EP 29 - How to Write Better Emails - Newsletters, Marketing Emails, Everyday Comms
w/ Ashley Budd & Dayana Kibilds
Co-authors of an upcoming book about emails
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SHOW NOTES
My guests today are Ashley Budd and Dayana Kibilds. Ashley is the director of marketing operations at Cornell University. Day is a strategist at Ologie which is a marketing and branding agency focused on educational institutions.
Ashley and Day are co-authors of a new book that is forthcoming about emails. Writing effective emails that people actually want to read and respond to and take action from. If you’ve ever wanted to know how to optimize your institution’s email newsletter to alumni, or emails to prospective students… and how to meet those people where they’re at with empathy and personality and clarity… You’ve come to the right place.
In this episode we talk about
An actionable template for writing everyday emails that get results based on the F Email method.
The importance of Writing in a conversational tone.. Even if you’re an ivy league university.
Personalizing email communications based on where recipients are in your funnel
How actually upping the frequency of newsletter communications can actually improve your results… counter to the popular belief that we don’t want to bug people.
Building trust with your email recipients and not breaking that trust with gimmicks
LINKS:
Connect with Ashley on Linkedin
Connect with Dayana on Linkedin
Website for email book: emailbook.co
Subscribe to Ashley's newsletter
Subscribe to the Talking Tactics podcast hosted by Dayana Kibilds
Link to twitter email template about the "F Reading Pattern"
-Pricing for Video Storytelling Subscription: pricing.unveild.tv
-Download the 3-part storytelling framework for student/alumni testimonials - "3 Absolutely Crucial Components Every Compelling College Student/Alumni Testimonial Needs"
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Transcript (done with AI so only about 80% accurate):
Dayana Kibilds: [00:00:00] I came across the F reading pattern. The Nielsen Norman group did a study. They put little cameras on people's eyes. Like, how do you read websites? And what came out of that was that people read like the first line, then they read kind of like a middle line. And then along the left border looks like an F.
So I'm like, I wonder if this works in email. And I started rewriting all of the emails. That I was responsible for and the metric started changing. It just started working.
John Azoni: Hey, welcome to the higher ed storytelling university podcast on the B podcast network. This is a podcast dedicated to helping higher ed marketers tell better stories, create better content and enroll more students. My name is John Zoni. I'm the founder at Unveiled. We're a video production company working specifically with college marketing teams on automating their student success stories through a subscription approach.
Uh, if you want to learn more, you can go to [00:01:00] unveild.tv. That's U N V E I L D. Or if you want to chat directly with me, you can find me on LinkedIn or head to the contact page on our website where you can email me or even text me right on my personal phone. There'll be my wife, uh, asking if I want to watch Muscles in Mayhem, the unauthorized story of American Gladiators, to which I will reply absolutely yes.
And then I'll come down and respond to your text. So it's just a whole party in my Messages app, and you're invited. My guests today are Ashley Budd and Dayana Cabilds. Ashley is the director of marketing operations at a little school called Cornell University. Day is a strategist at Ology, which is a marketing and branding agency focused on educational institutions.
Ashley and Day are co authors of a new book that's forthcoming about emails, uh, writing effective emails that people actually want to read and respond to and take action from. So if you've ever wanted to know how to optimize your institution's email newsletter to alumni or [00:02:00] emails to prospective students and how to meet those people where they're at with empathy, uh, with personality and with clarity, uh, you've come to the right place.
Place. In this episode, we talk about an actionable template for writing everyday emails that get results based on the F email method. I'll talk about the importance of writing in a conversational tone, even if you're an Ivy league university. Uh, we talk about personalizing email communications based on where your recipients are in your funnel.
How actually upping the frequency of newsletter communications can actually improve your results counter to the popular belief that we don't want to bug people and then building trust with your email recipients and not breaking that trust with gimmicks. And we talk about other stuff too. So let's dive on in.
Here is my conversation with Ashley Kibbilds. Well, Day and Ashley, thanks for coming on the podcast. Appreciate you being here. So tell me about each of your backgrounds. Day, we'll start with you. Just tell me who you are, [00:03:00] what you do.
Dayana Kibilds: Oh my goodness. Well, thank you. It should be alphabetical. Ashley should go first, but I'll go with it.
I'll go with it. My name is Day. I'm currently a strategy director at Ology. Ology is a marketing branding agency in the U. S. Um, Though, I currently live in Canada, and I've been working in higher education for about 13 years now, I think. I think that's the math. Um, Primarily focusing in mark on marketing, um, as it has to do with enrollment, but also took a detour there into advancement and fundraising, which is how I met Ashley.
John Azoni: And is it true day that you live car free?
Dayana Kibilds: I do live car free. This is a subject I don't bring up because I am very radicalized. There could be a whole episode about how cars are destroying the planet. Um. Yes, my family, we are completely car free, we have not Owned a car in four months [00:04:00] and we were car light before that, whatever that means.
So we get around using transit, our own two legs, and we have way more bikes than a normal person
Ashley Budd: should have.
John Azoni: Does Canada have pretty good transit, public transit?
Dayana Kibilds: Uh, there are cities in Canada that have great transit. I would say that I don't live in one of those. So it's. It's a commitment, let's put it that way, but we're setting, we're hoping that we can move to Montreal in the next five years or so, which actually would put me much closer to Ashley, which is a win.
And Montreal is one of the best kind of transit cities in the country, so. Yeah.
John Azoni: That's great. I, I would love to like just ride my bike everywhere, but we're based out of Detroit and it's the, the motor city, you know, capital of the world. So it's the whole area of the state is built around cars and you can't get in.
You can hardly get anywhere without a car. It's just, it was like the whole design
Ashley Budd: was horror stories.
Dayana Kibilds: [00:05:00] Yeah. Like if you are staying in a hotel on one side of the whatever highway freeway, you can see where you want to go across, but there's no way to get there without a car. Right? There's yeah, it's the infrastructure is not built for it.
