How USC Marshall cuts email production time in Pardot by using Beefree

Discover how the USC Marshall Business School leverages Beefree in conjunction with Pardot to rapidly create professional HTML emails, all without requiring any coding.

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Intro

USC Marshall School of Business is a top-tier business school at the University of Southern California. It offers multiple degree programs, including full-time and part-time MBAs, PhDs, MS, BSBAs, and more. With an alumni network of over 90,000 and 4,000 enrolled students per year, the USC Marshall communications team stays active year-round.

"The only steps for inputting a Beefree email into Pardot are copy HTML and paste HTML. It’s an easy process."
- Dwayne Rice, Senior Associate Director of CRM, Management and Digital Marketing

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Challenge

Dwayne Rice joined USC Marshall in April of 2020 as the Senior Associate Director of CRM Management and Digital Marketing. As part of his responsibilities, Dwayne supports 11 graduate programs with email marketing for prospective students. Among the core strategies for engaging potential students and capturing leads into the CRM system are email drip campaigns.

As a result of the number of departments and the scope of the campaigns, Dwayne needed an “efficient process to crank out emails”. There was only one problem - USC Marshall was already using Pardot for email automation: a powerful automation that integrates with Salesforce, but lacks an intuitive drag and drop design tool.

This left Dwayne with a dilemma. Creating emails in Pardot was both time-consuming and did not produce the desired results in terms of email design.

Prepared to do his job well, Dwayne searched for an easy-to-use email design tool that would generate a custom HTML without requiring coding skills. His goal was simple: create professional emails, quickly.

When testing solutions, Dwayne had a number of considerations. At the top of the list was the question, “How quickly can I build a successful email with this tool?”

Solution

Dwayne came across Beefree and knew it was the right tool for the job. He purchased the Freelancer plan himself to hit the ground running in his new role, then later officially brought the tool into USC Marshall.

Beefree is sophisticated enough to meet Dwayne’s technical requirements (namely, HTML and CSS outputs compatible with Pardot), but simple enough to save him time when designing email campaigns.

Beefree also allows him to organize projects for the 11 programs he supports, send test emails to stakeholders for design approval and save reusable elements such as headers and footers for a faster design process.

"BEE Pro enabled us to create content efficiently enough to bring multiple processes in-house and discontinue relationships with several third-party vendors, saving time and money for our programs."
Dwayne Rice, Senior Associate Director of CRM, Management and Digital Marketing

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Results

Just 18 months later, Dwayne has not only created hundreds of emails for the programs he is directly responsible for but also onboarded team members from other departments onto Beefree. He has built templates and modular elements that he can reuse for nearly every email-related need. Complex emails with tough graphic requirements now take a maximum of two hours to complete. And every day emails take minutes. As other programs add roles similar to Dwayne’s, they are adopting his scalable email design process. To facilitate this process, the university has upgraded its plan, which allows for more users, co-editing features, real-time commenting, user roles and permissions and customizable brand settings and styles . By creating emails in BEE Pro, USC Marshall can reallocate time and budget to more activities that keep them front of mind for prospective students considering a business degree.

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