Speaker 0: Combating early student drop offs with, uh, conversational SMS. My name is Andy Morton, and I’m a marketing automation consultant at Monks in Australia. And, um, I’d like to introduce my good friend, uh, Gia.

Speaker 1: Hi, everyone. My name is Gia Gazzella, and I’m currently a marketing automation specialist at Transurban. But I met Andy through my previous role at an online higher education company, and we work together on this campaign. And she’s basically my Salesforce marketing club mentor now. Thanks, Gia.

Speaker 0: Our agenda is, um, we’re gonna be looking at a strategy for tracking early, sorry, tackling student drop off, particularly in those first few weeks of, um, a student participating in online study. Um, the strategy aims to keep those students motivated and engaged right from the beginning, uh, and, you know, we talk about how we really need to have a more proactive and personalized approach to student support in those first few weeks. And we’re actually gonna dive right into the thick of it and, um, go through all the elements of the technical solution. So I’m gonna hand over to Guia now to tell you about the campaign goals.

Speaker 1: Lovely. Thanks so much, Andy. So we have four campaign goals that we want to achieve through our journey. Number one is creating a connection. Because it is an online environment, we want to foster a sense of belonging for our students, providing motivation as well. It can be quite difficult to be able to stay motivated, do your best while not meeting people in person. So we hope this journey gives that sense of satisfaction to them. And we also want to decrease the number of withdrawals because students can drop off anytime before the census date, but we want to lessen that rate of withdrawals. And then at the end, we also want to be able to provide the feedback and support towards our students because all of our advisers are reaching out to them fully online. We want to be able to despite not seeing each other in person, giving the same quality of service.

Amazing. And I’ll talk about the key engagement challenges now. So we do have a couple, and I’ll go through them quickly. So one of the challenges that we noticed that our students face, and, um, we hope that this journey will help mitigate those challenges are a sense of belonging and adjusting to new environments, especially in an online education environment. Self motivation and discipline and understanding expectations can also be challenging. When your lecturers are going through things quickly, we just wanna make sure that, um, through this journey, it will help them to understand what the course wants or expects from them. They also struggle with time management and also finding the right resources in our student hub. And, also, they’re already receiving so much communication, whether it would be through emails, student hubs. We wanted to make sure to reach out to them in a way that is efficient and easy. And also lastly, technology adaptation, which Andy will talk more further into how a lot of our students are actually also working full time or part time. So lots of different generations there, and it might be, um, a challenge for some trying to adapt and learn a new technology or way of communication.

And next, I’ll talk about the journey objective. So the main objective that we want to achieve through our journey is that we want to be able to reach out to students wherever they are. So our journey is actually a SMS journey. And with SMSes, you pick up your phone, you pretty much instantly read the message or get the information because it’s a lot more convenient and easier to read comparing to an email. So this journey focuses on giving students information right when they need it. And because of that, it fosters a sense of community because our journey is also connecting them with our student advisors and coaches. So what that means is that instead of students having to go through the long processes of, um, putting a inquiry, reaching out to, um, someone in the contact us details, they’re actually able to give their responses, and our student coaches or advisors will be the one reaching out to them if, let’s say, they do need additional support. And then we also provide multiple touch points throughout their first six weeks of their teaching period or semester because there’s a lot of crucial points. There’s a lot of assignments, quizzes, class attendance, and we only reach out to them during those crucial moments such as if it’s a big assignment week, we’ll send them an SMS like, hey. Here’s some study materials or, like, would you need an extension for your assignment? And Andy will talk further, um, in our presentation about that. And we also want to highlight the students who are not engaged or struggling. Let’s say if it’s something to do with their personal life or their studies are starting to affect their personal life, we want to know how they truly feel, and we also want to know how best we can provide, um, the support that they need, whether it is through a peer engagement support group or also, um, having a couple of options of assignment extensions or even, yeah, like a one on one session with their lecturer. And the last but definitely not least, we also want to collect data over time because this journey actually runs several times in a year. So what we want to do is every time we enter a new teaching period, we want to do things slightly different, slightly better than the one before based on the learnings of the students’ responses and also the feedback that we get from the end of the campaign.

Speaker 0: Thanks, Gia. Um, I’m going to take everyone through the technical execution of this solution. Initially, I’ll just explain what conversational SMS actually is. It’s basically we send out a message, um, the recipient sends in a reply, and then we send a response based on what their reply was. Um, the thing I love about this journey is that it practically uses every element of Salesforce Marketing Cloud. We’ve got multiple data extensions. We’ve got journeys. We’ve got SMS content. We use an x keyword function, um, AMscript and SQL. And then we also use elements of Salesforce Sales Cloud with their campaign objects, um, cases, tasks, and, um, reporting. So the only thing we’ve missed out on using is emails. But aside from that, it’s a very it’s, yeah, it’s just a great use case for how, um, the things you can do with marketing cloud. And from a technology point of view, that’s what I like.

