Higher Ed Storytelling University

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John Azoni
All right. My guest today is Corey Glover. Corey is responsible for supporting the strategic development and execution of email marketing initiatives for University of Michigan, Dearborn. With more than a decade of experience in higher education and nonprofits under his belt, he's become something of a jack of all trades copywriting, web management, email campaigns, and pretty much anything else that needs a creative touch.

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John Azoni
Corey He's got some serious Michigan loyalty going on. He earned his bachelor's from UVA in Flint and his master's in communication from Central Michigan University. When he's not busy attempting to craft the perfect subject line. You might catch him strumming his guitar, working on his next song, or attempting to become a consistent runner, which is still a work in progress as a spoiler alert.

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John Azoni
His words, not mine. Most importantly, he's always scheming up the next adventure with his wife and two kids. Corey, welcome to the show.

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Cory Glover
Hey, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Awesome.

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John Azoni
So I. I have in the past tried to become a consistent runner, too. And I just accepted the fact that I just don't like to run.

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John Azoni
I don't want.

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John Azoni
To, you know, get tired.

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John Azoni
Yeah. Yeah.

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Cory Glover
I think I might be landing on that as well. Or it's like this is just not not my thing. But I keep trying to say, yeah, keep.

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John Azoni
Keep going. I just feel like I kind of peaked at, like, two miles, like back in my running days. And I just, like, I could never, like, get into I can never, like, hit a stride where I just wasn't tired, you know, where you just stay.

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John Azoni
Right.

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John Azoni
Where like, every step didn't feel like, dreadful.

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John Azoni
Yeah.

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John Azoni
When is this going to be over?

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John Azoni
Yeah.

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Cory Glover
Yeah, I feel. Yeah, Yeah, I kind of. I kind of peak out at like a5k, and then I'm like, Oh, I want I want to keep going. And I just can't get over, you know, maybe, maybe next year. Maybe next year. We'll see.

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John Azoni
Yeah.

00;01;59;04 - 00;02;24;10
John Azoni
Cool. We're talking today about friction and reducing friction in especially email campaigns. And I know you do a lot of your work in the email sphere. You've in Dearborn, so I'm excited to talk to you about some things that you've done to reduce friction. And I know that I'm really interested in email topics. You know, people might think this is just a video podcast about video production and they would be wrong.

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John Azoni
I love when people reach out to me with a possible email topic and because I'm, you know, we have the weekly newsletter that we do and I've just, you know, always been trying to kind of like just tweak that and, you know, have done like automated email campaigns in the past. And it's always just like it's just a fun thing where it's like, you could change one thing and it, it makes all the difference.

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John Azoni
It's like, right, right now reducing friction for people to get to your website or take the action you want them to take.

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John Azoni
Mm hmm.

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John Azoni
Cool. Well, before we jump in, I will start off on a tangent. Tell me something people might be surprised to know about you.

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Cory Glover
Oh, wow. Well, aside from failing at running, I guess one of I am. I don't want to use the word failed, but I'm also a musician as well, so a singer songwriter. I think something cool there is in the past have had a couple of music sinks in, a couple of TV shows and things like that. It's kind of funny working in marketing.

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Cory Glover
You meet a lot of like people who are like, Yeah, I used to tour or do such and such and they had a little bit, a little taste of something and then, you know, they had to pull it together, so. Yeah, yeah. Like, you know, it's one of those things where it'll show up in like a reality show and people are doing stuff and there's just like some strumming in the background of a song I wrote a long time ago, but still pretty cool.

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Cory Glover
You know, it pays for bass for diapers. Now, at this point, like, it doesn't, you know.

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John Azoni
So you get like random, like bass cap checks or whatever.

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Cory Glover
Yeah, little, little things like that. Yeah. So that's kind of a cool. Yeah. A little tidbit about my past creative life that is now kind of slightly on the back burner, but still a cool hobby for sure.

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John Azoni
That's awesome. How did you like what shows were you in?

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Cory Glover
Yeah, I mean, I think one recent one, there's this veterinarian show called like the Yukon Shoot. I would need to Google it and Yukon something, you know, it's like an it's like a Yukon vet show or something. I don't know. Somebody was like, you know, caring for like a sick horse. And you could hear like some like, you know, I play kind of like sad folk music.

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Cory Glover
So it's just that kind of like sad guitar in the background. While they're not caring for a set course, I don't know stuff that you would never, you know, imagine your songs showing up over, but it's cool. That's cool nonetheless. Yeah.

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John Azoni
That's cool. I used to write music a lot as well and thought that I was going to go that route with my life after college. I didn't end up doing that, but I was very much like riding the wave, like the emo wave of like the soul world, like singer songwriter writing about breakups and things. And I went golfing with my dad recently and he's like, He's still writing music.

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John Azoni
I'm like, No, I've been married for 15 years now. I haven't broken up with a girl for long time.

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John Azoni
Right? Yeah. Thanks.

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Cory Glover
Things change, right? Yeah.

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John Azoni
Yeah.

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John Azoni
It's hard to write. You can't just write about. You can't write about happy things. That's like, you know, I think about that.

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John Azoni
Yeah, yeah.

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Cory Glover
Yeah, that's true. That's true.

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John Azoni
Yeah.

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John Azoni
Well, cool. That's awesome. So, all right, we're talking about reducing friction and. Well, actually, let me back up. Tell us a little bit about your role at UVM Dearborn and like what you know, what kind of stuff do you have your hands involved in?

