All right, well, you guys can continue putting in the chat where you're from, we'll go ahead and get started. Good morning. My name is Nicole Blackwell and I am the Director of Advancement Communications and Strategy at the University of North Texas. And I'm excited to be here to moderate this case district for a deep dive on marketing and on how email marketing works. So today we're joined by Diana Kivils, the Vice President of Strategy at Ology, got that right? Host of Enrollify's Talking Tactics podcast and co-author of the brand new book, Mailed It, a guide to creating, crafting, there we go, go that book off, crafting emails that build relationships and get results. So we'll be talking about communication and email marketing strategies for all kinds of audiences. Today's session will be a Q&A style conversation. So first I will ask our guests some questions and then we'll open up the conversation for everyone else. We hope you will ask a lot of questions. I'll either give you the hand raise function in Zoom or drop your comments in the chat section and I'll filter them through to our guests at the end of our Q&A and we will do our very best to get to all of the questions. So a few housekeeping things, first and foremost, be engaged, this is going to be a really exciting conversation and I don't want you to miss anything, so make sure you're engaged. Keep an eye on the comment section, I'll be dropping some additional information and some links throughout our presentation today. If you experience any technical difficulty, please let me know, feel free to reach out to me directly in the chat. And then last but not least, turning on your cameras during this session is optional, but we do ask if you're going to ask a question after the Q&A portion that you turn your cameras on so that we can engage with you a little bit better, sound good? Take those head nods as a yes. All right, so Diana, thank you for joining us today. Thank you, Nicole. I'm so excited to be here. I'm very excited to have you. So before we get started, I am told that your friends get to call you Day for short. So I think we're all friends here. Do you mind if we call you Day for this session? I would love it if you call me Day, I would love it. Thank you. All right. You're so welcome. I always like to ask. I know, I love that. That's so thoughtful. Thank you for asking. You are so welcome. All right, so I'd like to start by asking, how did you discover a passion for email marketing? So there's so many different roads that people can go down for their career. So what made this one call out to you? This is such a good question, because you think that, you know, since I co-wrote a book about email, that this was like, you don't grow up thinking I'm going to be an email marketer. And honestly, it was it was mostly by accident, I think it was it wasn't a deliberate choice. I think at some point, I realized a couple of jobs into my career that all of my roles had email in common. And all throughout that time, I was trying to make them better, make them work better. And one thing that is like the common through line in general, even outside of email for me is like, I'm obsessed with being really effective and really efficient. And I just kept tweaking and tweaking and tweaking until I found something that really worked. And then when I found that, I'm like, wow, I should share this with a bunch of people. So I think the passion comes from, oh, it works more than, oh, it's email. But I will say, with email specifically, there's kind of another side to it, too. I have always felt that it's the ugly duckling of the marketing mix, like people love to hate on email. And, you know, I felt like I needed some love. So I that's why we're trying to do that. We're trying to love email again. I love that. I like that. You said that it's kind of been the kind of the black sheep of the marketing. And now you're bringing it back, giving it some love. Let's bring it back. Okay. So you recently presented at a case communication conference on this very topic. Can you share a little bit about that session and the strategies that you discussed? I believe we might have a slide from your presentation that we may be able to share. But if you could share a little bit with us about that presentation. Yeah, of course. So the presentation was titled, Write Emails People Will Read, or something like that. Write Better Emails. It's always something about that. And it's basically a one-hour culmination of everything I have learned over five, six years of testing what actually works. It really covers everything from the from, what it should be, the subject line, the copy of the email, the links, what should be in the links, and then how you put it all together. So the eyes can't help but see it. I wrote this talk for the first time. I created it back when I, or that moment where I discovered, oh my gosh, something I'm doing is working. What is it? Like, I need to bottle this up. And I really believed back then, and I still do now, that if people are not reading your emails, it's your fault. And the moment that we own that, and we start to do something about it. And so I want to give people the tools of what they can do about it. Now, the whole premise of the talk is that people will only look at your emails for two seconds or less. And I used to, the first time I did this talk years ago, I just came up with that. Like, how do I make people see it in two seconds? But then in 2022, Litmus, a big email company, came out with a study that showed why two seconds. And I was like, oh my god, I'm like a genius. And so it's two seconds because they discovered, or they tested, that most people will read an email for nine seconds if they read, but only 30% of people read. There's 41% of people who they call it skim. That's two to eight seconds. And then a full 30% that only glance for two seconds. So if we find the way to put the information where the eyes are going to go in those two seconds, our message gets across. And that's our job as communicators, right? So the talk is about how you do that using the from subject, copy links, and the formatting. Oh, it's in the chat. Great. Yeah, I added it. Look at you. Look at you. There it is. Everybody take a look at that. Print it. Put it by your bed. Memorize it, all those things. Just memorize it. And what I love about the talk, too, is sometimes email can be scary because it can be super advanced. And if you have the best ERM and the fanciest technology, yeah, you can do a lot. But this framework is designed to be used with any email, with any software, with your Gmails that you send in your personal life or the Outlook emails you send to your colleagues or whatever. It doesn't require any fancy technology to write simple copy