So so initially, I’ll tell you about the journey. Um, we have an entry data extension which is filled, um, with all the students who are embarking on their first online course ever. Um, at the start, we put we do a control group split, which is 25% into the control group, and that obviously is to help us with reporting at the end of the, um, the journey. We also have a couple of campaigns associated with this journey. Um, the one we add them to at the beginning is, uh, purely to track their um, their their journey. So they’ve gone into the journey. Um, we track when they, uh, leave or maybe text to opt out of receiving further SMSs, things like that. So that’s purely around, uh, the journey, But we also have campaigns related to each of the messages which track the responses that have been sent sent in. So I’ll talk a bit about that, uh, later. And, yeah, obviously, at the end, we we do wanna capture, um, like, compare the results with the control group and also just make sure that we can if we can see any patterns of, um, either course withdrawals or students opting out of the SMS service, uh, so that we know where to improve. Um, and just on that, rather than using exit criteria in the journey to exit them, we’ve we we do use a decision split each time before each SMS, um, primarily to set those different campaign campaign statuses. And, um, we do we have an automation running in the background that fills, um, a a separate data extension with everyone that’s texted in Finnish so that we know they’ve opted out of SMS because whilst, uh, texting in Finnish will prevent the student from getting further SMSes, we don’t really have any other reporting around that. So we wanted to to to be able to capture that at the point they opt out. And the, um, yeah, the same with the, um, we don’t just use exit criteria. If they’ve withdrawn from their studies, we use that decision split to capture all that.

So the journey has about 13 messages in it. Uh, the first one is just a welcome to the journey, and it explains what the student can expect from the journey over time. Um, the journey is called you got this. I’m not sure if Gay mentioned that. So, um, yeah, it just welcomes everyone to the you got this journey and says we’ll be checking in and, um, also tells them how they can opt out of the journey. After that, every message actually has, um, has a call to action. So we we, um, will ask a question and say text yes or no as a response or there’s another option where if it’s about feelings, it’ll be, um, you know, tell us how you’re feeling from zero to five with zero being, um, not very good to five being excellent. Um, so, additionally, the content actually has, um, plain text and some AM script in there for personalization, and there’s a next keyword set up for each of the messages in the journey, which I’ll will explain now.

So you can set up next keywords on SMS messages in mobile connect, but in this instance, we’ve set it up individually for each individual message within the you got this journey. The next keyword basically explains to the system which SMS should be sent if someone responds to this, um, text that they’ve received. The other thing you’ll note is that we have to use a phone number, and I’m in Australia, you can’t respond to a, uh, from name. So, um, I’m not sure what it’s like in the rest of the world, but, yeah, you have to set it up with with the actual phone number. So the SMS comes from a phone number rather than coming from the education provider, which is a bit of a shame, but without that, um, we can’t receive a response. The next keywords, um, defines which, um, message is being sent next, and each of these reply messages actually have quite a bit of very complex AMscript in them. Well, actually, complex is probably not the right word. There’s there’s quite a few things going on. So when a student replies with a yes or no answer, um, or they might write back yeah or nah or nah or something like that, the aims code actually looks through that and cleans up the text and, um, converts it to lowercase and classifies the response as either a yes or a no response. Or if it doesn’t recognize any of those words, it will, um, define it as an other message. And, uh, use using those definitions, it will look into a data extension of what to send back as a message for each of the individual replies that we have. So there’s 12 data extensions that just hold the responses for each of the SMSes. Um, it also creates a Salesforce task to document that SMS interaction on the student’s record. So each student adviser, if they should happen to get a phone call from one of those students, they actually have a list of of all the, um, comms that that we have sent out to them and also their responses. So that’s a great reference for them. Um, and we also upsur all the responses into a master conversation data extension, and that’s primarily for reporting later on just to see what kind of responses, uh, people are giving, um, you know, maybe defining figuring out if at some point they sound more irritated or things like that. So it’s, um, yeah, just part of the statistics that that we look at later. The, uh, that replies and this also adds um, everyone to a campaign. So there’s a campaign for every response as well. There’s a master campaign for the responses and then there’s one for every reply. So campaign for reply three, campaign for reply four, etcetera. So lots of moving parts. So the the as I just mentioned, there are multiple campaigns used across this journey and once again, the individual campaigns just capture the message sent and the response received and the other campaign tracks those journey statistics such as when a student withdrew or opted out.