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Cory Glover
Yeah, Yeah. So my technical title is Marketing Cloud Manager, and so basically I'm in charge of our email campaigns for all prospective undergrad students kind of oversee our larger strategy. On the email side, we are a centralized email unit. I know in a lot of universities, right, things are a little separate, a little. You know, every unit or college kind of has their own marketing person, but we are are centralized and ship out emails for current students out of our area as well.

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Cory Glover
So I kind of oversee that. And yeah, that's kind of the main, I guess the quick and easy version of it. We use marketing cloud. So that's, you know, the piece of the title that's in there. I know there's a ton of other systems and things like that that, you know, people use, but that's what we use at Union Dearborn.

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John Azoni
Cool. And where in the student journey are you typically coming in? Is it like kind of like after they become a student becomes like a lead if they request to, you know, request information or something like that, or is it before that?

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Cory Glover
Yeah, Yeah. That's I mean, that's basically the jumping off point, either larger list buyers that we get from enrollment management or inquiry form, so outs and things like that all the way through pushing them through orientation into enrollment and then it's passed off to our current student person.

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John Azoni
Cool. All right. Good to know. Got that background. Okay. So you were telling me when we were initially talking about this episode about you had bought something in like in an ecommerce scenario, which kind of sparked an idea for your email campaign. So tell me about like the problem, where was the friction point with the email campaigns? And then like, how did you get inspired and then what did you do?

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Cory Glover
Yeah, yeah. So I think, you know, there's a ton of, you know, friction points across the way, you know, for students going through the funnel. But I think a big one for a lot of students is the orientation process. Just a lot of tasks do a lot of things that to complete, you know, when do they need to complete them.

00;07;31;01 - 00;07;57;15
Cory Glover
Yeah, you know, there's just a ton of things. What portal do they need to log in to? A lot of universities have like multiple portals for different things. It just becomes real complicated. And so I think I was in the midst of trying to think through the, you know, how do we revamp ours in a way? Because we at the time did a little bit of like part marketing type email and then we'd send a transactional email, you know, but they're they're already pretty far down the funnel there.

00;07;57;15 - 00;08;17;14
Cory Glover
You know, they're deposited there. They're pretty committed. So but we were still kind of hitting them with the same typical, like marketing messaging, like, Oh, we have small classes, you're going to get in our case, a michigan degree, stuff like that that they already heard while on top of how you should do these tasks and things. So, you know, I couldn't quite crack the code to it at the time.

00;08;17;14 - 00;08;34;29
Cory Glover
But you know, like a lot of us, I get served up a ton of ads. I spend most of my time on Instagram getting like secondary tic tac stuff and things like that, right? I'm not I'm, you know, the forefront of that. But I guess connecting it back to the music stuff I collect T-shirts, music, t shirts and things like that.

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Cory Glover
I was searching for a Tom Petty t shirt and I just thought I'd like to to that I liked and through them and not even thinking, you know, not even doing like secret shopping type stuff, you know, just threw them in like a, you know, a basket, you know, just kind of like, you know, ready to go. And then, you know, couple of days later, I end up getting a couple of emails for each one.

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Cory Glover
And they were just like wildly different. Right? One almost had this like, you know, energy bar type thing where it was like, Hey, if you buy this now and you buy another t shirt, you know, you've completed your purchase and you get free shipping or something like that, the other t shirt. And right away they're asking you to buy insurance on the shipping or something like that.

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Cory Glover
You know, it was almost like when you go to Best Buy and you want to buy like a TV or something and they're like, Hey, do you want the performance service plan? Right? And we're like, Well, we haven't even chatted about like what the cost is yet, you know? So it's like you realize.

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John Azoni
You want to professional to come install this t shirt on you.

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John Azoni
Yeah, yeah, exactly.

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Cory Glover
I was just like, well, that's I don't know if they're really, like reading me, you know, correctly. And so. Right, you know, for thinking of friction right right away, which one became a bit easier for me to purchase is the one that gave me kind of like the, the cool like almost like gamified like power bar thing. And I was like, how can I how can we use that?

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Cory Glover
You know, we're always looking at like empty card emails and things like that and higher ed and just trying to borrow. But, you know, more so than just like a standard nudge of like, hey, you know, your applications have done or something. Like what? You know, I was thinking, what can I borrow from that experience? You know? And so I thought about how can we pull the checklist from our portal, from our orientation portal, and just stick it right in the email.

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Cory Glover
So, you know, we're not just saying like, Hey, check out your portal. We're saying like, here's here's the tasks that you need to do and here's what you've completed. So it's a it's a dynamic. It's almost mirroring what they see in their portal. So, you know, if they've done their math placement, then they, you know, they're going to see a green check in their portal.

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Cory Glover
They're also going to see a green check in the email that they receive. So it's just a way to kind of, you know, roll out the red carpet a little bit more for the student. You know, it's it's one less click for them to kind of know where they're at and hopefully creating a sense where they would, you know, be more willing to click and go to the portal because they they already kind of know what they need to do and just, you know, again, just putting that information right in front of them again so that they don't have to search for it.

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Cory Glover
And that's a little bit easier.

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John Azoni
So yeah, that's great. And so, yeah, as much as you can and it's sort of in line with kind of my, my point of view about content is zero click content, you know, as much as.

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Cory Glover
Possible, right?

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John Azoni
Putting the value right in the LinkedIn post or the Facebook post or whatever, you can't really get away with like, Hey, we wrote this blog, go over here and check it out. You can't really get away with that anymore. Like you could maybe like 15 years ago.

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Cory Glover
Yeah, Yeah. Things are changing.