So that's why it's a commitment. But we're leading by example
Ashley Budd: over
John Azoni: here. I like it. I like it. All right, Ashley, who are you? What do you do?
Ashley Budd: Loaded question. Um, I, yeah, I have a day job. I work for Cornell University. I'm leading their advancement marketing team and like I've probably been in this Like marketing lane, most of my career, I started as an admissions counselor, but in that role was writing email newsletter way back in the day to prospective students and parents got really involved in social media when, you know, 2007, a lot of social media platforms were either [00:06:00] emerging or allowing brands to have them.
there. And then in 2013, I switched from my admissions work to advancement at Cornell. And I've been at Cornell for 10 years and have seen like a really incredible evolution there with a big commitment into digital strategy and digital first programming. So that has been amazing, amazing opportunity.
That's where Day and I met. And then I have. Always been, I think one of my identities is an overshare, always like sharing what, sharing what I'm doing, was doing that way back when I was in the admissions world at RIT. And have kind of carried that along as a speaker, as someone who's always like willing to pick up the phone and talk to a colleague at another place and explain what I'm doing, hear what they're doing.
I've been writing for, I don't, I, I don't know how [00:07:00] long the newsletter has been. I think it's five years, coming up on five years of writing my newsletter. And when I started that, I started thinking that I was gonna, I was gonna write a book. And I also needed to get off of Twitter at that moment. It was like one of those like Really defunct Trump Twitter moments.
I can't remember which one that was. There were too many to remember, but I remember thinking like, wow, I'm going to lose my whole network. How am I going to share the cool links that I have that I always share on Twitter? And so I switched to this newsletter format then and have been able to build a really great community of friends who I write to.
And finally. Five years later, a book is happening, but it's not the book that I thought I was going to write. It's a different book and yeah, that's a lot of what I've been up to.
John Azoni: As an overshare on Twitter, I bet, I bet you really loved like 2008, 2009 version of Twitter, where everyone's like [00:08:00] taking pictures of their bowls of cereal they were eating and every little thing they were doing.
Ashley Budd: Yeah. Like I, I loved all of that. I learned, you know, I, I have like a really interesting stance now that I have a child who does not have any online presence that I'm in control of and, you know, but I was, you know, making it publicly available where I wasn't at any moment with, you know, checking in on Foursquare and like doing all the things to connect with people and yeah, I mean, some of my closest friends are internet friends from those early days of networking and sharing.
That's
John Azoni: cool. I was the mayor of my old work office on Foursquare. There was three of us. I was the mayor for a couple days, and it would just, me and my co worker would just switch back and forth. We'd always just like race each other to check in. Yeah, those were the days. Foursquare [00:09:00] is still alive, I hear.
But once in a while, I check in on it. I'm like, whatever happened to that? Okay. So you guys are writing a book, you've written a first draft. It's about emails and it's kind of a work in progress right now. Tell me like what, what sparked the idea to write this book? Where are you at right now? Just give me the overview.
Ashley Budd: When did this happen? We started
Dayana Kibilds: talking about writing a book together last summer, I think. Okay. And I think, I mean, at least for me, the. Ashley and I have both been talking about email at conferences and doing workshops about email and like have email on our jobs for a while. And I, for me, I saw you, I saw Ashley deliver a campaign work, like a campaign talk workshop at Case Summer Institute last summer.
And, you know, the thought I had was, wow, this is so complimentary to the email stuff I'm doing. And wouldn't it be great if we put all of this [00:10:00] together in one book? Um, so the really cool thing about us writing this book together, I think, is we both have a lot of experience with email. We have tested a bunch of different things, but they happen to be very complementary.
So I tend to focus a lot more on like tactical, like the few, like the least amount of words possible. Don't add any emotion to email. And Ashley's like, Oh, wait a minute. People need to like, want to read this and like, here's some fun content to engage. So it's, it's going to be a really robust book because we have those.
Kind of complimentary perspectives.
John Azoni: Yeah. And I saw that you posted on Twitter, this very actionable, like email template that I got super excited about. Ashley sent me a list of links to, to, to look into while I was on vacation. Yes. That's what I do on vacation. I, it's like, I love, I love. It's like, I love getting away to like, think about my business and like, like, it's just, it's [00:11:00] like recreational reading and stuff for me.
It's like, that's my favorite vacation anyway. So that's what I did. This vacation was, was study up on you guys. But I got really excited when I saw this, this Twitter template. And so do you know what I'm talking about?
Ashley Budd: I do know what
Dayana Kibilds: you're talking about. That's my baby. Okay.
John Azoni: We'll put this in the show.
We'll put an image in the show notes. It's very quick at a glance and you can get a lot of value from it. I've actually started. I've been overhauling my email. I do a lot of cold emailing. I've been overhauling my whole sequence this morning and kind of keeping that in the back of my mind. So explain it to us what
Ashley Budd: that's about.
Dayana Kibilds: What even is that? Right? So I, man, Let me think back. When I started working with email, I think was my, my job in the admissions office at Penn State. I, we were implementing a CRM and had to bring in all the emails that the university sent out, all the campuses, everything in house. That's when my email kind of obsession started.
Back then, it was more about coordinating what we [00:12:00] were sending, when we were sending it, so we wouldn't spam our recipients. And I didn't worry so much about the content. But over time, I started reading a lot more about UX and natural language or simple language. And I just started, you know, as, as the web started to evolve, like I started to become more involved in that stuff.
And I came across the F reading pattern. I don't know. I mean, folks probably know what that is. So, This is old. This is like 20 years old. The Nielsen Norman Group did a study. They put little cameras on people's eyes. Like, how do you read websites in left to right reading languages? And what came out of that was that people read like the first line, then they read kind of like a middle line, and then along the left border looks like an F, right?
So I'm like, I wonder if this works in email? And I started rewriting all of the emails. That I was responsible for at Penn State and then I was [00:13:00] also writing a lot of emails at Cornell after and the the metric started changing. It just started working. People would click on things and read things and reply to things and do the things that we were asking them to do.
