Wilkes University.
Wilkes University, like so many other institutions, was at a post-implementation plateau when it came to their Slate instance. The team had built a solid foundation of communication outreach, data practices, and reporting, but now they were looking to expand their usage to drive student engagement and internal efficiencies.
They sought external expertise to evaluate their instance as it was configured today, and of course identify opportunities and areas of improvement for the future. Wilkes needed a Slate audit — and Waybetter Marketing was up to the challenge.
Results
Increased Usability. Streamlined Efficiencies. More Student Engagement.
Wilkes took Waybetter’s audit recommendations and ran with it — implementing a lot of our suggestions right away and leaning on us to help build others.
Post-audit success looks like this:
- Configured a comprehensive communication drip strategy for sophomores and juniors (a 16-effort dynamic series based on student demographic and behavioral data).
- Developed outreach for all enrollment stages of the transfer journey from inquiry to applicant to admitted students.
- Improved email deliverability by adhering to list management best practices and correcting previous violations of CAN-SPAM.
- Created specific nurture-based campaigns for the Doctorate of Education and MBA grad programs.
- Provided innovative reporting recommendations related to counselor activity, event conversions, interactions, and other.
- Utilized pre-populated form fills where appropriate for event registration to boost conversion.
- Improved efficiencies around counselor logic in emails (moving away from if-then statements to storing all the counselor fields in Slate).
How we did it
Step One – Discovery
Waybetter met with leadership and Slate power users to resolve immediate questions for some quick wins and then sought to understand the daily successes and challenges of working in Slate.
Step Two – The Audit
We at Waybetter rolled up our sleeves and dove deep into Wilkes’ Slate instance, evaluating over 500 items with our exclusive scoring rubric to provide assessment scores related to emails, campaigns, forms, events, trips, queries, and reports.
Key Focus Areas
Step Three – The Presentation and Next Steps
Waybetter prepared and delivered a comprehensive, digestible written report and virtual presentation to identify strengths and highlight areas necessary to improve the daily use of Slate. This included explicit direction around suggested ‘do now’ and ‘do next’ items for a phased implementation approach.
I love working with Waybetter!
They approach each project differently, tailoring the work to the specific need of our University and project goals. It's never a one-size-fits-all partnership. The Waybetter team feels like an extension of our own enrollment communications and operations team, working closely with our folks, taking time to understand our business rules and intended outcomes. Waybetter offers unparalleled service in delivering search campaigns, but to also have them creating communication plans directly in our CRM is a powerful benefit of our partnership.