or action-driven links or use an F pattern. So that's why it works, because anybody can use it. I like that. And I like the simplicity of the outline even that I just shared in the chat, how it kind of breaks that down in a simple way. So like you said, anybody can use it regardless of what you're sending. So I love it. So how would you say, there are a lot of people on this webinar that are from various different roles and functions within our industry. So how would you say email marketing strategies differ from fundraisers versus communication professionals? And what are some tips you can give specifically to our frontline fundraisers who want to communicate better via email? Yeah. So I, this is such a good question. Two creams and one equal, one sleeping pill. Someone is ordering something at a drive-thru right now, and I want one too. Right? That sounded great. Whatever that was. All right. So I love this question because the way that we're structured at universities and colleges puts us in these different departments and different silos. And so naturally we think, of course, our jobs are different than everybody else across the institution and in many ways they are, but when it comes to email, like the foundation of email and email strategy, it doesn't change that much. The most important principle before you do anything else is we need to add value to the people's lives that we're emailing. We need to add value, right? And so that's exactly the same for fundraisers and communicators and enrollment marketers and internal emails and student emails. All the emails are all about adding value. And so what changes is how we do that. Like how do you actually create value for your readers and your recipients? So for communication staff who may be communicating with a broader audience for different reasons, we might send a completely different stories or topics or content than we would our donors that we're trying to re-engage or young alumni donors that we're trying to engage for the first time. So it's really, I mean, I'm saying a lot of words to say it's audience centric. That's what we all share, but what our audiences need from us is different. Now on the fundraising side of things specifically, one of the things that I've noticed together with my coauthor, Ashley Budd, which many of you probably know, what we've noticed is that a lot of fundraisers spend a lot of time asking for money. Like a lot of the emails that we send are an action, right? Give now, donate now. And so that is less effective than if we spend an equal amount of time nurturing the relationship and offering value, even for fundraisers, right? And the way that advancement officers are set up or offices are set up, it's like you have your alumni engagement team and they're doing the events and the engagement stuff. And then we have, you know, annual giving, for example, we're sending just solicitations all the time. And if these two offices are not talking to each other, that ratio of how much nurturing we're doing and how much asking we're doing is off. So what for fundraisers specifically, we need to think about if there was a pie chart of how many emails we're sending and how many of those are dedicated to asking for money versus, you know, raising awareness for the campaign or nurturing and adding value or stewardship, it should be 25% each. 25% this thing is coming, 25% here's why it matters to you here, so you can be a part of it here, so you can help. And then 25% it's time to make the gift. And then 25% thank you, this is what you accomplished. And that is not the existing ratio of how fundraisers communicate, right? So I would say that that's probably one of the most important things for fundraisers to think about before they even think about what the subject line should say. I like that, I think that's good to know about the need to add value on both sides, because as we collaborate on different projects and different things, with our fundraisers and the communication professionals, that's a good thing to keep in mind. Adding value is kind of the underlying, yeah, I like that. Yeah, and if I may, like, talk a little bit about what that means, right? Because that's the other thing that universities do a lot is we send a lot of emails about ourselves. And this is not just on the fundraising side of things, like enrollments is guilty of this too. And so what does value mean? It means what is that person going through in that period of life? What is that person going to in that season? And how do we as an institution insert ourselves into what they're actually experiencing, right? If they're making a career move, like what supports and resources can we give them? If it's fall, what pumpkin pie recipe can we send them, right? So value is inserting yourselves in their lives in a way that is relevant to the moment they're experiencing. And it is not sending them our most recent news story that was published on our website, right? There has to be this mindset shift about value isn't just telling them about us, it's inserting ourselves in their lives. Most people, most alumni, all of us included, do not think of our alma mater at all, unless you work there. And so how, you know, like, do you really care, right? Unless it's something that's for you, made for you, or useful to you in that moment of your life. Yeah, that's a really good point, because before I was working here, there were a lot of times where I would kind of, it would be a distant thought in my mind as an alumni. So I do see that, yeah, that being a good way. Thank you for that description. I think that helps in this kind of factoring what it means when we're adding value to things. So you have said that one of your focus areas is helping institutions use communications as a tool for equity and access. So can you give us a high level overview of what that means? Yeah. So I firmly believe this, as a person who has had to learn multiple languages in my life, that languages are either a way to open doors, or languages, words are, or a way to shut them, a big barrier that you can put up, right? And like, I first experienced this and learned this myself, personally, through different languages, right? And like, just simply not understanding. But it doesn't have to be a language you don't speak for it to feel like, or to feel welcoming or to feel alienating, right? So when I started my career in higher education, and as I progressed through kind of this marketing and writing and web copy and email copy, I started realizing like, why is it that so many students are confused, right? When they're going to our admissions websites or a regular one, like they're looking at financial aid, nobody understands. And I started my career in admissions, and like, we would get so many