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00:00:01
Invisible Problem
26 Plays11 days ago
In this episode, Rustam Irani shares a powerful personal experience from his time as a higher ed CMO, highlighting the hidden dangers of over communication in student marketing and admissions. He walks through a pivotal project where his team audited every piece of communication sent to students from inquiry to graduation and uncovered an overwhelming and chaotic messaging environment. Through this eye opening exercise, Rustam emphasizes the importance of aligning teams, reducing overlap, and crafting a streamlined, student centered communication strategy.
Resources Mentioned:•
Miro Student Journey Framework - https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVK7WgQac=/?share_link_id=90885879347
Timestamps:• 00:00 – The disconnect between campaign performance and enrollment rates
• 01:30 – The chaos of overlapping campaigns across departments
• 03:00 – Launching a full audit of student communications
• 04:15 – Mapping communications in a giant conference room
• 06:30 – Realizing the sheer volume and redundancy of messaging
• 08:00 – How cross-team alignment sparked real change
• 09:20 – Rebuilding automations and streamlining messaging
• 11:00 – Navigating tough interdepartmental conversations
• 12:15 – Introducing a Miro-based framework for auditing communications
• 13:20 – Final challenge: take the first step to uncover your own opportunities
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Transcript
Challenges in Enrollment and Communication
00:00:01
Rustam Irani
Your campaigns are running full speed. You've got leads coming in, dashboards are looking good as far volume and activity.
00:00:12
Rustam Irani
But for some reason, the enrollments aren't coming in the way you want them to. Or people are just falling off. The contact rates aren't good. But what if, in fact, the real challenge was the fact that you just didn't know what was happening?
00:00:30
Rustam Irani
almost had a blindfold because there's just so much communication happening within marketing and admissions. And a lot of times we don't even know and have an idea of everything that's happening.
Introducing ROI University Podcast
00:00:46
Rustam Irani
Welcome back to ROI University, podcast for higher ed marketers and leaders looking to change the game and themselves. I'm Rissoumi Rani, former higher ed CMO,
00:00:59
Rustam Irani
also comes from the agency side. And i can tell you, I've been in this predicament a couple times in my career.
Rissoumi's Personal Campaign Experience
00:01:12
Rustam Irani
I'll start off by telling you one of the biggest times that I had an eye opening when it came to us just having way too much happening.
00:01:24
Rustam Irani
And it compounded. A lot of times we build out campaigns, email campaigns, SMS campaigns, multiple schools, multiple colleges, multiple teams within the organization, within the school want to have their own campaigns. They want to have their own communications. So we build.
00:01:45
Rustam Irani
We're marketers. We love building. We love promoting. We love communicating. All of these things are great. But at the end of the day, is it too much?
00:01:56
Rustam Irani
And i can tell you, it can absolutely be too much.
Automation with Salesforce Marketing Cloud
00:02:01
Rustam Irani
I remember we had... Basically, were using at one point Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
00:02:07
Rustam Irani
That was our marketing automation tool. We had hundreds of thousands of records within the system, and we were mailing quite a bit. We had full journeys build out based on different triggers. We had SMSs that were built out based on different triggers.
00:02:25
Rustam Irani
In addition to that, we had a significant size admissions team that also were communicating with prospects and students.
00:02:37
Rustam Irani
And sometimes there wasn't always a clear picture or an understanding of what those communications were, how they were happening, and who is doing what.
Mapping the Student Journey
00:02:50
Rustam Irani
So we decided it was a project our team took on and we said, hey, let's just look at the entire student journey from a moment a lead comes in, a prospect inquires, all the way through graduation.
00:03:06
Rustam Irani
What are all the communications that they get from our school? And at that time, at least the major programs we had looked at on our side were the associate program. So it was about two years for these students to 18 months and 24 months to get their degrees.
00:03:24
Rustam Irani
And what happened when we did that was absolutely eye opening. So what we did was we basically went in and said, okay, marketing, let's basically, and this was probably 10, maybe 10, maybe 12 years ago or so.
00:03:47
Rustam Irani
And we said, okay, let's print out.
Visualizing Communication Overload
00:03:51
Rustam Irani
every piece of communication that we have that goes out, whether it's an SMS or an email, and let's put it all across a room so we can really see visually what this looks like.
00:04:07
Rustam Irani
And it may be a little difficult nowadays if you are remote, but there are lots of tools that you can use to do something similar to this. So we found a conference room. We had an empty conference room.
00:04:18
Rustam Irani
Or not, it wasn't empty, but it was a pretty large conference room that really wasn't being used. It may have been, could even say like 200 by 200. It was a square conference room, 200 feet by 200 feet. It was pretty darn large.
00:04:33
Rustam Irani
Floor to ceiling, 10 foot ceilings, and we just started taping. We started from the moment l LA came in and we started printing out all the communications that came out.
Revealing Redundancies in Messaging
00:04:45
Rustam Irani
We divided it by program and we divided it by whether it was marketing or admissions. We also mapped in financial aid and other basically departments within the school to see what all was going out.
00:05:08
Rustam Irani
I can tell you this was the most eye-opening and grueling project we had done for in a while for the department and for our team. And it almost became a joke when somebody went into that room and they saw what was there.
00:05:27
Rustam Irani
At the end of it, we basically, when we mapped out, we used all four walls in the room. And we mapped out, it must have been few hundred sheets of paper. We tried to be conservative, printing a couple different communications on one if we could. But we mapped this thing out. It was absolutely amazing.
