engage not enrage: best practice, mobile friendly communications and more!
TRANSCRIPT
Engage not Enrage: Best practice, mobile friendly communications and more!
Hanisha Patel & Ryan Long
London, UK | February 2016
Ryan Long
Team: HE Client Support & Account Management
Hanisha Patel
Time with Hobsons: 4 years
Sr. Account Manager
Team: Technical Support
Sr. Front End Developer
Time with Hobsons: 6 years
Agenda
Engaging your students with email
Engaging your students on the web
Engaging your students with social media
Engaging your students with email
Market StatsSpeaker: Ryan Long
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76%
UK Adultsuse a smartphone
60%
Use email
How many use email on their phones?
Source: Deloitte Mobile Consumer 2015
Social Media
B.
Texting
A.
C.
Top 3
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Mobile opens are on the rise...
Source: Litmus 2016 State of email report
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Webmail opens decline...
Source: Litmus 2016 State of email report
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Source: Deloitte Mobile Consumer 2015
Digital communication methods
Actual phone call usage declining in favor of ‘old school’ email and other methods of communication!
Design LayoutsSpeaker: Ryan Long
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Don’t let your email become too ‘busy’...
● Emails layouts come in a variety of styles
● Easy to try to put too much content in
● Becomes overwhelming to the end user
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Simplify your layout
● One column layouts are easiest to read
● They look good on both desktop and mobile
● They are also are the most straight-forward to manage the content and edits
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Getting creative
● You can also hide elements on mobile
● Certain elements are ideal on only desktop
● These typically require a little more ‘advanced’ user to manage
CTA (Call To Action)Speaker: Ryan Long
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Don’t forget your Call To Action
A call to action drives your emails purpose.
Without a call to action, your users are left wondering what they are supposed to do with the email.
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Don’t forget your Call To Action
● Tell them what to do
● Use command verbs, not just ‘click here’ (such as Buy Now, Order Today, or Compare costs)
● Use BUTTONS!
● Make your CTA stand out!
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Don’t forget your Call To Action
● Buttons grab a user’s attention.
● Non-image based buttons work even while images are disabled
● Buttons are more touchscreen friendly than links by themselves
● Buttons give your user a goal
● https://litmus.com/blog/a-guide-to-bulletproof-buttons-in-email-design
SupportSpeaker: Ryan Long
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Responsive Emails Support
● Each platform has it’s own support for responsive email
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Responsive Emails Support
Each platform and each app can have its own support for email“
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Responsive Emails Support
Source: https://www.communicatorcorp.com/
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New technologies
Source: Litmus 2016 State of email report
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Save your Sanity
Source: Litmus
Responsive email support is slowly getting better… but more like a tortoise than a hare.
Hopefully these tips/resources will be helpful!
● Responsive emails need to be designed with many aspects in mind (handout)● Be as efficient as possible!
○ Litmus○ Make your buttons ‘bulletproof’○ Code snippets
● Build your emails with the most popularemail clients in mind
ExamplesSpeaker: Ryan Long
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A few email design examples...
Engaging your students on the web
Going MobileSpeaker: Ryan Long
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Did you know?
In 10 major markets...including the US and UK, searching on Google is conducted more often on mobile than desktop
Search engine Google...gives higher search priority to mobile optimized websites than their non mobile counterparts
Mobile vs Desktop
Although mobile use is growing, it isn’t killing the non mobile platforms. It is still just as crucial to have a usable desktop experience.
33%
Did you know that 33% of ‘internet’ users claim their smartphones as the most important device they have to go online (compared to 30% favoring laptops). Just over a year ago, 40% of users preferred their laptop to 22% smartphones.
Source: stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/
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Mobile devices take the lead!
Source: http://consumers.ofcom.org.uk/
• The implications are clear - if you're
not reaching your mobile audience,
you will miss out compared to
competitors who are.
• User’s average 1.54 hours per day on
their devices, compared to 1.09
hours spend on laptops and PC’s
Mobile devices are the favourite of most users
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Moving into a mobile age
● Having mobile friendly pages offers a more
user-friendly experience
● It makes the process of filling out a form for
example, much easier and touchscreen
friendly
● Without it, many users will just ‘move on’ on
mobile devices
SupportSpeaker: Ryan Long
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Moving Education Forward!
We are doing everything we can to provide mobile support in our products. We now offer at least partial responsive support within different areas of several of our products.
Some of the products are:
ExamplesSpeaker: Ryan Long
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1
2
3
4
5
Interest Pages Groupchat
VIP Pages
Events & Interviews
Answer
Connect
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1
2
Login Page
Future support in progress
ApplyYourself
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Radius
1 Inquiry Forms
2 Application Forms
3 Self Service Center
4 Emails (in progress)
Engaging your students with social media
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Engage
“Technology is changing the way we tell stories, allowing for greater interactivity, participation, and emotional
engagement” FoST
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How?
“Establish a meaningful contact or connection” Oxford Dictionary
emotion personality motion
Video StoriesSpeaker: Hanisha Patel
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Video Marketing
History
Culture Diversity Facilities
Adventure Friendships Variety
Teaching
Excellence
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Why?
● Youtube has over a billion users
● More than half of views come from mobile devices
● Launched local versions in more than 70 countries
● Total of 76 different languages
● Covers 95% of the Internet population
● On average 22% visited the referring destination
● Increased in views by 40% since March 2014
SnapchatSpeaker: Hanisha Patel
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Snapchat Background
Free app
Take Snaps and Short
Clips…
Build stories
Clips capped at
10 sec
Clips and snaps
disappear
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How it works…
Source: University of Houston
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How it works…
Source: Colorado State University
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• 100m daily active users as of May 2015
Why Snapchat?
Source: Contently
Q: At what age are you thinking about HE?
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Interesting finds...
• Newcastle University: newcastleuni
• University of Sheffield (SU) : sheffieldsu
• Q&A Pickle Jar + Newcastle University
Great examples of University Snapchat Accounts...
• University of Michigan : UofMichigan
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology : mitstudents
• Colorado State University: ColoradoStateU
InstagramSpeaker: Hanisha Patel
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Why Instagram?
● Over 400 million active monthly users
● 40 billion photos are shared
● 3.5 billion likes on a daily basis
● Free, instant, quick
● Contests/ photo campaigns, monitor hashtags
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Social Media
Wrap-up