emails asking questions that, you know, we would swear were answered on the website. And really, it's because the language that we're using, the word density, the complicated sentence structure, we're creating such a cognitive load, we're making it so difficult to understand very, you know, what could be simple things to explain. And even worse, a lot of admission offices, I will not name any specifically are so proud, right? Like, so proud of how much institutional knowledge they have, that, you know, they could never be replaced. But then we expect a 17 year old student to understand that same level of institutional knowledge within six months through the stuff that we put on our website. So it all really started there. So for me, it is language is a tool that we can use to either open the doors to our university or close them. And in admissions, there's a very clear kind of way that that plays itself out. If anyone here is a writer, I love using the Hemingway app.com website to measure readability. And readability tells you how basically how complicated is it to understand something at first pass. And I dare anyone to go to their institutional website, find a page that describes tuition and financial aid, and run it through this thing. And I bet it's complicated. Anyway, so on the fundraising side of things, it's very similar in the sense that we can use language to connect people to give, to be motivated to support giving access to the institution. Alumni also need access to the institution, right? There's this connection that's lifelong for them. So it really kind of grounded itself in this is an enrollment thing for me, like we're shutting doors. But when after in my career, when I worked in Cornell in annual giving, it was also about if we don't explain annual funds properly, people aren't understanding the impact they could have, right? So language is the way and it's magically also the thing that as marketers and communicators we control. We can't change financial aid policy, right? Like we can't change what annual funds are used for, but we can explain them. And so it's this really powerful thing that we have to create access and to make things equitable for all members of our community. I like that. And thank you for that app. I wrote that down. We had a few people in the chat asking about it, but I think we got it dropped in there. HemingwayApp.com. HemingwayApp. That's it. Yeah. Thank you for that. We're going to run our website through that when we get off this webinar. Okay. So there are so many different people we're communicating with on any given day. We've got alumni, young alumni, students, donors, athletics fans. Can you talk a little bit about the differences in how we communicate with these respective audiences and then how to determine the most effective way to reach each of them? Yeah. I mean, it goes back to the answer to the other question. If you are not doing audience research in your next budget cycle, set aside some budget to actually engage with some of these segments and ask them, what do you need? What do you want? What is useful? What do you like from us? Because that's really what we need to do. We need to put ourselves in their shoes and understand how we actually could bring value to their lives. I think this kind of question always lends itself to channels and channel choices. There's plenty of studies out there that show which generations like email more than other things and which that you can find out there. But for me, it's never about the channel, it's about the content. What are we sending? Is it actually useful? It might not be that different across your audiences, not as different as you think. So I think about what we're sending in two buckets. The content that we're using to engage and the content that we're using to lead to action. And so when you're thinking about engaging, it's not about us at all. It's about who you're sending it to, right? So for an alum, again, it might be a recipe, or it might be something fun, or it might be some tips for something that might be going on in their lives. And then to lead to action, we need to explain, and we need to nurture, and then we need to guide through the action. And that is all the same across any audience. It's just what actually engages and what the action is that changes. But the strategy, the strategizing part of the framework is very similar. You only find out what those differences are through research. I can't tell you what they are for your audiences, right? Because I don't want to speak for big swaths of audiences, and it's different across institutions as well. Yeah. So with that in mind, I like that idea of researching your specific audiences for what is important to them. Are there any tips you have on ways to, efficient ways to do that research? I know that's a pretty, research is a pretty broad term. So if you have any tips. Yeah. So, okay. Yeah, absolutely do. So if I kind of, let me give you some options based on budget, right? If there's a lot of budget, I would do a combination of qualitative and quantitative research. So everybody loves a survey. Everybody likes to say they're data-driven. By all means, you can do a survey and figure out what actually might be appealing to people in terms of costs they want to give to, or the types of appeals that might work for them. But I find that a survey on its own, personally, this is my personal opinion, a survey on its own without the actually speaking to some of these folks and hearing the stories and the why behind some of those decisions, it's a little bit harder to put together what it is that you actually want to do. So if you're going to do a survey, also please find a way to speak to a focus group or do a bunch of individual interviews with members of that audience to get the nuance and the detail that will add color to your data and your results. So that is obviously a big budget initiative. Doing qualitative on its own is great as kind of a directional sense of what might actually work with some segments and audiences, but obviously you can't say that it applies to everyone, right? But that's simpler to do. Like if you have an alumni board or a group, you can ask to join one of their meetings and ask them a bunch of questions and that can change your strategy. And it doesn't have to be statistically significant to inform you about what you might be doing correctly or not. That's one way. Another way that's integrated with email, which is part of the reason I love email so much, anything can be tested, right? Anything can be tested in email. Try an email that is all about your most recent news stories and then 50% of your audience and then try another one that's nothing about you and it's all about them. Like maybe there's an alum