00:05:51
Rustam Irani
I wish I may still have a picture of that room. I was looking for it. I couldn't find it. But if I do, I'll definitely share it. And so we mapped out the entire student journey, all of the communications across all of the different departments from when somebody inquired, raised their hand, all the way through when they graduated and even communications after that.
00:06:16
Rustam Irani
What we realized which was just absolutely incredible, was within a two-year period, some of those students were getting upwards of 250 to just emails from us across our teams and across our institution.
00:06:36
Rustam Irani
Now think about that. That is absolutely incredible because one thing we didn't include in here was all of the feedback when they are actually in class and all the communications with their instructors and so on. We did not have that as part of this. It was all kind of student facing for support services. So again, marketing, admissions, financial aid, career services. Those were the main ones that we had looked at.
00:07:04
Rustam Irani
Absolutely amazed when we saw
Collaborative Solutions for Communication Overlaps
00:07:07
Rustam Irani
this. What we also realized, there was a ton of overlap. We saw communications that were basically the same thing multiple times to a student.
00:07:18
Rustam Irani
We saw prospective students who we were looking to connect with. they were getting mixed messaging, not consistent messaging.
00:07:28
Rustam Irani
The tone, the voice, the proposition that we were putting out, it was chaos. It was all over the place. And so...
00:07:38
Rustam Irani
When we actually stood back and we looked at all this, it was really amazing. And the beauty of it all at the end of the day was the fact that admissions, marketing, financial aid, even career services, we all went into that room and looked at this thing and said, okay,
00:07:59
Rustam Irani
we need to fix this. Where's the overlap? What does this journey look like? And what is ideal for that student, right? Because we wanna create an incredible experience. We want to go above and beyond Every institution wants to do this. They want to provide an incredible experience for the student.
00:08:20
Rustam Irani
And I think a lot of times we get in our own way. We create things that we believe are helpful when really reality is creating more chaos.
Refining Campaigns with Salesforce
00:08:30
Rustam Irani
And so, you know, that was something that we really, honed in on and was very powerful for us because we got rid of probably half of the communications. As we were cleaning things up, we rebuilt in Salesforce Marketing Cloud a lot of our automations, we rebuilt a lot of our email cadences, we looked at our CTAs, we looked at our call to actions, we did a ton of stuff.
00:08:57
Rustam Irani
And, you know, I understand that as a marketer, there's a lot of external factors that can come in, which makes it difficult to do something like this.
00:09:08
Rustam Irani
We want launch campaigns fast. We've got other folks involved like IT, the CRM, how does it impact that? There's other tools that are out there that are being utilized, maybe even live chat. It's important to take a step back.
00:09:26
Rustam Irani
I've heard people say, you've got to take one step back sometimes and move two steps forward. And I think this is definitely one of those situations that we saw. We took the time. It was not easy, but it was very, very impactful. And we saw significant improvement and impact.
00:09:44
Rustam Irani
And then you've got external factors from the students, right? You want to get messaging out to them, relevant messaging at the right time.
00:09:54
Rustam Irani
They're considering multiple schools, and there's a lot there that can confuse them. And so doing something like this can really help bring a lot of clarity to the communications and lot a lot of opportunity to make improvements.
00:10:15
Rustam Irani
The other thing is when you look at it, our teams are constantly looking at ways to make improvements and make the opportunities better.
00:10:27
Rustam Irani
And so it's okay to uncover some messy situations. It's okay to uncover opportunities to improve email communications. Maybe it's the images that just aren't relevant. Maybe it's the overlapping message.
00:10:46
Rustam Irani
Sometimes also it might be a difficult conversation with other teams. Admissions, a lot of times, admissions wants to have that one-to-one relationship and that communication, and they don't want cookie cutter templates.
00:11:01
Rustam Irani
They don't want you to control the communication. So you've got to be open to understanding where that overlap is what makes most sense for the student. And there are some instances when maybe marketing doesn't need to be communicating. And those are the tough conversations that need to happen, right?
Structured Communication Framework with Miro
00:11:20
Rustam Irani
And when you are aligned across the groups and across the teams, that's when you can have those types of conversations. You know, have put together a framework.
00:11:32
Rustam Irani
And basically, it is a mirror-based board that you can look and start to kind of see what a email cadence and framework can look like without pasting emails all over the walls. You can use a lot of great tools, like I said in the beginning of this, to do this now.
00:11:54
Rustam Irani
And if you're interested in seeing what this framework looks like, I'll put a link in the show notes so you can grab this and start to build off of it. Again, Miro is just the tool that I use for our clients and for building these out.
00:12:11
Rustam Irani
but there are many other tools out there. And so what I would challenge you is, i know it's difficult, but if you don't feel absolutely comfortable with your current communications and you are seeing some challenges come through with why are leads not coming through this
Encouragement to Refine Communications
00:12:35
Rustam Irani
system? are we not able to contact them? Why are enrollment rates a little bit lower than we expected?
00:12:40
Rustam Irani
I encourage you to step back and really map out what communication is going out, what you're doing once somebody does raise their hand, and not just in marketing, but across the organization.
00:12:56
Rustam Irani
Take that on as a challenge. Try to map it out. The quickest, easiest way to do it that I've seen, it is overwhelming, start with one program and try that.
00:13:08
Rustam Irani
I have a feeling you'll be able to uncover some pretty amazing opportunities like we were. That's all for ROI University and class this week, where the biggest ROI is personal.