Salesforce Marketing Cloud | Subscription Audience

Audiences that fall into subscription email communications:

• The recipients explicitly opt-in to a specific email newsletter or communication
• Curated lists with explicit consent details that align to the Can-Spam Act of 2003
• The audience may be affiliated with the university in several ways – or not at all – their subscription is not dependent on any affiliation or recruitment status
  • Business contacts
  • Combination audiences of internal or external (faculty/staff and students)
  • Press releases
  • Research audiences (Note: student lead research initiatives are not supported)
  • University committee or community members
    • Listservs can be included here, but remember subscription has an unsubscribe option for commercial messaging
• Audience can opt out of email communication

Support for email execution within SFMC needs to be discussed within the college/unit before planning to move bulk email communications to the SFMC platform

Onboarding and training for SFMC is around 4 hours of BuckeyeLearn courses. There is an assignment to build an email within the tool with limited access. After this email build assignment is reviewed a determination will be made about full access to the tool.

It is important to consider the other email needs of your college or unit. Not all requests will warrant a new SFMC license. It is a best practice for email to have a central team supporting email sends for a college/unit. The SFMC tool requires attention to detail and an understanding of content development and technical nuances. 

• Are members of your team already using SFMC?
• Will the SFMC users support your email build and sending?
• We suggest providing a process for approvals and content creation outside of the email tool.
• Keep current contracts with other email platforms until a solution or transition plan is in place.

How to request a subscription audience for SFMC

The email and automation team will evaluate the request details and reach out with the next steps. We are currently supporting single subscription audiences only (1 subscription audience per web form). A more complex form option will be made available at a later time.

The below details are collected in our request queue for subscriptions. 

• Subscription Owner: First Name, Last Name, email address
• Subscription Email Name: (ex: EHE Education Newsletter)
• Department Contact: (SFMC Licensed User)
• Public Display Name (appears on the form and opt-out page): (ex: Ohio State University's Buckeye UX (BUX) Updates)
• Description (appears on the opt-out page): Who owns the newsletter and who should sign up to receive it?
• Form field questions for setting up the backend of the subscription forms and audience

When submitting a new Subscription request the field in the form labeled "Subject:" will need a specific naming convention. We ask this to help keep all the email requests organized. Please use this format in the "Subject:" field > SFMC-Sub: College/Unit name - Email name.

Examples of use cases:

1. Ohio State Bulk Tool users with external to Ohio State audiences or combination audiences. (Internal-only transactional message audiences apply to the University Community Business unit)
   1. Support for this tool will be sunset in FY2025
2. Units that are moving away from or have been prevented from using Mailchimp or Constant Contact or other bulk email tools that have applicable audiences
   1. Mailchimp, Constant Contact or other email marketing tools are not approved by legal and also meet the audiences that fall into a subscription (See above section for audiences). Note: SFMC is Ohio State's official email tool. Other email-sending tools do not align with the user agreement standards set by Ohio State's legal department.
3. Colleges/units with complex or multiple audiences that fall into subscription will need to wait for subscription 2.0 to be available
   1. A Buckeye360 project is in process set to develop a complex form structure that connects to SFMC
4. Internal audience Community or Committee communications. Subscription can replace Listservs and removes the list maintenance tasks.

College and unit responsibilities to prepare for SFMC subscriptions:

Each subscription will need an owned web location (page, form) where new subscription opt-ins can be acquired. There will be a meeting with each College/Unit to discuss the webform functionality for your email(s).