that's in a popular TV show right now. Maybe there's some recipes. Maybe there's, I don't know, something fun to do during the fall and see. See how they behave, right? Like A-B testing is so easy to do and it's cheap. I would argue probably free. Obviously staff time is to be considered, but you can test. That's research too. Does this work versus this? What if we try this? Does this work or not? And you know, things don't work. That's research. Now you know. The other thing that I would do if people aren't used, if you're not using Reddit or the internet in general to Google yourself, Google your institution and what people are saying about you, you're missing out. People are saying things about you, right? So if you, I recently, like I look at Reddit all the time to kind of see what the public sentiment is of the clients that I'm working with and there's always alumni making comments about what they enjoyed or didn't enjoy about their experience. People very angry when they get asked for money and the reasons why it makes them angry. So look yourself up. The other one that I love is if you go to Google maps and you look up your institution and you look at the ratings, like five stars, four stars, oftentimes it's students or alumni. And a lot of the complaints will be about parking, but like there there's also some interesting nuggets there. Like what does appeal to people? What do they miss? What are they nostalgic about? And that's all content ideas for you. Yeah, that's, that's a good idea. I have looked at the Google maps and I do see a lot of the things are about parking, but you're right. There are some, some gyms in there that are like, Oh, I didn't know people would come here. Like this bagel is the best one on campus. I'm like, what if you then sent a recipe for how to recreate that bagel at home? Like that that's engagement content. And it's so, it's so unique, right? Yeah. I like that. And I do, I appreciate you sharing the different avenues for research, because I think when we think of research, we think of very specific structured things, especially working in higher education. So all of those different formats that you can do can be still considered research. So thank you for sharing that. Okay. So let's talk about the frequency of email messaging. We talked about kind of the importance of doing research and the importance of having good content. Frequency is something that comes up often in conversations that we have, especially in working with different groups. So what are some general recommendations for how often emails are sent? And then specifically thinking of audiences that are targeted by multiple senders. So at the same institutions of athletics, advancement alumni, what are some recommendations, recommend strategies for how to avoid inundating our constituents with competing messages? Yeah. So I love this because the answer is always unexpected for people. Frequency is such a hot topic in email, because most people think frequency is overwhelming, because a lot of emails in your inbox is overwhelming. But what's actually overwhelming is the density of those emails. If you get an email that is quick and easy to scan, and you know what the point is in two seconds, that's not overwhelming. If you get an email that is going to take you 16 minutes to interpret, like you open it up, and it's like scroll, scroll, scroll, that's extremely overwhelming. Think about how you feel when you receive these things too. Like exactly the way you feel when you think of your inbox, or you get these giant emails. If anyone's a parent of a student in K to 12, you know what I'm talking about. You're like, oh my God, like I'm going to have to set aside time to sit down with this thing. That is overwhelming. That's overwhelming. It's not frequency, it's density, right? It's like how complicated it is. So with that in mind, there's actually a lot of benefits to frequency. So if you have a monthly newsletter that ends up being like, you know, extremely long with multiple things in it, and you're only sending it once a month, you actually have content. You could probably go to weekly, and that will help you in a bunch of ways. One, it makes each email so much easier to digest. Two, the more emails that you send, so the more times that you send email, your sender score actually benefits. Because tools like Gmail or Yahoo or whoever, like these receiving email companies, they use every single email to evaluate how good of a sender you are. And if you're only sending an email once a month, you're only giving them data once a month. And because that email is overwhelming, people are not clicking on it, you look bad, right? But if you send more emails, more data, and they're shorter and more engaging, right, easier to digest, and people are clicking, reading, interacting, that's good for you. So when the sender score goes up, you don't end up in spam, you don't end up in the promotions tab, and you actually land in the inbox. So frequency is actually good. But the big caveat is it has to be relevant, right? Back to the research and the content. It can't just be a weekly email that has nothing to do with anything I care about, an event I would never attend, your most recent story that has nothing to do with my life or anything I'm interested in. That's not relevant to me. It has to be frequent and relevant to actually matter. Now, the other part of your question was, what happens when multiple areas of the institution are sending emails to the same audience? And I would say there, we have to be so, so careful. Like, if you are not coordinating with anyone else who is emailing your audience, you have to start right now. You have to start right now. And part of the reason for that is like, we might think, and I saw this question in the chat, right? Like, if 25% of our emails are ask emails, how many more emails can we send? Well, like, the chances are they're already receiving other emails. It's not just what you are sending, right? It's the full picture of what they are receiving. So, we need to shift our mindset from my email program is what I'm sending to my email program is what my audience is receiving. And that might be way more than what you and your job are sending specifically. So, I start now. The easiest way to do this is to make it this collaborative thing where everyone has a shared calendar. And in the first year, I always say, all you care about the first year is knowing what is happening, what is going out. And then in later years, year two, year three, you try to coordinate. You say, well, you remember last year when we sent seven emails in one day, that was horrible, right? We shouldn't do that again, right? So, you start with the visibility, and then you try to make progress. If you're