How Universities Are Using AI and Data to Drive Smarter Email and SMS Campaigns

Q. What is a key trend you’re seeing in how universities are approaching digital communications?

Thetford: Universities are focusing on the entire life cycle of a student. The first time you enter the door, you get an email from a university. They’re thinking about what that communication pattern looks like throughout your college journey and then coming into an alumni position, using all the data they’re gathering on you and all the different types of communication they're sending you. If you’re newer to this concept, I highly recommend downloading Emma’s e-book, “Email Marketing for Higher Ed,” which is an excellent primer on best practices for email marketing.

In Emma, you can see every single email or SMS you ever sent them and whether you are over-sending to specific segments of people. You can also see which subaccounts they are part of. For example, in undergrad, if they majored in English and now in law school, they would be in another account. Still, you could track all of that within Emma and have all that data to push them into alumni status. Then, when the time comes, you can make sure they're targeting them differently now that they're postgraduate.

Q. Speaking of trends, we keep hearing about the term “dynamic content.” Can you explain what that is?

Thetford: In the 90s and early 2000s, emails were designed in a flat newsletter style, much like a newspaper. Now we have more data around attention spans, what we find engaging to the eye, how long a user will sift through an email, etc. All of those insights are pushed into new software systems like Emma, where you can build more eye-catching emails with GIFs, images, different fonts, and more click options within it with buttons that make it easier to get across what you need.

Dynamic content is a process where you use tags to create more customized content for multiple segments. For instance, imagine you work in marketing in the Department of Communications, and it's the first week of school. You need to send out an email with major-specific information to students. Maybe they need to go to a specific classroom that day or review a particular blog post before class. You could craft that email and then add dynamic content tags. In other words, you're putting in an actual code tag that pulls in a specific sentence if their major equals journalism or public relations. They will see the paragraph below it, and if their major does not equal that, they won't see anything. So you can build out one email rather than having to build out six emails, one for journalism and one for public relations. This allows you to build it out once, and then, based on what that student has listed, they only see certain parts of the email.

Q. What’s another example of an email marketing feature that can streamline communication workflows for university teams?

Thetford: The HQ section is controlling everything. You're able to create templates and style guides there. The style guide is where you can lock in fonts and colors – essentially your university style guide –  and then make templates and share those down to your sub-accounts. So if I'm an end user, and I work at the law school, and I log into my Emma account, maybe my marketing team has already created my templates for me and shared those down. The templates are all locked with the style guide, so I can’t go rogue and add different colors or fonts. The brand manager feature ensures certain things have been added in there for me, maybe like a footer in the logo, and then I can go in and add what I need for my specific department. This feature helps with brand continuity and makes it easier for the end user to go in and write content.

Q. AI is being integrated into so many aspects of communications. How is AI being used in email platforms?

Thetford: AI is the hot buzzword in marketing. Emma has an AI Content Assistant within its email editor. When you build out an email or a template within Emma, there's a button you can pull into your email to write out content using the AI system. I think it's beneficial if you're short on time, which we’ve seen is common for many of the people crafting these emails for universities; they don't have the time to do this because it’s not their primary task. They're just trying to get something out to their students or staff quickly, so the AI feature supports them by crafting a few sentences to plug and play into their email.

AI is helpful when you need to flesh out a few content pieces within your email. But I also think ensuring you still include your university’s tone is essential. If you’re personalizing your email, use some aspects of the content you’ve written so the student can feel that it’s coming from a person and not always from an AI system.

Q. Let’s talk about online fundraising. What is it about modernized email tools that make them more effective for fundraising campaigns?

Thetford: I’ve worked with several universities that have integrated their donation systems with Emma, and here’s how it works. All that data you're gathering on your donors – for example, first-time donors and all the categories of the different types of levels – gets pushed into Emma, and then you can create segments based on that. Because you’re not going to communicate with your most significant donors the same way you speak with someone who's never donated, those are very different pathways.

In Emma, you can pull out all that donorship information and create a specific segment, such as “donation equals $1,000. “ This would pull people into that segment, and then you can email just that subset of people.

I've seen some universities target first-time donors or non-donors with more information. Maybe they just need to understand where their donation is going. For example, the millennial generation is one segment that likes to know where the money itself is going, so maybe you're going to do a whole campaign series on the effectiveness of these donations and where they're going across the campus to incentivize them to donate. Your highest donors know and are ready to give the university money. So, you want to be more thoughtful about your emails to them. You also don't want to oversend it to them, and you also want to craft an exceptional, grateful thank you email that will be different from some of your lower donorships.

Q. Universities often have large, complex user networks for email systems. How are email platforms set up to accommodate various accounts and subaccounts across campus?

Thetford: Gone are the days of sharing account passwords. For many universities I work with, each department is its own fiefdom. They don't want to share an account. And sometimes, you don’t want that data to cross over into different parts of the university for security purposes.

Emma’s tiered account structure allows users to have as many distinct subaccounts as they like under the main account, so various departments have their sections to send emails. Users log in and see their accounts; they cannot access anyone else’s accounts. They're just logging in and can create and draft an email and send it to their audience.

But let's say I work for multiple departments or oversee multiple. You can also access numerous accounts within Emma, and then, on the top end, you have what we call the HQ section. So, if you’re on the marketing or IT team and you oversee all of the communications for that university, you have a bird’ s-eye view of who's sending what from each account at any time.