading like the 50th book to my child at bedtime last night. If I have to read, if you give a mouse a cookie one more time. EEG major tracks, another lovely screenshot from Sonya and EEG. So decision splits can be utilized for different pathways. But like I said, you can use dynamic content if you don't want to make separate emails. Some folks like to make separate emails because then they can see where.

Loschiavo, Mindy   1:09:31
Yeah.

Smith, Kayla   1:09:50
right away like what populations are not taking actions within emails. They can get the analysis quicker from the email engagement. So you can have a split. We can add Salesforce campaigns to your journeys if you wanted to, but like I said, it's a storage stock. We have a campaign retention policy now though, so I'm not as worried about that. So we can talk about if you need campaigns in your journeys, but that is not a requirement anymore and it hasn't been for about a year. But the decision split sends people based on an ad
attribute on different paths. So you can immediately tell like, oh, like, like it could be cool for like if you're thinking about alumni, donors and friends, like people who haven't engaged in so many days, or maybe they inquired from this date to this date, send them on this path. And you can have separate communication flows based on date-based attributes or specific filters.
And essentially people could be in different flows and on different paths. And we have that with admissions, for example, where there are different decision dates. So there's like 3 primary ones. People who get the first decision date, and they're told that we want them in December, they're admitted. The December folks go on the top half on a decision split, and then people who are admitted
after that date go on a different path to get a more condensed flow, which is good. We don't want them to get emails after May 1 anyway.
Okay, visit push. This was a cool idea I had two years ago. If people registered for a larger Blackthorn event for admissions, like an admissions overview and campus tour, we also wanted to encourage them to go talk to their program that day. So I was able to filter like pull all the registrants for these larger
undergrad admissions events or grad and professional events, and then email them an email based on their program. We piloted this with EHE, engineering, business, and a couple other areas, ENR as well. So that's something else if you've got attributes that you can filter on, maybe they attended a specific event or something in your program, or they indicated an interest in something, you can filter on that.
to then push them into another flow.
Right, no show. This was another cool idea. So this is another like Blackthorn thing though. So if you're not in Blackthorn, I know there's like lovely Taz and other things we got to figure out first as the timing goes on and more folks are brought in that tool that are non-recruitment. No show message was really cool. You can see in this journey for grad and professional admissions, they hosted
primarily until this last year, almost all virtual events. And we saw really high no-show rates for those events. So we were like, what if we send all the no-shows an email to say like, hey, we missed you. We'd love to see you at another event. I have followed so many people in this journey that took the action to register for another event.
On average, it takes them about three times to no show to an event, and then finally they show up to something. It is actually crazy, some of the people that will launch.

Loschiavo, Mindy   1:12:42
It is, but I think it has to do with the graduate professional audience because everybody knows what all the other things that are going on in your life and you really want to do this, but then life happens and you can't show up. So that's very, I think it's a kind thing to give them more opportunities.

Smith, Kayla   1:12:50
So.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. And we just send them back to the event group, which has all the different grad and professional events on there, whether it's related to program or not. And then if they did attend, they could have post-evaluation. So that's pretty cool. That's a section in the Blackthorn event.

Loschiavo, Mindy   1:13:01
To do that.
Yeah.

Smith, Kayla   1:13:13
This is the long part, the building and sending. I almost could talk forever about this.

Loschiavo, Mindy   1:13:17
Okay, so we don't have to go any further, but I think that's enough of a teaser with

Smith, Kayla   1:13:23
Yeah.

Loschiavo, Mindy   1:13:26
In Salesforce Marketing Cloud, the ability to send journeys is nuanced because of the data. So Kayla is talking about the Salesforce CRM and data that's directly connected to the CRM that is automatically connected to Marketing Cloud. She mentioned advancement and the advancement system, which is lovingly called TAS.
There is a delay in data. So there's going to be a little bit of a test and learn situation. I believe the data may be two days behind because files have to transfer from Taz to Salesforce Marketing Cloud and then back to Taz for that data extension to automatically update.
in Salesforce Marketing Cloud. So the list content takes 2 days to get refreshed if you want to think about that in layman's terms. So we just need to think about that and also focus on the TAS data in an acute manner.
But also for internal.
sends that are connected to the Salesforce CRM. I think the future state for journeys as we will be standing up some.
Templated journeys, as I'd like to call them, but if anyone else wants to call them something different, we send a lot of emails for events and Ohio State. I don't know if you guys are aware of that, but it's a thing. And so we could create a multi-step journey that's, this is your invite. There's a reminder. Then there's a follow-up after your event.
as a standard event flow. I also want everyone to know that sending more for events isn't necessarily going to help your attendance. Just letting you know that. And it's just creating more messaging for our constituents overall. And we send a lot of email here.
And then the other idea I had for that is a welcome journey for subscription. Subscription can also have event journeys. I have a new, I'm just going to say, how do we do this when our team is so small over here? I don't know, Beatrice, if you want to come off.
Just come off hiding and show yourself. We have a new contractor who's here with us, Beatrice Perkins. She has extensive experience in Salesforce Marketing Cloud and email, and she's kind of one of the unicorn peeps out in email. So she joined us on Monday, and hopefully we can
get some of these templated journeys available for everyone, and then I can curate some training for that. And Kayla and Kristin and Eli and Sonya and people in advancement, we can kind of get together and discuss how that should be, probably in the meeting of the minds, which is
Pretty cool group. What do you need, Matt? Matt Swift. Always asking a question.

