Why is this feature needed?
Our new Engagement Monitoring tool, will help institutions trim recipient lists in order to maximize deliverability. When it comes to emails and communications, often less=more. LESS emails to recipients who are not engaging means MORE emails getting through to those who are.
Every sender (in this case your institution) has a sending reputation.
This is determined by sending behavior which factors in things like content, # of emails, # of emails sent to bad addresses, # of times emails have been flagged as spam along with a few other factors
This reputation effects how email providers perceive the sender.
Senders with a poor reputation will see more emails suppressed, placed in junk/spam folders or sent to less prominent inboxes (marketing/promotions vs primary)
Senders with a strong reputation will see more emails actually get through to recipients.
More emails getting through=better chance of opens=better chance of students entering the pipeline and so on
General Overview
Engagement Monitoring examines a recipient's engagement history with your school and determines whether that student is eligible to receive outreach emails.
For tracking purposes, we are monitoring a number of actions including
email opens
link clicks
attending events
submitting forms
We've determined a threshold on the number of consecutive outreach emails within a given timeframe without engagement, that a student can receive before being temporarily withdrawn from recipient lists and opt-ed out from getting emails.
The tool ONLY affects Outreach Emails. Text, Voice and record-specific emails (password resets etc.) will not be affected.
The tool ONLY affects records listed as Prospects and Inquiries. Emails can be sent uninterrupted to records listed as Applicants, Accepted, Enrolled etc.
Typically, Prospects and Inquiries are the largest groups of students and also have the lowest amount of engagement. This means they are at the highest risk for harmful email habits.
The feature will start all recipients and senders with a "clean slate". All recipients that were previously eligible to receive emails will still eligible after the the feature is activated.
Ex. Student A has not engaged with the last 5 emails they've received from Liaison University. They will still receive emails from the school. To be clear though, if a recipient has opted-out in the past, the feature will not reset this status.
A student is paused from receiving emails, where do we go from there?
On the record page, users will see a new message with that student's status.
This status is temporary and students can be opted back-in to emails after 1 of 3 different criteria are met
Students begin to engage with emails.
Ex. Student A does not open any emails from Liaison University in a 2 month stretch. They decide to start combing through their inbox and begin opening emails from LU. This counts as engagement and Student A will begin to receive communications again.Enough time has passed where a student may now be interested
Ex. Student A has not engaged with any communication from LU. After 5 days the student is eligible to receive a limited number of outreach emails.A rep manually "resets engagement" to cover data points we cannot track.
Ex. Student calls or emails the rep directly.
There continues to be a lack of engagement on the student's part. The school can eventually send another email, but the length of time for each will increase after every subsequent email.
Ex. 5 day wait after initial emails, 10 days after the another email, 20 after another
Think this of this as a faucet. At the start the faucet is wide open and water (emails) can flow through freely. This slowly closes the faucet and the water slows a drip.
A Student fails to engage with communications for a year. The student will be permanently paused from receiving emails until they engage with the school.