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John Azoni
Yeah. And so, like, as much as you can, just like I'm here now. This is the part of my screen I'm looking at, just like, Give me the meat right there. And I'm looking at your too. Corey had sent me a presentation that he did about this change, and we'll put this image in the show notes, but it's the two T-shirts side by side here and the different email engagement examples.

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John Azoni
So the first t shirt being basically like, Hey, you got this in your cart. Do you want shipping protection, as you said? And the other one, as I look at that one, I'm like, yeah, I would go back to my cart and buy that one because there's this progress bar that says you're just $33 away from free shipping.

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John Azoni
It's like there is just something like about a progress bar and you're not there yet. You're not at 100%.

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John Azoni
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

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Cory Glover
There's like a little more incentive, right? Yeah. And the and it's a cooler shirt, you know.

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John Azoni
Yeah, it's a cool shirt. The full moon fever. Tom Petty. That's kind of the standard. That's the album cover that I remember my parents having in our CD collection growing up. It was for.

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John Azoni
A.

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John Azoni
Full moon fever. But yeah, this other t shirts got an eagle on it, you know, So that right there, it's got roses on it, you know, it's like this eagle flying. I mean, so right there, I mean, probably higher conversion rate, but there's also below the progress bar is sort of like a replica of what you would see in the checkout, which is like, this is the price, this is the size and the color here is quantity.

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John Azoni
And probably what happens if you click, you know, the quantity or if you click checkout or it just takes you to the checkout page. That's kind of like how, you know, videos work. You know, you're not actually going to watch a video in the body of an email. But yeah, it is smart. It's like coming to translating that into higher ed.

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John Azoni
I think just bringing the conversation right into their inbox rather than asking them to go somewhere else and then navigate their way through that somewhere else.

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Cory Glover
Exactly.

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John Azoni
Yeah. Yeah.

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John Azoni
You know what This kind of reminds me, too, of, like, homeschooling my my kids. We're doing, like, partial homeschooling, so my kids are ten and eight, and we decided this year we're going to put them in like a hybrid program. So they're in school Mondays and Wednesdays and then Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, they're there at home. And this whole idea of friction and especially friction in like emails and like checklists and things like that has become so apparent to me just in that homeschooling lifestyle because we have to log into like Google Classroom and every teacher has like a different checklist of things and then every teacher's got kind of like a different place where they

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John Azoni
put like the instructions on where you're supposed to do that thing and like the resources. And it's like, okay, well, does this one do I have to pull out the teacher manual on this one? Or does is this just the workbook that my kid is just going to work off the workbook? And it's very self-explanatory. It's like all these there's so much clicking around.

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John Azoni
It took me weeks to like, get into a rhythm with like how to navigate homeschool and at the same time it's like, you know, my youngest, Rylan, she's like one now. And then my oldest, Ellie, she's like, Dad, I need help too. And then she's got that whole set of problems on a different account. And so right, right.

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John Azoni
Help at the same time. So it's like, Yeah, yeah, parenting is already stressful then homeschooling is, is stressful to kids at the same time needing help. But then all the clicking around is, is yeah, I just want like give me a email that's just here's everything from every teacher and right next to the thing that says, you know, do this assignment link to where I am supposed to get information about how to complete the assignment.

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John Azoni
Don't make me clear.

00;15;12;11 - 00;15;12;28
Cory Glover
Right to.

00;15;12;28 - 00;15;29;24
John Azoni
Some other document to now find where I have to find that link. So yeah, I think I think it's super relevant to higher ed because I imagine in that process of you know, trying to get people to apply and stuff, there's so many, you know, orientation and stuff like that. There's, there's so many things that they have to do.

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John Azoni
How were you able to manage the tech involved in getting that checklist to update in the body of the email?

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Cory Glover
Yeah, yeah. It took a few iterations. I will say that when we first launched it, it wasn't properly dynamic. It wasn't sort of matching what was in the portal. It would for a moment, but it was like it was pulling some like static data, but we had to eventually pull in some amp scripts. Yeah, my coworker Caitlin was able to kind of, you know, figure that problem out.

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Cory Glover
But luckily, I think even just the idea of the checklist kind of being there was enough to get people to engage and act on it, but we didn't solve the problem. But yeah, it's one of those things where it's just like even if it's not working on percent, like just swinging for, you know, like we, we gave it a shot and then we refined it and got it working and we used similar, you know, similar kind of structure and a few of our other email campaigns.

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Cory Glover
Now that schools like commencement and stuff like that, just to make it easier for the student to know what's what's going on and what's next for, you know, what they have to do.

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John Azoni
That's one code that I think is hard to crack about. Email nurture campaigns is like true personalization. And I think we think like, okay, if I put the first name merge tag there, then I've done the personalization.

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Cory Glover
Say something like, Yeah.

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John Azoni
It's like everyone. There's so much tech involved in like creating this automation and it's, it's over my head. I mean, I'm sure that with my newsletter I could be personalizing more, but I'm like, I only have the brain space to send out like one email to everyone that signed up for it, right? You're all going to get the same email.

00;17;09;10 - 00;17;12;28
John Azoni
It's going to dressy by your first name, so that's cool. But beyond that.

00;17;12;28 - 00;17;13;20
John Azoni
Yeah, yeah.

00;17;14;03 - 00;17;32;16
John Azoni
Yeah, yeah. I think that's I mean, any time where you can like Yeah, pull actual information from where they are in the process or what they previously clicked on that they would be interested in. It's such a web of complication, but I'd like to see that, you know, you guys actually are swinging and taking shots at true personalization.