in a culture resistant to doing this, but if you're in a great culture, that's like, no, you're right. We really need to think about the audience experience, then build your strategy together, right? Because if you're in annual giving, your emails might be the 25% ask, and alumni engagement is doing all the other stuff, right? Like, because you're collaborating, you're coordinating. You don't have to take it all on yourself. So, it's really important. There's actually a strategy in the book to working with stakeholders. There's a whole chapter, actually, working with stakeholders on how to make this happen, but you have to do it. Like, it's not optional. I like that. I think that's a really good point about how we are not the only ones sending the email, because I feel like a lot of times we get so consumed in our work and what we have to do, we kind of lose sight of the fact that everyone's getting emailed. So, kind of to follow up on that, I'm curious to know thoughts about when you work at, because there are different size institutions in different areas, and some institutions kind of collaborate some of their divisions and departments. Is there a kind of best practice for the shared calendar function, or just the communication in general to make sure that we're all kind of aware of what the other hand's doing? Yeah, I mean, I don't, again, it doesn't have to be anything fancy, right? Like, I used to, I've done this at a few, like, a few places. I always, I was a fan of Airtable for this kind of work, because there can be kind of public links, anyone can add things, there's a cheap or free version even, but it can be any tool that you have that people can share. It can be a document, like a Word or Excel document, right? The best practice is less about how you keep track of it, and more about buy-in. And so, I would always just try to go to the, like, who is, first of all, who controls the list, right? Who gives people the emails? And figure that out, like, how do people get access to the list? If you're in a situation in which that's controlled centrally, and you happen to be in central, great. Like, you then, you have power, right? Because you control the list. You can say, hey, you know, let's meet, let's talk about what we're going to do next year. And, you know, lists will only be released if, like, your strategy is part of this global strategy. If that's not the case, and at a lot of schools it's not the case, like, everybody just has access, or they have their own lists, then it's a lot more about social capital, right? One approach is go to the leader. Like, you know, all these offices might report up, and up, and up, like, who's the person, everybody, that's on top of everybody. And you might not be able to go to that person yourself directly, but you can work with your leader, and they can work with their leader, and have a conversation. Like, hey, I notice that we're all doing, like, this experience must be terrible, because, you know, alumni are receiving all these disjointed emails. And as much as you can, when you have these conversations, come prepared with as much data as you have. But my favorite tool, my favorite best practice tool, is find one or two, like, worst use case, worst scenarios. So, for example, when I was at Cornell, and I was in charge of their giving day email strategy, I realized, you know, any unit, any college, anyone could email the alumni on giving day. And we can imagine how bad that is, like, how bad that experience is going to be. But I looked in the email tool for the alum that received the most emails in a day, something like 17, something like that. And so, that was bad, but they were also not coordinated. So, they received, like, six emails at 9am, and then nothing until noon. And then, so, it was really bad. And from all these different areas of the institution, because they swore, right, because this person graduated from here, or played in this sport, or whatever, that they're going to give to me, like, their affinity is to me. But the reality is the affinity is to the institution at some point, right, especially on a giving day. And that person didn't make a gift that day, but they made a gift to the chorus who didn't email them at all. And so, I brought that as the worst use case to the giving day committee to say, we need to coordinate this, like, we can't just give out the emails, because this can happen. And if this happens, they unsubscribed and they gave to the chorus, we're going to lose people, right. And these worst use cases serve as this example, right. So, it's kind of like I said, with quant and qual earlier, the data tells you how bad it is. But the example is what people remember. The example creates emotion. And so, best practice, that's the best practice. Like, bring the example that will create emotion, because that will get you more buy-in. I like that. And remind, a reminder of, like, what not to do, or the reason we don't do that. Oh, my gosh, the reason we don't do it. Yeah. That email at 9am, oh, yeah, that's a good example to use. Everybody write that one down. Like, I already know it's giving day, stop. Yeah, it's so bad. Okay. So, you and I have previously chatted a little bit about Enrollify, and the intention behind the platform, and some topic for some upcoming kind of episode that you're working on. Can you share a little bit about your podcast and your work within Enrollify? Yeah. So, my podcast is called Talking Tactics. It's about a year and a half old now. I wanted to create a podcast that, in my opinion, filled a gap in the podcast offering at the time. And, you know, when you attend a conference, when you listen to the podcast, like, I'm always inspired. I always learn something. But I, because of the roles that I had, or kind of the position I was in at the universities I was working at, I couldn't just come back to my campus and implement a whole new strategy, or, you know, implement a whole new piece of software. Like, I couldn't do that, right? I didn't have the authority, or the budget, or anything. So, I wanted to create a podcast that was for the person like me, in, like, an entry-level or mid-level job, and, like, with the scope of the things that I could control, which are tactics, right? Like, maybe budget is set, strategy is set, but how I do it, like, whether I send an email, or a text, or the type of email that I send, or, you know, how I use my paid media budget, whatever, I can control that. So, that's what Talking Tactics is. It's one episode devoted to one tactic that can be implemented with limited resources. And up until now, it's focused a lot on enrollment, and marketing communication stuff, like reputation stuff, showcasing research, that kind of thing. But starting next month, there's going