Marketing is a core pillar of any successful higher education technology foundation. Good (or not good enough) marketing impacts the entire student lifecycle, from prospect to alumni. Gaining insights into constituent journeys helps institutions optimize and personalize student experience, allowing for increased engagement that leads to more fulfilling and successful efforts campuswide.
Cloud for Good has a dedicated higher education team supporting the implementation of Salesforce solutions across campuses, constituent experiences, and lifecycles. Our experience tells us that Marketing Cloud’s extensive suite of products delivers institutions everything they need to serve these purposes. Cloud for Good’s Digital Marketing team works with clients in supporting Marketing Cloud digital strategy, technical implementation, and the breadth of requirements associated with institution engagement in a digital environment.
Two products in particular, Marketing Cloud Personalization and Marketing Cloud Intelligence, are making a profound impact on the higher education space. These solutions offer the marketing keys needed to unlock greater success at an institution, and they should be seriously considered by anyone in the space looking to make their marketing more sophisticated and impactful.
Marketing Cloud Personalization
Previously referred to as Interaction Studio, Marketing Cloud Personalization creates modern marketing experiences by connecting various systems through data. Sources of that data, such as web behavior, email providers, Commerce Cloud, Salesforce CRMs, data warehouses, and/or analytics tools, all serve to inform Marketing Cloud Personalization and fuel its efforts. These connected systems then help to build a unified constituent profile that leads to real-time, 1-to-1 experiences through customizable algorithms and machine learning.
Consider one of the core building blocks of digital engagement: web behavior. With Personalization, cookies can be embedded into websites that track how those users are interacting with those sites. These cookies help gather information on what pages users interact with and for how long. Personalization can help unlock a deeper level of constituent understanding by cataloging the content on each website. This allows for additional analysis generated from the types of content the constituent is interested in and actively engaging with.
From there, the constituent’s interests help build a profile leading to modern marketing innovation through Personalization. This can look like an application pop-up appearing for students actively interacting with an institution’s course catalog or recurring donation pop-ups appearing for an alumnus who has made several one-time donations.
Sound familiar? This is quite similar to the way Amazon suggests purchases related to recent browsing or the way Netflix recommends a new show or movie based on what you’ve watched previously. Marketing Cloud Personalization acts similarly, placing users into unique journeys weaving in data from connected systems based on each user’s data and activity.
Customer Success
Teach For America (TFA) is a nonprofit organization whose stated mission is to “enlist, develop, and mobilize as many as possible of our nation’s most promising future leaders to grow and strengthen the movement for educational equity and excellence.” In partnership with Cloud for Good, TFA implemented Marketing Cloud with CRM integration for a single source of turn across 53 chapters, giving each the flexibility necessary to expand reach while adhering to established branding guidelines.
Using Personalization, Cloud for Good helped power up their recruitment efforts by creating custom preference centers for TFA that enabled segmentation according to constituent locations, interests, and inclinations. Additionally, “exit-intent” popups are being used to capture email addresses and collect information used to nurture journeys that recruit new teachers to propel the organization’s mission forward.
“It used to be one size fits all nurture campaigns. Now, Marketing Cloud Personalization Powered by Interaction Studio helps us to personalize journeys for everyone, relative to their unique situation and where they are coming from.” – Bridgett Willis, Managing Director of Marketing Technology + CRM, Teach For America.
Marketing Cloud Intelligence
Formerly known as Datorama, Marketing Cloud Intelligence brings together data together to enable marketers reach greater audiences while providing deeper, more intimate constituent experiences. Intelligence brings data together across a host of different advertising channels, like Google, Meta, Twitter, etc., into a single connected, unified, and harmonized data set with a full, complete data model.
And the entire process is automated, allowing marketers to spend more time strategizing and less time conducting time-intensive manual processes. With the time saved through automation, institutions can focus on analyzing dashboards and reports automatically created from Intelligence’s data. Artificial Intelligence tools are also integrated into Marketing Cloud Intelligence, and easy goal, alert, and activation creation help keep track of progress through clear visualizations.
Customer Success
LSU Online & Continuing Education was managing a $12M annual advertising budget with spreadsheets and manual processes prior to Marketing Cloud Intelligence. Data points were consolidated across various tools, including Salesforce, Tableau, and several advertising platforms, without any cohesion or connectivity, resulting in hours upon hours of manual processes performed by a staff stretched thin.
Cloud for Good implemented Marketing Cloud Intelligence for the institution, which allowed for information to be pulled from various sources into one, singular view of all marketing data. This has resulted in more meaningful insights into advertising spend, ROI, and other success metrics. Pulling program marketing performance once took 90 minutes, and now it takes just 15. The institution now has better ROI on advertising spends and has gained the ability to make real-time decisions and pivots when needed.
“Marketing Cloud Intelligence is opening us up to more analytics, allowing for more meaningful revenue conversations, and allowing us to position the marketing investment in a way that really makes sense.” – Christina Bourg, Executive Director of Marketing, Partnerships and Business Development, LSU Online & Continuing Education.
For more information on how Salesforce Marketing Cloud solutions can boost your institution’s effectiveness and increase engagement, contact Cloud for Good today.