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Cory Glover
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's it's definitely worthwhile and it's a process too. I think, you know, if people are listening and they're like, oh, you know, it's we're going to mess it up. Like that's, you know, it's not going to be perfect. Just keep at it, you know, and keep thinking it through and figuring it out. And I think you eventually land on something.

00;17;49;05 - 00;17;59;11
John Azoni
As you guys were rolling that out, did you have any emails go out that were just like, completely bonkers, like mistakes that just the code just kind of went off the rails or something?

00;17;59;11 - 00;18;14;04
Cory Glover
Yeah, not nothing that big. Yeah, just the checklist wasn't updating properly in some cases and a few other things like that. But yeah, nothing like, you know, complete like mis rendering of anything luckily. Right. Just smaller, smaller things. So. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, that's.

00;18;14;04 - 00;18;33;22
John Azoni
Good. So talk about like where in the student journey have you experienced like most of the friction points being in terms of like, you know, I don't know if you're you and your team have identified like where students are most likely to drop off if we confuse them or overwhelm them too much. Are there are there certain spots in that journey?

00;18;34;05 - 00;18;54;24
Cory Glover
Yeah, I think, you know, I guess there's two campaigns that I think there there tend to be quite a bit of friction. You know, you've got the apply now type journey that people would have, you know, four prospects probably specifically 50 acts that are coming in and the deposit journey, you know, if you work for a school that that is depositing.

00;18;54;24 - 00;19;19;11
Cory Glover
So for us, it's sort of like after like, you know, 3 to 4 emails or so, you see kind of like a little bit of drop off and like, you know, I think trying to to kind of crack the code on that, like how do we how do we keep students involved in that type of journey without like the fatigue of like hitting with apply now right away or hey, pay your deposit or, you know, save your spot or whatever that that might be.

00;19;19;11 - 00;19;38;01
Cory Glover
Right? So those are kind of little, little pain points that I think come up across the board for us, aside from things like orientation and which has just a ton of steps to it right there. Same kind of problems. Right. You know, it's a friction of like, hey, we're not quite meeting the student where they're at potentially, and how can we do that better?

00;19;38;13 - 00;20;00;28
John Azoni
Yeah. And you had some success with speaking to the apply. Now, you had told me that you had had some success kind of changing how you say that because yeah, I mean the apply now language, it's worth testing. You know, it's worth testing if that works versus something else. But you know, I've seen a lot of advice on LinkedIn that's like stop saying apply now like.

00;20;00;28 - 00;20;02;02
Cory Glover
This, all right? Or give them.

00;20;02;02 - 00;20;07;02
John Azoni
A specific action to take. So like and it seems like you guys kind of tested that out. Tell me about that.

00;20;07;14 - 00;20;27;14
Cory Glover
Yeah, they applied, I think is sort of an interesting trend. And I do think I think it's worth testing out, moving away from that type of language, partly just because everybody's doing it. It doesn't stand out as much, you know. But we've done things like start your application. I've had some luck on our own testing out, become a Wolverine, you know, just kind of, you know, trying some things out that way.

00;20;27;17 - 00;20;43;20
Cory Glover
And, you know, it feels a little less urgent to me, too, right? I think we know that students are engaging with the application or just in college in general, a little bit differently. There's not sort of like a linear like, oh, they're ready to apply now or something like that. So feels like kind of like gives them a little more power, right?

00;20;43;20 - 00;21;13;03
Cory Glover
But I just kind of, you know, stating it a little differently. It feels a little friendlier, still a little more conversational. Apply now feels very direct right at this point, you know, And it feels like everyone, again, is kind of just used to seeing that, too. So if you twist it a little bit, whatever your brand might be, and, you know, give an alternate take on that, I think, you know, if people are scrolling, they see that button, it's going to be, you know, hopefully a higher likelihood that they'll they'll act on it at least quicker or even if they don't like.

00;21;13;03 - 00;21;17;23
Cory Glover
Just think about it. Oh, yeah, I want to become a Wolverine, you know, That's who I want to be type student. I want to be.

00;21;18;05 - 00;21;43;23
John Azoni
That's an interesting way to to position you. Even Dearborn kind of say that as a selling point without actually saying it, because from what I know of the sort of like satellite campuses for University of Michigan, I imagine other schools are like this, too. It says University of Michigan on their diploma or whatever it is. So like, people might think, oh, is it going to be like a downgrade to go to U of M Dearborn or something like that?

00;21;43;23 - 00;21;51;15
John Azoni
But like saying like become a Wolverine? It's like, No, we're including you in the Wolverine Nation. I don't want to call it that.

00;21;51;18 - 00;21;56;07
John Azoni
So yeah, including you.

00;21;56;07 - 00;21;57;27
Cory Glover
Maybe I'll start using that in the Wolverine mission.

00;21;58;10 - 00;21;58;16
John Azoni
Yeah.

00;21;59;06 - 00;22;15;10
Cory Glover
No, no, I get what you're saying. Yeah. Yeah, it is. It's sort of like a big tax, right? For us and being a regional campus. I know there's a lot of other similar regional campuses too, that are kind of building off of a larger brand too. But yeah, it's a it's a michigan degree. You become a wolverine, you know, everyone belongs here, too.

00;22;15;10 - 00;22;19;28
Cory Glover
It's that kind of that kind of like tone, that kind of feeling that I think puts people in for sure.

00;22;20;15 - 00;22;34;07
John Azoni
Yeah. So you sent me this presentation for changing the deposit. See CTA was you tested reserve your spot today and pay your enrollment deposit and tell me about, like the results of that test.