to be some advancement fundraising tactics in there, too. The first one that I'm going to record, I'm so excited, is Ohio University's Name a Squirrel on their Giving Day, and, like, how much participation that got them. Like, if you gave $18, you can name a squirrel on campus, and you get, like, a certificate for it. I love that. So, Katie Allgood is going to be my first guest talking about how they pull that off, kind of fundraising-related. I will say, one of my, I didn't go into the podcast thinking this would happen, but it's one of my favorite unintended consequences, is the nature of what's on the show. Tactics, entry-level, mid-level, is bringing a lot of people onto the show that are not used to speaking, or sharing their work, or thinking their work is important or impactful, right? Because they're the ones doing it. They're in it. They're the ones who, you know, you might not think that the way you wrote that email actually made a huge difference, and so somebody tells you it made a huge difference, right? So, all my guests are like, oh my god, this is my first time ever doing a podcast, or, you know, I'm so nervous, and it's so cute. And then, often, after they do that, I always tell them, like, go and brag to your boss that you did this, but then they feel this confidence to, like, submit a proposal to a conference, or something like that, and then they go on and speak, and, like, it just opens this whole world to them, and I'm so proud of that. Like, it's my favorite part of hosting this podcast. That's amazing. That is a really good feeling, to kind of inspire people to want to do something bigger. Love it. And then, really quick, Enrollify, you and I talked about it briefly, because I didn't really have a good understanding of it. Do you have a quick, kind of, high-level, kind of, sentence we can use to describe what Enrollify is for those people? Yeah, so Enrollify is a network that provides professional development for high education professionals, to help them grow in whatever role that they have. And so there's a lot of podcasts because that's originally how the network started, but they also share white papers, they share more and more webinars now, and there's one or two summits a year, so these free conferences that folks can attend. There's one in person, it's not free, but the virtual part of it is free. And there's actually one coming up later in October. So it's essentially a free-ish, not all free, professional development resource that really adds to some of the stuff that's available out there that's more in person. One last question before we jump into the chat. You co-authored a book, you just talked about it, mailed it, congratulations on that. What would you say are a few key takeaways from the book and anything you learned in the writing process? Yeah, so the key takeaways of the book, basically email is about relationships. That's probably the most important foundational thing. Email is about adding value and relationships. It's not about converting and cold sales leads or anything like that. We don't, my co-author and I, we don't think of email that way, and we really think for email to be effective long-term, you can't think about it that way either. It's a tool that can be so intimate and so personal and really establish a back-and-forth between two people or a person in an organization. And when we think about its potential that way, it becomes less this mass communication tool that is the reason people are ignoring it. So that's the first foundational takeaway of the book. The second thing I think that is foundational is really understand, everything in the book is backed by science in some way. So Ashley and I take these models that we find other places and we apply it to email marketing. And so it's the reading the email in two seconds part, it's we just know what the eyes are gonna do, so this is what you need to do to make sure that before they even realize it, your point has been made. And so it's simple, it's easy to read, and it's directly applicable to anyone that writes an email for any reason. Now the book is written for email marketers, so there's a bunch of chapters that are like audience segmentation, setting up an email operation, email strategy, things like that, that not every person needs to read. But there are the two chapters that my talk at CASE was based on that are all about how do you make it happen in two seconds, which is for anyone. In terms of what we learned in the process, really it's, you need to have a project management plan. Like you can't write a book, especially with a co-author, and especially remotely with a co-author, without having some sort of way to organize yourselves. So we use Basecamp. You also have to really like each other and respect each other. And Ashley and I, we have been friends for a long time and like deeply admire each other, and each other's expertise. And what I love about this book is that it's ours. It isn't half hers, half mine. It isn't, this is my chapter, this is your chapter. It doesn't matter. Our audience doesn't need to know. It's ours. We created it together for our industry. And I think that is, I think one of the most important things that we learned is, you know, it's truly a collaboration. Yeah, I love that. Collaboration is one of my favorite things about this interview, so thank you for that. Okay, so we do have some questions for you from our chat. So I'll ask, let's see, what are your thoughts about methods of trying to get, what are your thoughts about methods of trying to get people back who opt out of a category or unsubscribe completely to your emails? Oh, yeah, that's a rough situation to be in. I mean, my first method is prevention. The more you can do to prevent a complete unsubscribe, the better. So one tip that I'll share is, especially when you know that you are going to be a lot, like if it's a Giving Day, for example, or it's a campaign launch or something like that, I am a big fan of sending an email that sets expectations. Like, listen, tomorrow, we're launching this thing. There's going to be, you know, four emails in a day, they're going to come at this time, this is what's in them. If you don't want to be a part of that, let us know right now. And we'll kind of pause that for you. So you don't, they don't unsubscribe, right? You kind of just pause the launch for them. So some ways we incorporate that sometimes it's just this email setting expectations. Sometimes it's a PS statement, like I know, we know we're a lot. So if you just want to opt out for now, let us know and we'll restart you a month from now, like always set kind of a timeframe on these kind of optional. No, thanks. And an example I have of that actually, is we when we launched the book, we had we