I started doing it internally too. In my work, I've always had to work with many, many stakeholders across campuses or colleges or whatever. And you always want to ask them something, like, sign up for a thing or, you know, send me this thing. And people started doing, like, I stopped suffering with email.
Like, it just worked. So I'm like, there's something here. I feel like I should share this. And that's where that template came from. So it's, if you look at it, it, that's what it's trying to mimic. It's that kind of F pattern. You know, the first line is important. The center is important. The left hand side is important.
That's where it started, and it has evolved from there. So there's a lot more sophisticated stuff that I usually talk about now, like how to write, how to simplify language, what the links should say. And email is not just what's in the copy [00:14:00] of the email or the body of the email. It's the whole strategy behind it and the sender and the subject line.
So it's kind of evolved from there. But it really started with me just finding that F pattern thing and testing it in my own work and seeing that it's, it actually works and it still works. So since then. I've been running these kind of, I just do these kind of on the side as a freelance thing. I run these email marketing workshops and I teach folks how to write email like this and I continue to get feedback, which is why I'm curious, John, if you do this, let me know that people are just astounded at how much more.
How many more conversions they're getting because they're writing this way. So I'm like, Oh, we should write a book. Let's share this.
John Azoni: That's awesome. Yeah. I loved it because it was very simple, actionable for people who are just listening and not watching the video version of this. It's like, it's a, it's called a single action email template.
It's [00:15:00] starts out like, dear person, it's time for you to do this action. And that's in like black and then in like really grayed out, it's like. Words. It's like, no one reads this. No one reads this. No one reads this. Do this action by this date. And then there's a button, do the action. And it's like a bullet pointed list.
Here are some details. And then it's like, no one reads this. No one reads this. You know, I'm like, Oh, that's so helpful. That's a great way of, of, of putting that. So, so yeah, I, I went through my, my email sequence that I, cause I, I built my whole business on cold outreach, but, but trying to humanize. Cold outreach, not be like spammy and, but try to be human, try to be funny and, and relatable and give them actual value.
But I did go in this morning was like bolding things and deleting things. So I appreciate that. It's very useful. We'll put a link to the show notes to that in there. So, yeah. And so tell me guys, like what, what, what excites you about this book, Ashley, tell me like, what's, what's, what, what excites you? Like, what, what is it that you're, you're bringing kind of to the.[00:16:00]
to the book that may be different from what day is bringing on. Day said she brings tactics. You kind of bring more of the emotions. Like, tell me about your side of the book.
Ashley Budd: It's not funny that I'm the emotional person. It is so
Dayana Kibilds: funny. This is the opposite of how we are everyone. If you don't know,
Ashley Budd: I think what I'm bringing is like this social psychology lens to it.
So it's. It's about emotions, but I'm like much geekier level. It's like, how does your brain work? What is the sequence of steps for you to understand communication? What habits are you building that you don't even know you're building when you're reviewing email, you know, also really interested in how those behaviors have changed over time.
So if I reflect back on when I was writing those perspectives, student and current. e newsletters for RIT. [00:17:00] This was a time when I did not have a smartphone. It was not email, you know, like I was sitting down at my desktop with my flip phone next to me and I had a dedicated amount of time. At my desk to read the 10 emails that I got, right?
Like it was, I had 10 emails when I came into work and I had time to sit down and read them. And our newsletter looks like a newspaper. It had a big header and then it even had like the little date, like it was mimicking a newspaper and like these columns of sections and so many newsletters still look like that.
But it was built for, like, let's replicate a newspaper in an email inbox in the same amount of time that you would be able to sit down and consume a newspaper, you could consume it digitally, that was the mindset, but since then, you know, we're almost like two decades since then, the amount [00:18:00] of email that we're getting is off the charts, and if you feel like you're getting more email now than ever, you are.
Transcribed by https: otter. ai And it will keep increasing and our behaviors have totally changed. Now we're like, one of my favorite data points that's in the book is where people read their email and it's like in bed on the toilet, like while I'm commuting on all of these different places. And then you're also trying to cram in at like a really conservative volume might be a hundred emails a day.
You're probably getting more than that, but like, let's just say it's a hundred emails a day. And if you even had two hours of your life a day to dedicate to email, you might have a minute to read each one. And that's not even responding to email. That's just like actually spending time reading these things.
And like Day, we do consult and do workshops for folks and we get [00:19:00] asked all the time to look at, Can you look at my emails and give me feedback? And some of these newsletters. Are like, I can, I can copy and paste into a program that tells me how long it will take someone to read that thing. And they're like six minutes long, like that's not going to work.
Right? Like, so, so I think what, what I'm bringing to it is this kind of science, a lot of data behind like to back up. Why things are the way they are. And yeah, I'm also just really interested in creating good habits around email. So like, how do we, how do we take what we know about individual inbox behavior and leverage that?
And because we've both been working in the nonprofit space and then the higher education sector, most of our careers, uh, we're really interested in leveraging email for good. Like how can we create. Actionable emails that do something good because [00:20:00] like email sucks, right? You know, like, you know, it really sucks.
It's really bad. We put a call out for, for folks to send us bad emails. We want your bad email examples. You can send them to bad at. Emailbook. co, just forward them right along and that's, I think that's the, like, that's the world we're all living in is really terrible email and every time, and I love email newsletters so much.
Like I've been writing one for five years. I love it. I get great feedback, but anytime I'm doing a presentation, I make sure to ask people, what are the words that come to mind when you think about an email newsletter and it's It's the biggest word in my word plot is always like boring or like, uh, like there's no love.
There's no love at all. So we're going to change some minds. Hopefully we're going to put. Some better like email. And that's where, that's where I think like everybody could use this book. It would help all of our inbox struggles, [00:21:00] make, make our email world a better place.
John Azoni: Yeah. I saw you guys post that call for bad emails.