00;22;34;16 - 00;22;51;21
Cory Glover
Yeah, that's, that's another quick little AB test that ended up, you know, just becoming a standard thing that we do as well. I think for a while we were saying reserve your spot for a deposit, which feels kind of it's kind of vague language, you know, and also it could be an event of some sort, you know, reserve your spot, you know.

00;22;52;07 - 00;23;09;29
Cory Glover
Yeah, I mean, technically you are paying and reserving your spot. So but I think that's more like thinking about it again, from an internal standpoint, you know, like, oh, the student is reserving a spot, but they don't they don't think of it that way. They think of it like I'm paying money. So just saying upfront, you know, pay your $50 deposit as the CTA, you know, went a long way.

00;23;10;09 - 00;23;35;16
Cory Glover
And for us, we were able to basically just increase deposits by 30%. Right. When we made that made that change, which which went a long way. Same thing with those application changes just alone, like kind of switching the tone of the CTAs and things like that. Applications went up about 17% that year and hold pretty steady. You know, we've just obviously, you know, we've kept doing the same style across the board.

00;23;35;16 - 00;23;57;13
John Azoni
So that's cool. I imagine like, you know, in line with the checklist to a button that matches the next thing they're supposed to do. So if it's like, you know, even if if it's like pay your deposit is one thing, but like pay or blank dollars, like however much it is deposit, then it's just I don't know, it just becomes more concrete in my brain.

00;23;57;13 - 00;24;12;03
John Azoni
I'm like putting myself in the position of a student that's looking at colleges and I'm like, okay, I know that the deposit costs this much like it, just reminding me to now it's becomes more actionable then just pay this generic deposit that I don't, you know. Right. Yeah.

00;24;12;08 - 00;24;16;01
Cory Glover
Know what exactly. Yeah. Yeah. There's something to like. Hang your hat on there for sure.

00;24;16;16 - 00;24;16;27
John Azoni
Yeah.

00;24;17;06 - 00;24;54;06
John Azoni
So does UVM Dearborn do anything different to personalize communications to parents who might be more likely to open an email and take action? This is something that I've been just kind of curious about in general is like, you know, how do we think about the student? But then like, you know, if the student's the one that applied and they put their email address down, you know, like, how do we think about like the parents who might be more likely to open those, those emails, The students might just be like ignoring they might have 50,000 emails, unread emails in their inbox.

00;24;54;15 - 00;25;14;09
Cory Glover
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. We don't specifically have you have in Dearborn like a parent track per se where we we have their emails and they're kind of on their own journey. But I will say when we think through prospects and inquiry, communication really, you know, anything, they are almost like the flip side of the coin audience that we're thinking of.

00;25;14;09 - 00;25;35;15
Cory Glover
You know, so recently in the past couple of years, we've rearranged or kind of like remixed the flow of our emails and we've frontloaded, you know, we realized like the first four emails are kind of like the big ones, right? Like people are most likely to read. So we've we've frontloaded information about affordability, front loaded information about, you know, how to match a major to interests.

00;25;35;29 - 00;25;58;28
Cory Glover
We've revamped our website and we've got like a ton of info about like searching through programs and outcomes in those programs and things like that. So we know, you know, those are like parent concerns, not just student concerns, but parent concerns. And so, you know, students are, you know, hopefully sharing those emails with their parents or, you know, chatting through it or, you know, if a parent has access to their students email, they're looking at them.

00;25;59;08 - 00;26;18;21
Cory Glover
You know, I think it's in, you know, a larger like plan to roll out some more specific parent communication. But it's always you know, it's always in the back of our minds as we're kind of like thinking through what kind of content is the most important and sort of frontloading that and, you know, making that readily available for both students and parents to look through.

00;26;19;03 - 00;26;43;29
John Azoni
Yeah, for sure. In, in making these kind of big changes or big or small changes to the nurture campaigns, like have you run into any issues where like you know, because you have to start simplifying things and leadership might not understand that. We can't say everything that we want to say in this one email, like have you had to bump up against like, you know, resistance from from leadership?

00;26;44;09 - 00;26;49;13
John Azoni
How have you navigated that or has everyone been pretty just kind of let you do your thing?

00;26;49;13 - 00;27;10;22
Cory Glover
Yeah, I think a little bit of both, right? I think, you know, showing your hand a little bit and doing like small pilot type things goes a long way. You know, the fact that we just were able to shift like the CTA of our, you know, buttons and see an increase and things like that. I think that kind of that almost gave like a blank check for a bet or it was like, hey, you know, like that was great.

00;27;11;02 - 00;27;32;24
Cory Glover
Things are going great. Same thing with the orientation portal stuff. We changed that up and immediately that year we were, you know, moving in. I think we had the highest rate of 50 students come in our door. And this year, you know, kind of keeping refining that stuff, we've been able to, you know, I think our enrollment went up for 50 acts again, like 2%, you know, So we're holding steady.

00;27;32;24 - 00;27;53;01
Cory Glover
We're doing okay in a pretty difficult atmosphere. But I think the next kind of almost like, you know, can cure is really that no click type of content, you know, so trying to, you know, make a push for hey, not every email needs to say like apply now or become a Wolverine. Like what kind of content, how hopeful can we be the students as they're thinking through the process?

00;27;53;01 - 00;28;13;22
Cory Glover
How can we become like somebody that tells really good stories about like, you know, students overcoming things, going to our university and things like that, and how can we do that through email? So that's more of a difficult sell at this point, right? Like switching a button kind of becomes easy, but like switching up a whole tone or whole like kind of feeling of, of a campaign I think is kind of where we're at.