have our own email list that we were communicating with people who wanted to learn about the book. And we sent an email like that tomorrow's our launch day, we're going to send you four emails, it's going to be a lot, but like, we just want you to be a part of the party. And one person replied, like four emails is a lot. Like, I'll take you off. No worries. Here's, here's the link to buy it, and he bought it. And so, you know, like, we when you know, you're a lot, that's the best way to prevent. If you haven't done that, and like people just have unsubscribed, if people have actually unsubscribed, there's really not much that you can do. In terms of like, you can't email them, right? What I would try there is try to reengage them in some other way. Like if they're at an event, or if you're using paid media, or on social, like, hey, you know, we know you unsubscribe, but like, we we have revamped our newsletter, and we'd love to see like, we'd love to get your feedback and see if you want to be on the list again, like I would try to engage them in some other way. Because you can't legally email somebody who unsubscribed. If it's an opt out of a category, I feel like there's a little bit more leeway there. Because you can technically change the definition of the category if you change your content. So I mean, I don't want to, I wouldn't recommend that anyone is sneaky. But I do recommend that you are honest. And you say, we know you opted out of these types of emails, we're revamping, you know, can you give us some feedback about what was annoying? We'll fix it. And like, that might be another way to reengage human to human, right? That's the tip. Like that. Thank you. Right. So you talked a little bit about F pattern and layer cake formatting. Can you give us a little bit more on how that works? Yes. And I actually have some templates on our email website. I think we might have that link to share as well. So basically, there's many different ways that people read content online. It 20 years ago, when websites were super simple, and it was really just text on a simple background. The Nielsen Norman group did a study like an eye tracking study to see how people would read on websites online on a screen. And what they found is that the eyes naturally gravitated toward that top line. And then like this middle horizontal line, and then the left hand scan, they called it the F pattern. Now, over time, with the evolution of web, and web design, and UX and UX design, obviously, different reading patterns have evolved because websites look different. And designers, what they do is they guide the eyes, right? Like where you put the picture, how big the font is, where the colors change, like, that's all the sign like a dance with your eyes, right? But the F pattern still holds true when it's plain text on a simple background. So when I saw this study, I don't know, I think I saw it 10 years ago. I was like, Oh, my gosh, I wonder if this works in email, because an email, like especially an email to a colleague, right? It's just plain text on a white background, or if you're a dark mode person, and I am not like a black background, right? And so I was like, I wonder if it works. And it does work, it still works on an email. Now, that was 20 years ago, right? Now, what Nielsen Norman Group, I think two years ago, they kind of did the study again, two or five, I can't remember at this point. And what they found is that this reading pattern still holds even on mobile screens, what changes is how much scrolling you do, like how much tolerance for that vertical scanning you have. And it also applies if you're in a country or if you're living with a language that's right to left reading. So like the F gets inverted. So that still works. And then the other thing that they found is that there's different reading patterns, obviously. And what what my co author and I like to teach is that for email, for the most part, it's F pattern, if you're sending a single action email, like a solicitation to give, or a layer cake pattern, which basically is the eyes jump from heading to heading to heading to heading, like think the layers of a cake, you jump from like the good stuff to the good stuff to the good stuff. And so with this layer cake, we found that newsletters are read that way. So if you send a newsletter that has a lot of content, people just read the headers, header, header, header, header. And they read for both templates, they read anything that looks different than what's around it. So if you bold something, or if you change its color, or if the button is a different color, like people will look at that because it's, it breaks the natural pattern of what the eyes are going to do. And so we have been testing those templates for years and years and years. And when we send content written, like the important stuff written in those places, people just get it and they act. And and that's the magic that we're sharing with everybody through the book. And I dropped the link to the book in the chat, as well for those. And the email templates. Yeah, yeah. So I know, Claudia, I know you had a couple of other questions. We have our Claudia in the back with a couple more questions. I think I got, oh, do you have companies or resources you can recommend if an institution wants to do a larger scale audience research? Yeah, that was the one of the ones that I came up. Thanks, if I have resources, or Yeah, well, what I could recommend. Yeah, if they want to do a large scale audience resource, companies or resources companies or resources that you can recommend, you know, like companies that are doing a big scale, like, I have to say ology, right? Obviously, like, I actually oversee our research team at ology. And so I'm going to say ology. But there are other, I think higher education is so lucky, because there are truly so many phenomenal agencies and partners that are a lot of folks that come from higher ed, and that really understand and want to support, like, we're all in this for the same mission, right education. So ology, and all of our peers that I will not name, but you can look them up. All right, um, let's see, I think we may have one more that we can get to. Let's see, how much value do you think donors put into handwritten notes and cards? How can you move? How can you make the format more personal with AI technology, the ability to mimic human handwriting? So I think donors really value handwritten cards. But what I think they value most about it is how personal it is. And I mean, what does it signal, right, you get a handwritten card, it means this person sat down and wrote something for me, right? I think it's less about the hand, the paper, and more about the this person made something for me. So I think there are