Swift, Matthew   1:16:28
Of course, I have a question. So I took journey building training four years ago when it first happened, because, you know, we have a life cycle events specifically for students. So we have recruitment. They have journeys. We have advancement and alumni and donorship.

Smith, Kayla   1:16:43
Yeah.

Swift, Matthew   1:16:47
there may be journeys there. But there's a major life cycle that happens for a lot of students, and that's called graduation. I wanted to create a journey four years ago because the graduate school is in charge of all commencement for all graduate students, and they have a 22 email campaign that they have to manually boot up every single term.

Loschiavo, Mindy   1:16:53
Biss.

Smith, Kayla   1:16:55
Sing.
No.

Swift, Matthew   1:17:09
and manually send out. Yeah, because it's like, who's your faculty? Who's this? Are you attending? Who's this? What are you getting a gown? Are you not? Are you, there's all this other stuff that needs to happen. Did you get your stuff in? Did you do your defense? Did you, there's a ton of stuff that would be perfect for a journey.

Smith, Kayla   1:17:09
Twenty-two.

Swift, Matthew   1:17:28
for students graduating. I'm sure it applies to the undergraduate world as well. And so I would like to see some kind of movement or maybe there's example of where not just events for the internal community, but like there are these complex processes that are done that could be part of a multi-step journey that's for the internal community. And I think that that would be a great place to use this.

Smith, Kayla   1:17:46
Mhm.

Loschiavo, Mindy   1:17:52
Well, I would say, Matt, give us a month or so. When do you need to start your sending that? Like, do you need to send that in the fall or?

Swift, Matthew   1:18:00
Well, this is not a, this happens every term, and it's been happening every term since the beginning of the beginning. So.

Loschiavo, Mindy   1:18:04
Okay.
So let's meet over the summer.
Let's meet over the summer, schedule a meeting with me and Kayla, and

Smith, Kayla   1:18:13
Mhm.

Loschiavo, Mindy   1:18:16
Brian Foley probably and Bobber. And let's talk about what you need and then plan that out. But also if you have examples of all your content, that'll help Kayla help you figure that out.

Swift, Matthew   1:18:19
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yep. Yeah, I mean, all this is done through Outlook, and I don't actually do it. It's all done by the graduation services team out of Outlook. I mean, we also have processes for GPA, right? If a student falls below GPA, they get letters in their advisor, and there, I mean, there's just a lot of processes when it comes to the registrar,

Smith, Kayla   1:18:28
Yeah.

Loschiavo, Mindy   1:18:32
Ohh my gosh.

Smith, Kayla   1:18:32
Sick, sick.
Don't tell me that.

Swift, Matthew   1:18:48
kind of area of the university that could really use this for the internal community. And I'm sure all those people are in the CRM.

Loschiavo, Mindy   1:18:57
Yes. So let's get you out of Outlook because that hurts our hearts.

Smith, Kayla   1:18:58
Oh yeah, especially with the person service.
Yeah, the like person service update in Salesforce, there's the current student record that's in there and it would show like rank 4, and we could create a data extension for you and literally automate that. The one thing that 22 emails is probably the most I've ever heard as far as a flow. So we would have to see if the journey would let you do that based on all the weight by attributes, because you can only do 120 activities in a journey.

Loschiavo, Mindy   1:19:07
Beth.
Yeah.

Smith, Kayla   1:19:25
until they tell you you're being excessive and they won't let you do more than that. But I'm sure, because you won't have a lot of extra steps beyond like, wait two weeks or wait till this date. So you'd probably be able to fit it all in one.

Loschiavo, Mindy   1:19:36
Yeah, let's.

Swift, Matthew   1:19:37
Yeah, some of that can probably be compressed, but it's just a flow that's been doing this way and it's out of Outlook and the limitations there and everything. I mean.

Smith, Kayla   1:19:42
Mmh.

Loschiavo, Mindy   1:19:44
You can't even tell if they're opening things.

Swift, Matthew   1:19:47
Yeah, I mean, they have some stuff that's still even, as far as I know, it was still using an old access database that's sitting out there that's that they have to sometimes have to be on campus to use it because they can't even use it through VPN. So like we have to come up with a better solution.

Loschiavo, Mindy   1:19:55
Okay.
Ohh.

Smith, Kayla   1:20:01
Ohh.

Loschiavo, Mindy   1:20:01
Let's get you in the year 2026, buddy. Let's get you in it. Wowee, wowee, wow. That's all I can say. And I don't know how you're saying that, but.

Swift, Matthew   1:20:04
Yep.

Loschiavo, Mindy   1:20:13
Kudos to you.
how I feel about that. Okay, does anyone else have a support that we'll need? Like Matt, I would just put something on our calendars, like put it in the end of May, beginning of June. Hopefully people aren't on vacation, but.
Get the group together. Get the band together.
All right. Thank you all for hanging out, all 38, 39 of you until now. I appreciate everyone. I will probably create the PDF and get this video posted over the next week with support of others. We covered a lot today. So if your brain's exploding, it's okay.

Smith, Kayla   1:21:00
And I could make the brains really like, so I could talk, I could talk a solid hour, I could talk all day about multi-step journeys and different things we could do, but I'm not gonna do that to you all, but yeah.

Loschiavo, Mindy   1:21:03
I know, Kayla is just getting started.
Yes, awesome. Thank you. I'm turning off the recording.

Loschiavo, Mindy stopped transcription