00;28;14;05 - 00;28;34;25
Cory Glover
And I think that really goes back to what I did initially, too, is just thinking through like, how can you pilot it on like little pieces of content or a specific population and then show your hand and see how it went, You know, yeah, I think that's the easiest way. But yeah, I mean, sometimes you get stuck doing what I'll call like a kitchen sink email or something like that, you know, where it's just like you want to send everything you know.

00;28;35;04 - 00;28;53;25
Cory Glover
And I think still the best practices like, you know, come into play there where it's just like, okay, you know, the student's going to be looking at for a couple of seconds. So think about the hierarchy of the email. You know, what's the most important thing they need to do? What kind of newsletter kind of format can you use so that they can scan it and, you know, nice big headers and things like that.

00;28;53;25 - 00;29;03;01
Cory Glover
So so yeah, if you do get stuck in that situation, I think it's just leaning on like what you know, works best for your, for your brand and also just like just email best practices in general.

00;29;03;10 - 00;29;27;10
John Azoni
Yeah. And one of the things too that I wanted to touch on that you guys that you guys changed up was just adding icons, even one of your slides in your in your presentation, which again will include these specific slides that we talked about in the show notes. But you got an email on the left that says congratulations that your senior year and then like a bunch of stuff, there's like three main points and they're bolded you know, which is like great move in the right direction.

00;29;27;10 - 00;29;53;11
John Azoni
But then you look on the side in the right and you've revamped that to put these like 1 to 3 icons. And something about that, just like it's just so much more clear. You know, it's amazing how just a little visual change. It might change whether they read the email or not, you know, because if they write and they just see it's a dense block of text, even with some bolded stuff, they still have to burn some like mental calories.

00;29;53;23 - 00;30;11;17
John Azoni
Turning that into a checklist or turning that into a bullet, you know, email in their brain like these are the things that I'm supposed to get out of this email. But when you just do like, boom, one, two, three, and it's not even just like one dot and then the title or you had like specific number one, Number two, number three icons.

00;30;12;05 - 00;30;26;25
John Azoni
Yeah. Any thoughts on that? It looks like even a change where the Apply Now button was putting it in the center and I'm looking at that version and I'm like, Oh yeah, something about that is more clear than on the left side where it's kind of tucked off to the side.

00;30;27;10 - 00;30;47;20
Cory Glover
Yeah, yeah. I think it's all just about accountability at the end of the day, right? You know, I mean, I think sometimes we think we're providing what the student wants again, you know, like we're kind of bolding a couple words here and there, but if it's even like, you know, a moderately dense paragraph, there's there's not a lot of reading going on, you know, So big, bold headers, big, bold icons.

00;30;48;02 - 00;31;04;02
Cory Glover
I think whitespace is really undervalued, too. You know, the more whitespace you put her on something, your eyes just immediately drawn to it. So those numbers that you're seeing there and like kind of like the sections are just there's a lot of padding, you know, so it just becomes easier to like, you know, key in on those those little nuggets of information.

00;31;04;02 - 00;31;22;09
Cory Glover
You know, I like the mental calories thing, right? Yeah. I think that's that's part of what you're battling against, right? Like even yourself, you know, when we open our own email, it's sort of like you check out if it's if it's too hard to process at this point because we're we're kind of used to getting things pretty quick at this point, too, you know, for better or for worse.

00;31;22;09 - 00;31;35;26
Cory Glover
Right. And kind of just yeah, again, laying it out there, making it nice and easy and yeah, like I said, I think the whitespace really sells, you know, if you're doing like little pieces of content or even like a newsletter type format thing, you know, making it nice and easy to scan.

00;31;36;09 - 00;31;58;20
John Azoni
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. There's a book I like called Building a Story Brand by Donald Miller. It's probably, I don't know, ten or 15 years old by now, but he kind of introduced me to that concept of like burning calories and friction because their whole thing is like, make your brand story like a linear kind of thing that people can follow along with and make it make it really clear.

00;31;58;25 - 00;32;10;04
John Azoni
Don't make people hunt around for what you do. Like your header on your website shouldn't say like artisan solutions. It should say like, we help you do this and here's how we do that.

00;32;10;04 - 00;32;11;03
John Azoni
You know, guess.

00;32;11;04 - 00;32;12;16
Cory Glover
Right? Yeah, I don't make.

00;32;12;21 - 00;32;21;19
John Azoni
Don't make people have to dig around your website to figure out what artisan Solutions means because you think it sounds cute. You know?

00;32;21;19 - 00;32;22;02
John Azoni
Right.

00;32;22;02 - 00;32;52;18
John Azoni
Yeah. And he just talks about that and he's like, when people are encountering your brand, you want them to burn as few calories as possible, getting the information that they need. And I think that's super important to for, you know, dealing with like students that haven't committed much yet. You know, if they if especially if they've just given like that first signal of like they sent a request for information or maybe they signed up for a webinar or something like that, especially at that point, they know they're going to get bombarded with like emails and, you know, print ads and stuff like that.

00;32;52;29 - 00;33;08;04
John Azoni
Like, right. What I want to know at that point is like, just tell me at a glance, what is it I'm supposed to take away from this email and then I can decide, is this worth digging deeper into it? So yeah, you guys did a great job with that.

00;33;08;14 - 00;33;09;20
Cory Glover
Yeah. Thanks. When you say.

00;33;10;04 - 00;33;31;20
John Azoni
So, in terms of like, how do you balance being like helpful versus creating that sort of apply now, you know, fatigue, Where has your team kind of thought about like what pieces of value have you thought about incorporating or that you have incorporated that you wanted to test as opposed to like sign up for this right now or whatever?