Did you any, did you get any responses that, that stick out to you?
Ashley Budd: There are a lot of, so a lot of cold call, cold call type emails. A lot of stuff like real cringy, you did not think about where the person was in the time or place that they were reading this kind of email. Yeah, I think like there's overall for me, I just feel like there's a real lack of empathy between both the writer and the reader.
Um, so we're seeing that kind of in conflict. What do you, what do you think Day? Yeah. Anybody else jump out?
Dayana Kibilds: Yeah. Like for me, it's when things are gimmicky, you know, I think one of the foundational things of our book is that email, what you need for a good email is a trusting relationship between the sender and the recipient and gimmicks to get people to open something or, you know, from that isn't actually the sender.
So when you think about [00:22:00] political emails, like, no, we're not getting emails from Obama, right? That is gimmicky and that erodes trust. And when you lose trust, your email is just not going to work and it's going to take years for you to kind of regain that trust. So for us, bad emails, it's not so much like misspellings or format, although like, yeah, that's pretty terrible too.
But it's just what Ashley's saying. It's just a complete lack of misunderstanding between the sender and the and the recipient. And I like. I blame the sender for that, right? Like as email marketers, we should know our audiences. We should know what they need. We should know when they need it, and that's what we should send.
And I don't think people approach email that way. I think it's a lot more self serving right now. And that's why nobody reads them. And that's why people ignore it. I work a lot. I work with a lot of universities. And I get to see a lot of their like enrollment comp [00:23:00] flows, and first of all, they all look the same, which is funny, like somebody gave us all a template about how to recruit students and how to send emails, and they, they have absolutely no Like no awareness of what the student, the prospective student is actually going through and what they actually need to make it through the search process, right?
Or what the parents need, and I actually just did this last week. It's my new talk. This year is about empathy and email and how prospective students are experiencing a roller coaster of emotions as they are searching for universities, applying and getting accepted, rejected, making a decision. Special agency right now, especially because so much of their high school Time was during the pandemic.
They're a lot closer to their families. They have a lot more worry. Anxiety. The world is different for them. And you know, the emails they get from colleges are just enthusiastic all the time. Like it's completely jarring. So yeah, I think the [00:24:00] most important foundational thing in our book is it starts with that trust.
It and when they need it. And we get more tactical from there. But if you can't You can't fix, you can't cover that up with a good subject line, or a clever emoji, or anything like that.
John Azoni: Yeah, I think, I agree with that. To me are infuriating and like one that sticks out. It wasn't an email, but a long time ago, my wife and I were newly married.
We got in the, in the mail from something from a car dealership. And it was like, go on this website and spin the wheel and see if. So I, I was like, whatever, I'll do it. So I did it and I got like a key or something and they're like, Oh my God, you got to call the dealership right now because you're like this rare winner.
And I called the dealership and they're like, Oh my gosh, you're, you're a winner. Come on down. And we, and we, we go down there [00:25:00] and they have us like spin this wheel and, and we get like a 5. A gift card or something. My area is a grocery store here. I don't know if you guys have them where you are, but, and I was so annoyed because it became immediately clear that they probably tell everybody like, Oh my gosh, you are the lucky winner.
Come on down. You're going to get a chance to like spin this wheel and maybe win a. Car or something like that. And for me, that was just like, gosh, I was so mad I left there. And then they're like trying to sell us a car. I'm like, no, I'm out of here. Cause it's like, when
Ashley Budd: you bring them again,
John Azoni: no, I will. I would never know it's completely broken trust.
And it's. It's, it's infuriating. And that's, that's too, I like, yeah, I hate the click baity stuff, but there's a fine line because you gotta, you gotta get people to open the email. You want to, there is a little bit of, you know, there's strategy involved in like, how do you pick a subject line? But like the difference between like spam and just choosing a good subject [00:26:00] line is like, did you deliver on the value that you said?
You were that you were like gimmicking about, you know, and so, yeah, for me, that's like, for me, when I send emails, when I send cold emails, my first email is always like. Subject lines like, I don't know, introduction plus a coffee emoji, and I send people, I send everyone like a Starbucks gift card. I'm like, you can ignore this email.
Go get yourself a free coffee. Sorry for cold emailing you. I know it's annoying. But blah blah blah here, you know, here's so I'm at least like, okay, at least like even if they're mad, get a coffee, you know. You know, take advantage of me, you know. Well, cool. So, and then Ashley, I, you were on the, what was it?
The four year institution podcast. And you talked a lot about Cornell's just journey with kind of changing up the newsletter approach, the, the comms approach and becoming more conversational. You implemented the snack bar idea. Tell me some, give me some, you know, play by play of Cornell's newsletter.
Ashley Budd: Yeah, it has been a really great ride. [00:27:00] We, we started, I would say. All under the umbrella of, like, the main strategy that we were reacting to was to streamline communications, and I think every institution that I work with understands that there is a need to streamline communication across Across their whole, like, ecosystem, whether it's like different departments or colleges or units that they're working with, everybody kind of understands this landscape.
It's even what day was talking about in her Penn State days, like all of these other campuses coming together. We're trying to not be on top of each other. I think it's like the main understanding and like, we all, we know we're communicating to the same audience, but somehow this is not, we're not really pulling it all together.
So. We had this charge to streamline communications to Cornell alumni. And at the same time, we had a global pandemic rain upon us. So where we might [00:28:00] have thought we would take a really calculated approach and like slowly move into stuff and test and iterate. Instead, it was like, Oh, here's this opportunity for us where our whole world is turned upside down.
And we know that there's going to be a much greater emphasis on Not only like communicating, but like communicating online, use leveraging email, moving everything kind of digital. No longer can we like knock on each other's door. So, so we use that, that moment to, I think, move things a lot faster than we would have if there wasn't a pandemic.