ways to replicate that digitally, if you really wanted to, like, I think a personal email also would have a similar effect. You know, I, one of the ways that I think AI, I'm not sure I would use AI to mimic human handwriting, like, I wouldn't want to replace the human part of that. But I think AI can help with doing things at scale. So one way that I can think about it is, like, this is probably easiest, like, the example I'm coming up with is more on the enrollment side of things. But let's, you can extrapolate, like, if you want to tell a student in an admission letter that they, you know, something in their essay really impressed you, you can make a spreadsheet with the one sentence of what really impressed you, and then the AI can generate the whole letter, right? But that part, the human decision of what is it? Where is that? And what is the emotional link? You still have to do that. You still have to do that. You can leave the production to the AI, you can leave the formatting and all the other stuff to the AI. But I don't ever, ever want us to lose the human part of that. Love that. That's awesome. Thank you so much for sharing. I think we may have any more questions? I think we might have gotten to all of them. I think there was one more. Maybe I missed it. But it was about event invitation emails, personalized email invite versus a paperless post. Did you get to that question? No, I didn't get to that one. Okay, let me let me let me hop into this question. It's a long question. Our university sends quite a bit of emails as a whole. And we have heard that some of our alumni donors are not receiving the university email invitation, possibly from unsubscribing earlier. So we will use paperless post to avoid the event email going to junk slash no delivery. Is there a best practice you suggest to avoid important event invites being junked? Or do we continue with paperless post invites? Yeah, so I would say you're in a little bit of a gray area here. If an alum unsubscribed, and you're sending them emails through another tool, I would, I would not do that. If they unsubscribed, they unsubscribed, right? Now, if they didn't unsubscribe, and your emails are still ending up in junk, I think there's a couple things that you need to look at, like it's your sender. So how frequently are you sending and how much are people engaging? And if people are not engaging, then you need to look at that. Like, why are people not opening? Why are people not clicking and something needs to change there? Maybe the events are not as important to them as we think, right? Like if, if you get sent an invitation to someone that lives far away, for example, are they going to go? No, right? So what is important is, do you determine that? Or is it what's important to them? I think that's the first place to look. Um, that being said, I think if somebody, this happened to me a lot when I worked at Cornell, like someone would say, I didn't get this, right? Like someone would email the inbox and say, I didn't get this invitation that my peer got. And I would look and say, well, you unsubscribed two years ago, would you like me to resubscribe you? Like, that's okay. You can get like verbal confirmation that they want to be added back onto the list. That's, that's okay. Uh, paperless or your own email tool, if they're subscribed, use whatever's engaging the most. What hurts me a little bit about paperless is that maybe you don't get to measure the engagement in the same central tool for everybody else to see that you're sending emails to them. So my, I guess the answer to the question is the best practice isn't so much what you're using to deliver. It's delivering something people are actually signed up for. Okay. Well, we have one more, um, that we'll have some time to answer. Um, what are your thoughts about the word using the word give on the buttons and the quantity, quantity of those per email? So give us a call to action on the buttons. Um, this was something I had to learn, right. When, when I joined fundraising and annual giving that we can't, nobody says donate. Like, why not? Why aren't we saying donate? Everybody thinks donate, right. But, um, give as a word is not an issue. I think it's fine. I think what's most important is, uh, what I like to, what I like to talk about in terms of calls to action and links in general is that people should only be able to look at the link or the button and know what it is that is going to happen. So give is not enough information, right. Um, give to the student fund is information. Sign up for a union is information. Renew by June 3rd is information. So it's, I don't have an issue with the word give, but I do think you have an opportunity to add more content to your link and to your button. For buttons, I wouldn't go beyond like four words in there for inline links. You, you have a lot more flexibility, six words, you know, as long as it doesn't, there's no line break. I think it's okay. Uh, but really ask yourself, if people only see this button, if people only see this link, will they know what I want them to do? Will they know what they're going to get or what they're getting themselves into? And if the answer is no, then you have to add more words. If the answer is yes, then guess what? It's going to be seen in the two second scan. So, um, that's, that's how I would handle that. And then in terms of quantity of buttons per email, I only like to add buttons for priority actions. So if you have a newsletter, I only like to include buttons for the top things you want them to do or see, and everything else is an inline link. So you're, you're creating the hierarchy of importance of the actions with that. And then, um, like reinforcing buttons, like if you have give at the top and give at the bottom, I prefer like one button and then like an inline link that reinforces it at the bottom. Again, there's no right or wrong there. I think it's just more about how aggressive it might be perceived and, uh, like the narrative that you're telling in your email. Um, well, thank you, Day, so much for sharing and being a part of our District 4 Deep Dive series. Thank you everyone for being here today. Uh, please do mark your calendars for our next webinar, a best of to gather focused on organizational change that can help you more, help you be more strategic, use your resources more effectively and significantly impact constituents in a positive way. Um, it's happening on October 24th, so keep your eye out for registration information from KACE. And thank you again all for being here and we hope you see you next time.

email marketing

audience engagement

communication strategies

email readability

audience insights

strategic frameworks

relationship building

inclusive language

collaboration