00;33;32;02 - 00;33;49;25
Cory Glover
Yeah, I think I mentioned earlier and you have as well like the funnel is shifting, right? There's no sort of like almost linear path. So to continue to hit somebody with like apply now when they're maybe not, you know, they're technically in that part of the journey, but they're not like kind, you know, mentally they're emotionally there and all of that stuff.

00;33;49;25 - 00;34;07;20
Cory Glover
So it's really just thinking about, you know, what, what kind of content, what kind of stories can we talk about, like make people feel like they can belong at your university, You know? So we've started telling some more short form stories connected to video in our emails about, you know, students doing things on campus, you know, finding their place on campus.

00;34;07;20 - 00;34;25;20
Cory Glover
I think we have one email that I'm going to, you know, to my own horn about it, but it's about a student who created this hackathon event on campus, you know, for computer science majors. And she, you know, create it from the ground up. So we tell her story about like her finding your place that you know, you've in Dearborn and there's a video snippet to go with it.

00;34;25;20 - 00;34;43;01
Cory Glover
And we have some really short copy on, say, like 150. But it gives us like a you know, a nice like big quote from her with a lot of white space around it. So you can see the quote. And then, you know, if people want to read more, they can they can easily go and access more. You know, a story that our communications team has written about her and stuff like that.

00;34;43;01 - 00;35;07;01
Cory Glover
But I think, you know, that alone is just showing like, hey, this person, you know, has, you know, found their place here and they've made an impact like at the university in something that they're really passionate about, you know, So, you know, adding those types of stories are something that we've sort of piloted and little ways. And in the next year we're looking at revamping like our sophomore and junior prospect campaigns to do a lot more of that type of thing.

00;35;07;14 - 00;35;30;00
Cory Glover
Seeing where we can fit that in. So it's not about like, you know, completely avoiding like the apply now, you know, they're going to go to a page on the website if they end up clicking on the email and it's going to have the apply button, you know, we kind of know that, you know. Yeah. And I just kind of make the assumption at this point that students know they got to go to the website to apply and they can, they can easily Google that and navigate it, you know, so what kind of role is the email going to play coming up here?

00;35;30;00 - 00;35;51;03
Cory Glover
You know, especially as we're seeing no click stuff come up, we're seeing a lot of people find out about universities just through AI in general, just Googling and, you know, just reading, you know, just like computer generated content about your university, you know, And if they're getting that, what can we pair with it? An email that like provides like a true kind of like experience about who we are as a university.

00;35;51;03 - 00;36;05;25
Cory Glover
So I think that's kind of like my thinking right now is like where, you know, and I haven't fully landed on like, you know, we're but we're trying some stuff out. And so far, stories like that are, you know, have been really impactful. We're seeing like pretty high engagement on those ones.

00;36;05;25 - 00;36;30;07
John Azoni
So that's awesome. And I think it's a vote in the direction to like like you said, as people are Googling, people's behaviors around search are changing. So they're Googling more specific questions and they're asking about more specific things that are like baked into a canvas, into a larger conversation with the chat where it becomes so much more important, you know, for your content to be labeled, to be found, you know, labeled correctly.

00;36;30;07 - 00;36;49;12
John Azoni
So that's one of the other things, like one of the ways that I mean, because I you know, I look at a lot of colleges, YouTube channels and just see just get a lay of the land. One of the strongest areas of friction that I see is just really vague titles to their videos. So like, right, yeah, meet Darren.

00;36;49;12 - 00;37;02;29
John Azoni
I don't know changing the name And then it had like comma 26. Like that was the year he graduated. And so I'm kind of like, why would I want to meet Darren? I didn't wake up being like, Man, I hope I meet Darren today. Where am I going to.

00;37;02;29 - 00;37;04;29
John Azoni
Find Yeah, that's going to allow.

00;37;04;29 - 00;37;08;00
John Azoni
Me to meet Darren. Oh, thank God this link is here.

00;37;08;21 - 00;37;09;28
John Azoni
You know, Right? Yeah.

00;37;10;07 - 00;37;49;27
John Azoni
So it's just like and that was probably done very well intentioned as in, but almost more of like an internal organization title of like, Oh Darren Story Class of 2026. Like here we go. But I don't think that people that are managing those YouTube channels are thinking about the effects that everything that you type onto that video, even down to what you name the File Matters episode several episodes ago with Matt Haimes from three Enrollment Marketing, and he was talking about how when you name the file, basically what do you want the title to be or whatever you'd want the search engine to pick up it like scans that stuff too.

00;37;50;07 - 00;37;55;13
John Azoni
So if you just have it, that's like better than just saying like student story number one.

00;37;56;22 - 00;37;58;10
John Azoni
Right? Or something like that.

00;37;58;10 - 00;38;21;08
John Azoni
Yeah. But yeah, I find that, that's like, that's like a major point of friction because like if I, you know, I'll, I'll just, you know, stock different colleges website as a almost like secret shopping like it's if I was a prospective student would I be confused right now and I'm like, yeah I see these titles that are so and then I see a lot of like YouTube channels that are completely on organize, like completely Uncategorized.

00;38;21;08 - 00;38;26;25
John Azoni
And I think that's just a symptom of like generally there's in a lot of colleges, there's just like one person.

00;38;26;25 - 00;38;27;06
Cory Glover
That's.

00;38;27;17 - 00;38;29;28
John Azoni
Probably managing all the platforms.