And we made a stance purely based on our gut to send to. Emails a week to all alumni, and we did this, like, I would say, just in a vacuum with our gut at Cornell. What I'm realizing now is that the rest of the industry was doing the complete opposite. They're like, oh, my gosh, [00:29:00] we're in a pandemic. Stop emailing people.
Pull back. Give them space. They don't want to hear from us right now. And instead, we leaned in. We decided to crank up the volume. We send, and still do now, three years later, we're sending a newsletter every Tuesday to everybody. And then every Thursday we're sending a single call to action email from the university.
So these are both university voice to our whole alumni base. And other, they get other communication too. So other communication might be going to a smaller segmented group. Those happen on other days of the week. But Tuesdays and Thursdays are the big all alumni email drops. And what we found when we cranked up the volume is...
Higher engagement. We also have some guiding principles that we stand by, which are That we will choose quality [00:30:00] over the quantity of content. And I think a lot of places that do newsletters are still trying to kind of fit everything in the boxes that their email wasn't designed for a day is laughing because I am laughing feels this deeply, right?
We must put three events and two stories and, you know, one quote, and this is the newsletter and that ends up putting you in a really tough position because you're now you're scraping to find that third story or you're, you know, like you're putting an event in there that's not really relevant. And once you start providing content, that's not to your quality standard.
Now you're going to start losing trust with your audience. So guiding principle number one, don't try to. Shove everything in all of the boxes. Make your email newsletter flexible enough to just provide people what they need when they need it. Guiding principle number two is use a conversational tone.
Email should be opening a conversation. [00:31:00] We're not speaking at people. We're inviting them to a conversation with us. We're opening our emails on our phones and we're flipping between DMs and text messages, and you're just naturally in this conversational state. Why move into something that's a lot more heavy.
So conversational tone. Is is a big one and the last one is probably the whole bit about building trust and keeping a trust. And when we talk about authenticity and trust building, like, don't say something's exciting. If it's not, we do that all the time. Like, this is the most, is it though? You know, as soon as someone can poke a hole into what you're saying.
Yeah, you've lost my trust there. Empathy, exactly what Dave was talking about. I'm so glad that she's now giving emotional presentations. So the empathy is a huge part of it. Making sure that they know that like, we're in it to see you succeed. You know, we're here, we're giving you this stuff because we, we value you.
And [00:32:00] we want to make sure that, you know, that when you get emails from us, they're there for you, not they're not the university's agenda. It's about our relationship together. And then the last piece of the trust building is like, can they follow our logic of how we got here? This one we all need to work on, like, we can't just drop a, an ask for something out of nowhere because people won't understand, like, why are they asking me and I don't have all this background information and, or even if they do, you know, if we do get them to click through on an email, is it, are the next steps that they're seeing on the website logical?
So it's like those three things combined that we're going to talk a lot about in the book. We also talk about when we present. Cool.
John Azoni: And you've seen pretty good, like respond. I like the, what you said about you didn't pull back when, when COVID hit, you didn't pull back on the frequency and you've actually, by, by posting or sending emails consistently, you've actually [00:33:00] like seeing an increase, you know, in open rates because it actually, you know, increases.
Your deliverability score or whatever, but also people kind of, they kind of get into a cadence with getting these emails in their
Ashley Budd: inbox. Yeah. The consistency and frequency is a huge part of, you know, I think some of the email audits that I do, not all of them are perfect, but you know, some, some folks, you know, they get the conversational tone.
They're being authentic, authentic in their email, but they're only sending one email a month. Yeah. Or maybe even less than that. And you just can't compete in this environment if you don't send more. Your email reputation gets reviewed every 30 days based on what you did 30 days prior. And if you didn't do anything, you're going right to the junk box.
Mmm. So, for folks who are, you know, struggling with the open rate, unengaged constituents. [00:34:00] You, you know, you might think about protecting them. You know, that's like your instinct. Well, I don't want to bother these people who aren't engaged. So we'll only send them every once in a while. That's it's hurting you.
You've got to crank up the volume for them. You've got to bring them into the fold and use your unsubscribe rate as the metric for email pain, right? You will know when you've gone too far, but we've, we've cranked it up a lot and we still believe that there's more, that there's more there that we could send
John Azoni: more.
Yeah. And tell us a little bit about that, this, this whole snack bar idea that you guys, that you guys implemented. Yeah, the
Ashley Budd: snack bar. So this was a little bit less about email and more about what people have time to consume. So it is in kind of that same vein of we have access to a lot of information and you choose what you want to consume every day.
How much [00:35:00] time you want to spend consuming, right? And... The alumni team had made some decisions about like, are we doing alumni profiles? Are we doing long, long format storytelling? What are, you know, what are the avenues that we have to share Cornell stories and alumni stories? And we really didn't have anything that was short format outside of social media.
So the snack bar is a owned space. Where we can share posts that look pretty similar to a social post. It's curated by oursel by us. We, you know, have different formats that we can share things on. So sometimes it's just a photo with a caption. Sometimes it's a video. Sometimes it's something that is on social media that we're sharing back.
And that really forced us to think about how do we tell our stories in a shorter way. And that helped us with getting back to the email side. And it helped us. [00:36:00] Provide more content to the email newsletter. That was also kind of in sync with, we want to tell you about this and we're not going to then make you spend six minutes reading a story because you probably won't get through it.
So how do we get you from here to there and get the mess, like, make sure our message is received. Um, how do we do that in a really succinct, short amount of time? Um, and, uh. You have, if you live in the marketing world, you have probably heard people talk about like snackable content so much to the point where we were like, ha ha, like we're going to create a snack bar.
And then we decided to launch the snack bar on April Fool's day. And we like leaned into it hard and we made like French fry graphics and like, here are your snacks and like go, go eat. And we just had, it matches our tone. We have a pretty lighthearted. Tone for an Ivy league's institution. So it ended up fitting the vibe we've talked about.
If you go to our [00:37:00] campaign website, greatest good. cornell. edu, there is a version of the snack bar there. It's not called the snack bar. It's called good stories, but same idea.
