February 2017

Marketing & Communications

Emails Sent!

On February 7th, we met our deadline and sent the first emails out of Marketing Cloud! Additional emails have been sent in the days following and this continues the previously mentioned IP warming process which will continue for 30 days. At the conclusion of that time, email providers should consider us a legitimate sender (ie. not a spammer) and we will be able to send large batches of email without any concern of being moved to a Spam folder.

New! Applicant Data Feed

On February 9th, we turned on a scheduled daily data feed of application data. This daily update of applicants includes their decision status, official test scores, and additional information (recommenders, work experience, etc.). For the first time, this is automatically matching to data that marketing uses (for example from GMAT test score purchases). This will soon allow for better return on investment analysis of the benefits of these list purchases, specific marketing campaigns, or hosted events. This business process improvement will also free up staff time, who previously had to create reports in excel and share those reports between admissions and marketing departments.

Alumni Email Campaigns

The newest data edition to the Salesforce org will be the Ross Development and Alumni Relations marketing email campaigns that are currently being sent out of Marketing and Communication’s RNT instance which is being replaced by the Ross Salesforce CRM and Marketing Cloud. This means that email campaigns for a select set of alumni communications will be sent out of Marketing Cloud.

Salesforce 101

Today, Ross admissions units have their own siloed data for prospective students. Some of this data should be kept private, like admissions scores, but some data, like current email address, street address or phone could be shared across Ross, but is currently kept private. Ross alumni also has their own siloed data for alumni donors. Some of this data should be kept private like donor amounts, but some data, like most recent email address, street address or phone is also kept private.

Imagine if we could share certain aspects of our contact records across Ross units, but still keep our private information private. This is the open contact model in Salesforce. Everyone can see certain attributes of a contact record, but the information that is private to your line of work can only be viewed, edited, added or deleted by specific users on your team. This creates a more up to date contact record that benefits not only Ross staff, but Jane Doe will actually feel like Ross knows her because all of her communications are going to her current email address or home address.