00;38;30;10 - 00;38;30;19
Cory Glover
And.

00;38;30;25 - 00;38;39;24
John Azoni
You know, they might be focusing, they might be like, okay, Instagram is kind of our main thing. YouTube, we haven't really can't wrap our heads around yet and I don't have time to wrap my head around it.

00;38;40;06 - 00;38;40;19
John Azoni
Yeah, yeah.

00;38;40;28 - 00;38;55;05
John Azoni
But it's becoming more and more important as we think about, you know, how people are finding out about the college. And obviously you're going to go all through all this work to get a get a video made. You want it to be you want it to be seen. But then it's like you go on a college's YouTube channel.

00;38;55;05 - 00;39;07;03
John Azoni
It's just videos everywhere. And yeah, like there's no there's no cat. Like some of the best colleges that I've seen have like one was like, you're such and such college starter pack. And it was like, Oh.

00;39;07;03 - 00;39;08;06
Cory Glover
Right, that's cool. Yeah.

00;39;08;07 - 00;39;29;07
John Azoni
All this stuff laid out like, here's ten videos that if you're just you know, if you're just trying to wrap your head around what our school is about, watch these videos. It's a whole rabbit hole. I'm like, That is brutal like that. That's cool. And we need more of that. I mean, all of that kind of stuff reduces friction because you think that's such a friction potential point when someone has chosen.

00;39;29;07 - 00;39;37;25
John Azoni
I'm going to go learn more about this school and go to their YouTube and then what you're basically saying when you don't make that easy for them is like, good luck.

00;39;38;12 - 00;39;39;06
John Azoni
Good luck. Yeah, yeah.

00;39;40;19 - 00;39;47;25
Cory Glover
Yeah. Or you just get the general commercial sort of kind of life or something that doesn't. Yeah, yeah. Broken shot, stuff like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00;39;47;26 - 00;39;49;13
John Azoni
Poetic voiceover and stuff.

00;39;50;21 - 00;39;52;12
Cory Glover
Right, Right. Yeah.

00;39;52;12 - 00;40;19;20
John Azoni
So lastly, one of the things that you had mentioned to me I think in the past is that like, you know, we think about like differentiation as like these like major brand messaging decisions. Like so we're going to change the tagline or we're going to make this bold claim about ourselves now. But I think I remember correctly you had told me that, like, you know, even just making a friction list, experience can be a differentiator, just the experience that you give people that are trying to navigate your institution.

00;40;20;00 - 00;40;49;18
Cory Glover
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think it really is hard to differentiate yourself at this point, right? There's so many people saying the same thing, right? You know, small class size. This is not so many consulting firms coming in and, you know, recommending the same kind of like, you know, verbiage and and different things like that. So, you know, I think one thing that people have more control over than they think is really just like the ease of use that a student has moving through the things they need to do to get enrolled and, you know, and stay enrolled and ultimately graduate.

00;40;49;18 - 00;41;10;24
Cory Glover
Right. There's just making that as simple as possible, clear as possible. And, you know, even if things are transactional, right, just being as empathetic as possible about where there are and shifting the tone a little bit, making it you know, I know we all work in academics, but it doesn't have to read that way, you know? So I really think that's that's one way, you know, things.

00;41;11;04 - 00;41;27;24
Cory Glover
You know, you can kind of shift your thinking a little bit more like, Oh, we don't need to have this like super, you know, amazing message. You know, it's just like, you know, how do we make this as easy as possible for students to understand, you know, who we are and how they can, you know, find a welcoming place here and then also just doing those tasks here.

00;41;27;24 - 00;41;39;14
Cory Glover
So, yeah, I really think it's just something something to think about, something that, you know, as you're thinking about, like the selling points and the data and stuff like that, like I think that goes like hand in hand with it for sure.

00;41;39;22 - 00;41;46;23
John Azoni
Yeah, absolutely. Well, cool, man. It's been great to chat with you. Where can people find you out if they want to reach out about questions or anything?

00;41;47;05 - 00;41;59;05
Cory Glover
Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn. I'm checking stuff out there all the time. Also find my own Instagram. If you're interested in music or parenting musings and jokes and things like that as well.

00;41;59;26 - 00;42;06;01
John Azoni
And if you're producing a reality show, you can reach out to Corey about the soundtrack, you know?

00;42;06;01 - 00;42;09;21
John Azoni
So yeah, if you use Instagram now. All right. All right.

00;42;09;23 - 00;42;18;13
Cory Glover
Yeah. I need some sad folk music. Just, you know, let me know. I can, you know, if you need that in your emails or, you know, your videos, let me know you're.

00;42;18;13 - 00;42;24;03
John Azoni
Of those, like, angel fire websites. You know, you go and they would automatically play a song.

00;42;25;04 - 00;42;27;19
John Azoni
Oh, right, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.

00;42;27;20 - 00;42;29;07
John Azoni
Like we need that for emails.

00;42;29;07 - 00;42;31;12
Cory Glover
We just go help people down.

00;42;31;12 - 00;42;33;10
John Azoni
There's play this jazzed up. So yeah.

00;42;34;09 - 00;42;40;25
Cory Glover
It's funny how it comes back around now because on Instagram, right, people will post something in a song like if you have your volume under control, you're just like, Oh no.

00;42;41;06 - 00;42;42;13
John Azoni
You know, it's possible.

00;42;42;15 - 00;42;47;12
John Azoni
It's come in. Well, thanks a lot. Is great chatting with you.

00;42;47;21 - 00;42;49;07
Cory Glover
Yeah, man. Thank you. Appreciate.