John Azoni: I love that. I love just leaning into the personality and yeah, you wouldn't expect that from, from Cornell, just humor and emojis and stuff like that.
But, but I love that. Quick break here to tell you how you can scale up your student and alumni success stories without taking on a bunch of extra work to manage with Unveiled's video storytelling subscriptions. Have you ever felt that nagging feeling of discouragement in the pit of your stomach? And that voice that says you're not doing enough.
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A process that largely runs by itself and saves me from having to come up with an endless supply of video content to produce from scratch to inspire my audience. Uh, for me, that content engine came in the form of this podcast, specifically the video version of this [00:39:00] podcast, and it solved a lot of that nagging feeling for me.
But, There are other content engines. There's another way to build this engine, and it's the primary way that we at Unveiled work with colleges and universities. It's a way that we help institutions regularly tell compelling student and alumni success stories that inspire and influence prospective students and increase enrollment, without having to manage a bajillion video projects, one by one, from scratch, all year long.
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Unveiled is spelled U N V E I L D. And there's also a link in the show notes you can click on. And if you have any questions, you can book a call with me on our website and love to personally walk you through. What this could look like for your institution. So that's pricing dot unveiled dot TV. And now back to the episode.
So [00:41:00] from the book, like, what do you guys think is this question for either of you? What is one or two things maybe that people wouldn't expect to see in a book like this or learn in a book like this? What, what might surprise people?
Ashley Budd: I think how usable it is just in your, like your everyday life. So I expect that we'll get.
Marketers to pick this up, but I think you'll find that, like Dave was saying, like getting someone, like getting a faculty member to respond to an email using some of these tactics can like really change or just how I communicate with my family or like how I can, how I use email to actually. Get a message across.
That's where I think people will be surprised at how useful it is.
Dayana Kibilds: Yeah, I'll also add I To Ashley's point earlier how everyone when you think of email usually a negative emotion comes up It's boring or it's stressful or annoying like I actually think if folks read this book that It's going to change their perspective a little bit.
I think they're going [00:42:00] to be excited to try something different. And when they get results from it, that their attitude toward email is going to change. And I don't think people are going to expect that when they pick it up. I think it's going to happen after they read it.
Ashley Budd: Yeah.
John Azoni: Yeah. And it really is applicable to just everyday emails too.
Cause like, even when, when I'm emailing, you know, I'm unveiled as a video company, so I work with a lot of freelancers and when I'm emailing like kind of instructions or creative briefs or just things that I need them to really retain a call time for a shoot or something like that, I'm like really thinking about like, how do I structure this knowing that, yeah.
Um, in my experience, 60% of this is going to go in one ear and out the other. They're going to, I can't, I can't tell you how many times where I'm like, I like something gets messed up. And I'm like, I, that was in the email and they're like, Oh, I didn't just
Dayana Kibilds: trigger something in me. It was [00:43:00] in the email. Okay.
But if they're not, if they're not reading it, it's your fault.
John Azoni: Yeah, I had a shoot one time we had a, we had a producer at my, at my last job and client was there bringing, bringing all everyone, like all their staff and stuff like that to the, to the studio. And it was very, it was clear in the email, like how many people were coming and we had a project manager that ordered Chipotle for.
Not nearly enough people. She just kind of was just like, yeah, we'll just pick a number. But like, let's just say like, we'll feed 10 people. And like, after that, it was like really embarrassing. Cause you know, when you don't have enough food for a client, it's like so nerve wracking and I'm like, I, it was in the email and she's like, Oh, I didn't see that.
I didn't see that part of it. And I'm like,
Ashley Budd: Oh my gosh, do me a
Dayana Kibilds: favor, go back, find that email and compare it to the single action email template. Where was the number?
Ashley Budd: Yeah. Where?
Dayana Kibilds: I should. Wasn't in the nobody reads this part? [00:44:00]
John Azoni: Yeah. So when I, so when I like when I'm sending a draft, for example, of a video to, to a client, I'll always like, I started putting the notes at the top of the email.
So I'm like, Hey, here's the V one. The link is below. The link is always at the end of the email. I'm like, here's my notes that I want you to read. Cause like. Can't tell you how many times like they'll they'll if I put the link like here's the v1 boom. Here's the link They'll click the link. They'll see it and then they'll be like, what's this?
Why did you do it this way? Why'd you do it that way and they will completely ignore all the notes that have addressed all those questions You know and then I'm getting an email that's asking all the same questions that I put in there So it's like it's like that sort of news but I've a journalist friend that that taught me this like the the new the The news is like a upside down triangle or something like that, where it's like a news article will have like the super most important stuff at the top and then they just assume you stop reading kind of like halfway down.
So it's like less and less important stuff towards the bottom. Cool. So I had, so I sent out an email to [00:45:00] my list, mostly like kind of director level marketers at colleges, asking them for questions that they wanted me to ask you. So, uh, I'm gonna, we'll do a little, we'll a little Q and a here. So, um, Jen, uh, Jen Porter, uh, from Rochester University, uh, she's the director of, uh, Development Alumni Relations.
She wants to know how to effectively create a mass email strategy that spans different departments and has different voices. She says the obvious answer here is to coordinate all marketing through one department, but when you're small and wear many hats, many times each department is left to be their own voice while still representing the institutions.
How can you, how can we bridge those gaps? You
Ashley Budd: want me to go first? I do. I'm working, I'm working with a few schools that this is the same. The same. The same thing is happening across higher ed. We're all having the same challenges. There's a couple, like, things that come to mind to me immediately. The first one is a shared calendar.
Somewhere where [00:46:00] without a bunch of approvals and oversight, someone can add what they're planning to do to a calendar. It would be great if you had someone centrally on your team, Jen, that could look at who, you know, look at what people are putting on the calendar. That's, that's, that's even better, right?
