Any suggestions on how to empower Admissions Counselors to send personalized emails?
We are currently using Salesforce Marketing Cloud with EDA. We have a pretty robust communications plan from our central admissions marketing team, however, our admissions counselors like to send "personalized" follow-up emails. We do some personalized email out of SFMC, however, it isn't scalable for every communications they want to send.
Currently the ACs will run a report, export it and use Microsoft Word Mail Merge to send the email out of Outlook. This seems like such a clunky process. The reports can be between 300 - 5,000 contacts, and from my understanding SF orgs have a daily email limit. They mostly are pulling things like "all contacts a X high school" or all contacts owned that are admitted etc. And they send these a few times a month (but we have 15+ counselors), so my team can't program all of these out of SFMC.
Is there an out of the box solution we are missing from SF or has anybody implemented any 3rd party tools that do this well for a reasonable price? The other concern is keeping opt-outs honored across all systems.
@Evan Thrailkill Based on my experience in implementing marketing cloud for admissions, here are some option which you guys can leverage.
1. Create a report in salesforce for the criteria your admission team wants to pull the students from.
2. Pull that data into a data extension and create a journey with different email templates leveraging the admission counselor information.
3. Now you might have to pull different data from salesforce like user for admission, contacts for students, and a templated email to make this happen.
4. The journey can run at regular intervals and send emails on a regular basis.
5. You can also report on them with click-throughs, opens if your salesforce is connected to the marketing cloud as well.
Questions for you.
1. Do you have journeys available in your marketing cloud instance?
2. What is the average volume of students your admission counselors will send emails to?
3. I am also assuming that the word template currently used is the same template used by all admission folks. Is that right?
Happy to have a call if needed to share best practices.
