Some of my work

Contents
PDQ Connect Customer Onboarding Email Series (2024) | Truman State Brand Campaign (2022) | Westminster College Pipeline Acceleration (2017) | University of Utah Admissions Print Catalog (2016)

PDQ Connect Customer Onboarding Email Series

Now here’s a company that’s serious about not taking themselves seriously. I was able to have some fun with this onboarding campaign for PDQ’s marquee product, PDQ Connect. This is a great example of how it’s possible to balance authoritative and comedic notes while delivering new customers valuable direction and education.

The Problem
Truman State has historically focused the majority of its marketing dollars on high school seniors who have a huge decision to make about where (and if) they’ll go to college. These savvy consumers no longer fall for the false sense of urgency created by arbitrary deadlines and enrollment red tape. Instead, they’re looking for an institution that matches their energy, making them feel welcomed, supported, and human.

The Process
Instead of pushing students through the enrollment funnel, we decided to try walking alongside them. This meant meeting them earlier in the funnel and nurturing a relationship with them, as opposed to waiting until they’re a senior in high school and immediately serving up critical, high-pressure CTAs like “Apply Now.”

Working with staff in the Office of Admissions and our partner agency, we crafted an omni-channel, low-pressure brand campaign for high school juniors. This was, to my knowledge, the first intentional brand campaign the school had ever run. By targeting juniors, we’d help prime the top of the funnel for more effective campaigns during their senior year when it’s time to apply for admission. The campaign includes:

1. Direct mail piece introducing high school juniors (and their parents) to Truman State:

2. Display ads targeting the same audience as the direct mail brochure

Below is one example of an animated ad at different stages of animation:

3. Landing page development

Campaign-specific landing pages were a first for Truman, and were made possible by a strategic partnership that I spearheaded in 2021 with a company called Net Natives. Their proprietary software (Akero) allows us to create simple, drag-and-drop webpages in a fraction of the time it would take to get them from our already-overtaxed web team. It also includes a form builder that links directly to our CRM, allowing us to track enrollment intent from the first form fill to the first day of classes.

Below are screenshots of a page I concepted, wrote, designed, and published. Check out the full page here: explore.truman.edu/discover

4. Surround sound digital

In addition to programatic display ads, we ran YouTube bumpers, Snap ads, Instagram reels/stories, search, and a healthy dose of TikTok (where the numbers show a majority of our audience is spending their time). Several of these channels ran through the entire summer, creating a seamless handoff between the end of our junior campaign and the beginning of our senior campaign.

5. Drip email series

This is where we got more granular, segmenting several different audiences based on a variety of factors from one email to the next. For example, the first email took our larger audience of high school juniors and segmented them by academic interest. Depending on their program of interest, they were placed into one of six buckets representing Truman’s five schools: Arts & Letters, Business, Health Science & Education, Science & Mathematics, and Cultural Studies. A sixth bucket was created to catch all students who were undecided or whose profiles lacked any program interest data.

Each segment received a customized email with an associated landing page. Below you’ll find an email to students who had indicated interest in one of the programs housed in the School of Arts & Letters. And here’s a link to the accompanying landing page: explore.truman.edu/academics-arts-letters

Other emails in the series included segmentation based on distance from campus, as well as GPA and test scores.

The Results

The campaign is trending to produce over 5 million ad impressions across all digital channels, and over 100,000 unique landing page visits across digital and email. But the larger win is that we’ve taken a huge step in the right direction, creating a new and necessary best practice where one hadn’t existed before. We now have a framework to carry campaigns like this into subsequent years, and even expand into further top-of-funnel activities for high school sophomores and freshmen.

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The Problem
When I was hired, Westminster was about to bring in its smallest class in recent history after half a decade of declining enrollment. Almost all of this decline was coming from the first-year class. After analyzing the enrollment trends of years past, and the current enrollment funnel for the lack-luster incoming class, it became apparent that the pinch point was application completion. We had students submitting applications online, but too many of them were not submitting their supplemental items. In our case, supplemental items included: official transcripts, official test scores, an essay, and a high school counselor recommendation. 

The Process
That summer, my colleagues (Director of Undergraduate Admissions, Director of Admissions Operations, AVP for Enrollment Management) and I made the decision to drop the counselor recommendation requirement and to accept unofficial transcripts to complete an application (knowing that students would need to submit final transcripts before coming to campus anyway). While these decisions were being made, I was busy with members of our I.T. and Marketing and Communications teams, completely redesigning our first-year communication flow, with special emphasis on app completion. You can browse through the flow charts for each funnel stage below. 

The Email-CRM Connection
Our email communications were among the first to get a face-lift. This project put a lot of work on the desks of our creative professionals, and they hit it out of the park! My main role was to guide our creatives in the production of content that fit into our overall communication strategy, and to refine copy for a first-year audience. Below are a few examples of our emails.  

Quick note on these. You'll notice a bunch of percent signs, brackets, and other funny looking stuff. Whenever you see that, it means there is a variable data field that populates based on the student's status, the information we may or may not have on file from them, the date, etc. This was another major part of this project. Working with a team from our I.T. department, we were able to port information from our CRM into our emails to create a more tailored experience. For example, the first bit of code you'll notice is right at the top of the email. It basically says, "If we have a nickname on file, use it. If not, just use the first name field. Oh, and make sure it's all proper case, too." 

The Result
Westminster has always been proud of their devoted faculty, that dedicate their time and efforts to work one-on-one with students. Now they had a communication plan to match that sentiment. With our strategy laid out, we set to work designing the aforementioned emails and building an all-new, fully-automated communication plan in CRM Recruit. We also made sure to make time to train admissions staff on how they would receive call jobs and mailing assignments.

On August 15, 2017, the new communication plan went live. Thanks to updated data porting from our CRM and great forethought at the inception of this project, the communication flow has hardly been touched in almost a year at the time of this writing. Students stuck in the "App Submitted" status (submitted online app but missing supplemental items) are down 25% and applications completed are up 19%, leading to an 11% jump in first-year admits. Admit-to-deposit yield is up 3.1%, largely in part to our solicitation of deposits early in the recruitment process.

First-year enrollment deposits (a huge enrollment intent indicator) are up 26% at the time of this writing.

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While at the University of Utah, I managed the production of dozens of large-scale publications for the Office of Admissions. Below, you'll find our Viewbook, Campus Visit brochure, First-year Travel brochure, and Transfer Travel brochure from the 2016-17 recruitment cycle. In producing these pieces (and many others), I determined the creative direction, oversaw photo shoots, wrote a majority of the copy, and handled distribution. 

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