So that maybe if a few things get put on that seem like they're in conflict or maybe everybody's sending all on the same day and that's just... It's not, that's just going to drown everyone's messages out. Then maybe there's someone who's kind of advising from the center. Maybe you want to try the stay instead, but I would say shared calendar goes a really long way to helping get people out of each other's way.
And then, you know, I think your thinking is right if we had, if everything was centralized and it was all coming out of one place, then it would be a lot smoother and the plan would make a lot more sense. That's. It's true, but it's not organizationally possible in a lot of places. And to that, I would say like, what can you do at the center that would [00:47:00] provide value out to these partners?
Is it at the very least just providing some resources where you say, these are our email standards. This is a writing guide that you should use, or even go as far as to say. When you send an email, use this kind of template, make sure it looks this way. Some of these, some of these like brand points, maybe that would be consistent across the whole university.
So it does sound like we're one place coming from the same place. Um, so like the very least you could just point them to some resources. Um, you might be able to provide consulting. Like that might be something that you could scale to more partners. So you might not be able to build and send every email.
But in addition to just pointing them to resources, maybe you could consult, maybe you could say, sure, send me a preview and I'll give you some tips or like, just inform me about what's going on. And I can, I can share feedback. And then the last is like, maybe wrangling, [00:48:00] maybe there is a chunk of communication where you decide these are really important communications that are coming out of colleges and units and we at the center really believe that there's value in streamlining.
the process. And I can say at Cornell, we, we did that with annual giving email. We felt like this was a space that might be more sensitive. To readers, if it seemed uncoordinated that they, they might not give us as much slack as maybe some of the engagement emails that we were sending. And so that's where we decided, okay, we can, with an injection of some resource at the center, bring this stuff in.
To advancement marketing and have the email team that's centrally build and send and do quality assurance audience management for, for those. So you can think about, is there a section of this email program that makes sense to [00:49:00] centralize and others where maybe you're just providing templates or you're pointing folks to resources.
John Azoni: Perfect. Joe Pacini from Pratt Institute, Director of Enrollment Marketing at Pratt asks, How do you differentiate student search messages, in other words emails, where the goal is to get them to fill out a request for information form? How do you differentiate those from prospect messages where the goal is to get them to fill out an application so students who start as cold leads don't get redundant messages?
Dayana Kibilds: Yeah. Oh, what a great question. So this is one, I think one of you was talking about this earlier. How, um, I think it was you actually like the, the logic of how we get here. You can't just start, ask somebody to apply in the first email that they get. So we need to think about like the, the recruitment com flow, that search com flow as Progressively deeper.
So when you're at the very top of the funnel and this is a lead, it's a cold email, right? It's it's a name that you [00:50:00] bought and you're sending them an email. You're not gonna share as much as much information as when they are fully in the consideration phase. You're on their short list. They're that close to applying.
So the way to really differentiate this is like when I'm designing com flows for enrollment. I start early, so 9th grade, 10th grade, and the communications that you're sending there are not even really about you, institution, they are about higher education, how does it work, what's a liberal arts college versus a state school versus private, what are all these terms mean, what is a major, what is a credit, like, deliver some value, so that when they're actually You know, searching for schools when they're in their junior year and actually like going through the process of creating that short list of schools, they're going to apply to.
They already have some trust in you and then you can start delivering like that top level information about you. So they don't care about. All the details at that point because they're comparing a lot of schools. They care about like the top [00:51:00] five things. Like, what's the cost? Do you have my program? Is this a city I could live in?
Am I going to belong there? Like, do I feel like I would be safe there? And what's the school even known for? And then once you've Kind of cross that awareness barrier and they're fully like you're fully on their list. Then you can get deeper. Okay, we do have your program, but this is why it's cool and unique and different than other schools.
Okay. Our city is this big, but this is why it's great to live there as a student. Okay. This is our cost. And this is how that breaks down. And this is how we support you in terms of scholarship specific to you. So the way to differentiate these communications is you just get more and more specific. Okay.
More and more and more specific. And when you actually get to yield, that's when it's most specific. And you're, you know, sharing many lectures, you're sharing course schedules, days, like, day in the lives, quotes from professors, actual materials they have to purchase. So really, you just have to think of it as an actual funnel of communications, too.
That's, that's following them in [00:52:00] their journey, giving them the information they need to take the actions they need to take where, where they are.
John Azoni: That's really great advice. I love that. Another question from Joe is what kind of person, what kind of personalization matters? I know, Ashley, you talked about personalization, personality emojis.
Ashley Budd: I have feelings about this. Um, I have feelings about this because The technology exists to do some really hyper personalized stuff. Yes, that's true. But most institutions are not set up in a way to leverage. Like, they don't, either they don't have that kind of technology, they don't have the data that supports that technology to be leveraged, or they don't have the staff to create.
A million different segments of communication, right? There's like, there's complexity here when, you know, when I hear leadership say like, we want to personalize like Netflix and Amazon. It's like, you're [00:53:00] not Netflix or Amazon, and you're never going to be Netflix or Amazon. So how do we personalize for your institution?
Like, what is your capacity? This is where my ops brain totally takes over. And it's like, yeah, it would be nice if I had something personalized to me, but Is that what I need? No, I don't need that. What I need is something helpful for me today. And that doesn't like, and what's helpful for me today is probably helpful to a large swath of people.
Not just need, doesn't need to be personalized to Ashley, but so, so that's like my main, those are like the, the big feelings I have about it. I think we also have skipped this. Step and making email personal and we go to like the tech can personalize it. We can do dynamic content and we can do all of these things to make it better.
But if you're not personal and you're not conversational, you're not treating people like people, you've totally missed the mark. So I tend to start to go like way back with folks and say, like, how do we, how can we make it personal? [00:54:00] And let's see how effective that is before we get into this personalization journey.