So that’s pretty much the technology. Um, I guess the thing we really want to know now is how are the results. So I’m going to hand back to Ghia to let us know about that.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Thanks so much, Andy. So I think it’s safe to say both you and I, we were quite pleasantly surprised at the result because it was quite what we hope for, definitely, for the students who are in the campaign to perform better in the control group. But as you can see from the numbers there, it’s quite pleasantly surprising. So from the total of students that went into the journey, seventy two percent of them actually went past census. So what that means is that they’ve completed their first ever semester with us, and they basically made it. Or should I say our journey basically helped them to get through through those crucial moments. And from the control group, there were actually thirty eight percent of them who converted or who went past census, which it’s quite interesting because the control group itself is only 25% of the whole volume of students that went into the journey, so definitely a much more lower volume of cohort. But, um, yeah, maybe we’re still trying to actively investigate, but maybe because they did not enter the you got this journey, they didn’t get the same amount of support from our student advisors. So, yeah, that’s a really interesting point.

Speaker 0: Yeah. And the key thing to remember too is, um, the online education provider doesn’t get paid if a student doesn’t make it through to Census. So that that basically census is the point at which before that they can drop out of their course and not be liable for any fees. But if they if they’re retained to census, that’s when, um, the universities can start collecting fees. So that’s obviously a key KPI for this journey. Um, also the very last message has some, uh, like, asks people to send their feedback on the journey and that’s been pretty positive as well, hasn’t it, Kia?

Speaker 1: Yeah. Um, again, pleasantly surprised because at SMS thirteen, we share them a link directly to the student hub for them to share their feedback. And we were really happy to see some of the students felt like the You Got This campaign felt like there was, like, a friend that they could talk to from our side to reach out to them and also to talk about anything, really. We also want to be able to provide support that maintains their well-being. And then they also felt like because we are reaching out to them twice a week, every Tuesday and every Thursday, during busy times of the week, they felt like the regular outreach was really helpful to support them in their studies. And because, um, based on their answers, we give specialized resources depending on what response they give to us. They really appreciate how the links that we give through the student hub, it really helped them to achieve whatever it is, whether it would be assignments, quizzes, attendance. And then lastly, they also felt like, um, yeah, the tips because they were given at a very specific milestone. It was really helpful for them, especially juggling, like, work and life in general. So we were really happy when we saw these positive responses for students, and we’re going to be using these responses to better refine our journey in the future because, um, as I’ve mentioned, it’s something that we’re always gonna be using on a semester to semester basis.

Speaker 0: Yeah. Cool. And I think also, um, from a student adviser point of view, some of the feedback that, um, has been received is I I know I did some online study many years ago, and the student advisers at that point were reaching out by just cold calling. So having to call every student. Whereas this journey does that legwork for them. Um, it’s reaching out to students twice a week and, um, kind of flushing out the ones that actually want some support. So it’s, um, yeah, means that those student advisers can focus on more important tasks rather than trying to catch people on the phone all the time. So that’s, um, that’s a really key part of this journey as well. Um, as we’ve gone through it, there has been some discussion on other ways to optimize and expand the journey. So as Gia mentioned, um, there’s always discussions around the content that can be provided. Um, you know, one of the things that I would like to see in future is maybe add just an email or two into that journey so that we can make use of MarketingCloud’s interactive content, um, forms. So we can actually do ask those questions in the email and the student will be able to answer that from within the inbox, which I just love, um, that feature of marketing cloud. Um, we could also use things like send time optimization and path optimizer, um, and start tracking some engagement on emails. It’s we could track engagement on the SMSes, but it’s quite complex. Checking to see if someone’s responded or not is pretty much the only way we can tell, well, that’s their engagement. So we can do that and maybe send people down a different path if they haven’t responded. So that’s something we can look at in future as well. Um, Yeah. So in summary, the conversational SMS helps to provide that personalized support. Um, we’re using a combination of marketing cloud engagement and sales cloud tools to send those messages and track responses and also enable that personalized follow-up from the student advisers. Because if someone sends in particularly, I mentioned earlier, if they send in another message that immediately gets flagged with a student adviser to reach out to that student and, um, see what’s going on if they need any extra support. And as Gia said, the results do show a significantly higher student retention rate and that’s pretty much what we’re always, um, judged on as marketers is is it is it actually doing what it what you hoped it would. And, uh, I think this journey’s been a really successful one that I I love working on this with you, Gia. So Likewise. Yeah. So, um, unfortunately, we’re not able to take any questions at the moment, um, but I have provided some QR codes and I’m sure if you look into our speaker profiles as well, you’ll be able to reach out to either Gia or myself on LinkedIn if you wanna discuss, uh, this journey further. Yeah. Aside from that, thanks very much for sitting through our session and and we really hope you gain something valuable from it and, um, enjoy the rest of MarDreamin’.