I was
John Azoni: kind of chuckling a little bit when you said the Netflix and Amazon thing, because I just did a video with University of Chicago's Data Science Institute and their big, like, star, one of their star faculty, David Uminsky is like this mathematician algorithm. Just brilliant guy. And he talked in the video about like, there was a point, you know, 2008, 2009, when Netflix was asking, like, how do we personalize movie recommendations for people and the whole data science community was like.
in on this problem, like trying to think about it. And he's like, it all comes down to math. It's, it's like math solves this problem, but it's so, it just made me think like, it's so complicated. Like these are really smart, like brilliant mathematicians that are working on these like day to day problems that are at the back end.
Algorithms for which are extremely complicated. And, uh, so, so the idea that just anyone [00:55:00] can like start a MailChimp or something and just like,
Ashley Budd: But the math is hard. I was told there would be no math. The math is hard. And we also do not have the library that Netflix has. Like we do not have a Netflix library.
We have a ton of great stories to tell. And we have a ton of content. Don't get me wrong. We have more than we need, but. We're not Netflix, and we don't have the same, like, amount of product that Amazon does. I think that is where, wow, it does seem hyper personalized to me, like, it's weirdly, eerily specific, because you can get so granular with what is being offered.
And we're not offering stuff at, like, that granular of a level, so it's just not fair. Yeah,
Dayana Kibilds: I would. I would just add there that there are things we can do. And to Ashley's point, it doesn't have to be personalized to the individual. But one of my biggest email pet peeves is that if this applies to you.
Like, at a minimum, get to a point in your segments where you are only sending things that [00:56:00] apply to the person that's receiving them. And that's, that's personal enough almost, right? Don't send me a series of steps that are not for me. And because how do I know that it is for me or isn't? You should know that.
So that's the level of personalization we should strive for instead of like, you read this story, so you would like this story. Like, let's just, let's strive for useful.
John Azoni: Mm hmm. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, cool. Well, that's there's, I feel like we could do a part two cause we didn't get to like cognitive load and things like other, other deep concepts that I wanted to touch on, but so maybe we'll do a part two, but, but this being the first stop, as I, as I'm told the first stop on your book tour, which I'm very honored.
I'm very honored. Uh, if you need like a, you know, like a testimonial quote to go, like in the first page, you know, like written by John's own, you know, John's own, he says it's a great book or whatever, happy to be there, happy to be there for you. But final [00:57:00] thoughts, like where are we at? Where are we at with this book going forward?
What, what, what should people expect going forward? What, what can they expect it to come out? What might it be called? final words of encouragement. What do you think? Open ended question. We're
Dayana Kibilds: targeting early 2024 like spring 2024. I believe that's what our timeline says. We don't yet have a title, but the word email will be in the title for sure.
Ashley Budd: It's like naming your baby and we're like, we can't tell you our babies. We can't.
Dayana Kibilds: We don't even know. We haven't talked to our
Ashley Budd: doctor. We don't even know if this is a thing. It is a thing. But
Dayana Kibilds: it will be. You know, we're hoping it is. It will be a short and easy read with, like, just full of immediately implementable stuff.
Um, very useful, very light. Uh, it's going to be conversational, just like we are advocating for. So, um. Uh, [00:58:00] yeah, early 2024, big email party
Ashley Budd: for everyone. And between now and then, Jay and I are going to be in Wisconsin at the end of this month, we'll be there for a week at University of Wisconsin, Madison.
We'll be teaching a cohort of new professionals to advancement, all about these email things and, and more, and then we're working on our other. Speaking engagements. I'm excited that we're both going to be presenting a workshop at the American Marketing Association's Higher Ed Conference in Chicago in December.
So I'll be more a workshop format. I don't know if we have any others, more, more talks booked, but yeah, looking forward to getting more of your bad emails. We can use more of those. So send those. Send those our way. Any, any examples? Good. I guess we would take good ones too, but the bad ones are just more, they're just more fun.
Right. They're
Dayana Kibilds: fun. Everybody cringes. I just [00:59:00] love making people cringe.
Ashley Budd: Yeah,
John Azoni: for sure. Me too. Well, this has been awesome. Like I said, I told one of you on LinkedIn, I will be happy to be a beta reader if you get to that point. I'm really looking forward to the content of this book. Where can people connect with you guys at?
Ashley Budd: Do we share our email book
Dayana Kibilds: addresses? Yeah. So we have new, we're very branded. We have day at emailbook. co. Yeah. And
Ashley Budd: actually, yeah, emailbook. co. And our, I think we'll, our website will be up that it's like under construction right now. But emailbook. co will be up with more information probably even just next month.
After we spend a week together, we'll probably have, uh, a lot more online.
John Azoni: Cool. And people can download or not download, sign up for Ashley, your, your newsletter at what is it? Ashley bud. com. There you go. And then day you host the talking tactics podcast. Is that right?
Dayana Kibilds: [01:00:00] Yes. I host enrollifies newest podcast talking tactics.
It's all about enrollment tactics that move the needle in some way with low or limited resources. So folks can subscribe
Ashley Budd: and listen.
John Azoni: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being here. I appreciate
Ashley Budd: it. Thank you. Thanks
John Azoni: for having us. Thanks for listening. And you'll notice that, uh, we had a couple people write in, uh, questions to ask Ashley and Day.
You might be wondering, John, how do I get on that coveted email list? Um, well, today only, you can go to pricing. unveiled. tv and you can download that thing and get on the, on the email list, or go to unveiled. tv slash student testimonials, get on the list that way. Um, today only, just kidding. You just do it anytime.
Once you're on that list, um, not only will you get You know, the information that you signed up for, but you'll also get regular, a regular cadence of, uh, marketing inspiration, uh, and just kind of [01:01:00] things from the, the cutting edge of marketing, higher ed marketing world, um, that I pay attention to so you can, uh, just be inspired all the time and, um, would love to have you on that list.
So go do that. Thanks for listening. My name is Jon Izzoni. Go connect with me on LinkedIn or reach out to me on the contact page on our website. And in the meantime, we'll catch you on the next episode of the higher ed storytelling university podcast. Thanks.