There are three paths to creating a web form for SFMC Subscriptions

1. A single link with an appended unique "Subscription ID" is available for a simple form.
   1. This simple link solution allows site owners to direct traffic to a central web form via a link with a query string parameter attached. This solution handles accessibility issues, email address validation and CRM integration.
   2. https://cloud.t.osu.edu/sba_subscribe?id=<SubscriptionID>
2. Colleges/Units with a web support team may need to slate this work into the project schedule. 
   1. Developer details for the form build
   2. Two API calls required in the form code.
      1. API for Salesforce CRM object connection
      2. API for real time email address validation through Validity Everest
3. OMC’s Martech team can assist in the form creation by matching the following criteria:
   1. The web page is in BUX and is managed by OMC’s Martech team
   2. Aligns to a single subscription that aligns to the cloud page form
   3. Subscription 2.0 will be coming soon to accommodate complex forms

For existing subscriptions transferring from other email platforms will be asked to provide a .csv file of current subscribers’ email addresses and any other identifying demographic information (i.e., first name, last name, email address). These details will be needed after initial SFMC training and subscription email setup process:

Note: The list update process is the same as the initial list load to SFMC, the Buckeye360 team will need 24-48 hours to update the list. 

• Submit list upload request to Buckeye360 team for adding to the backend of SFMC
  • Submit one subscription list per request to OTDI buckeye360support buckeye360support@osu.edu and copy Rich Chappell.10 and Mindy Loschiavo.14
  • Provide the Subscription ID, each subscription has a unique ID, keep this detail for your records (ex: a3Z4U000000cUARUA2) 
  • What is list details are needed when submitting each list upload request to Buckeye360 team for adding to the backend of SFMC
    • Provide requested timing of list upload
    • Provide a .csv file
    • What to include in the list for uploading to SFMC
      • Current subscribers
      • Email addresses
      • First name (optional, if the field is not populated for all records we suggest a default value "constituent")
      • Last name (optional)
• Noted details for subscription lists already loaded into SFMC:
  • The upload process does provide contact matching and email address validation. If the process finds a match, it will either update the subscription or flag it as a duplicate, depending on what elements it matches on. A comparison can be ran prior to upload to make sure duplicates are not loaded.

Each College/Unit/Committee will commit to one active user license in Salesforce Marketing Cloud along with compliance to required training and user agreement to gain/maintain SFMC access

• Not every subscription will have a new SFMC-licensed user. 
• We suggest providing a process for approvals and content creation outside of the SFMC email tool.

Answer standard SFMC onboarding questions for the subscription, including the name of the unit creating the publication and how often emails will be sent (e.g., The Office of Marketing and Communications’ Ohio State Impact newsletter sends relevant story content from the osu.edu/impact site to subscribers weekly.)

• College/Unit name?
• How many licensed users does this detail apply to? (lastname.#)
  • Does the user have experience in SFMC or SF CRM?
  • What role does this user need (email execution, analytics, cloud pages, other)?
  • How often would they be in the tool? (After 90 days of inactivity their access will be frozen. Access will be re-assessed)
• What audience(s) will you be sending to (Advancement, Athletics, Recruiting students, University Community, Subscription - External to the university)? 
  • Frequency of email sends? 
  • Size of audience? 
  • What are the click metrics for 2 of the latest email sends?
• What email tools is your college/unit currently utilizing? 
• What is the requested timing for access to SFMC? 

Once the subscription is implemented in SFMC, a college/unit agrees to:

1. Honor opt-outs
2. Maintain the stated purpose and frequency of sends or notify emailmarketing@osu.edu of changes
3. To not purchase or scrape the internet for email addresses to build subscription lists. This method of gaining email addresses violates the CAN-SPAM Act and the SFMC user agreement
4. Use Salesforce Marketing Cloud as the university's legally approved email service provider and discontinue use of other bulk email tools where applicable
   • Aligns to single subscription that utilizes a webpage sign-up form 
   • Provides specific link to capture unsubscribes.
     • Subscription 1.0 uses a simple link in the footer to capture unsubscribes
     • Subscription 2.0 will provide a small preference center page per use case (launching soon)
   • SFMC in the university instance is able to provide email support for a few audiences. For more information please email the OMC email and automation team.

When submitting a new Subscription request the field in the form labeled "Subject:" will need a specific naming convention. We ask this to help keep all the email requests organized. Please use this format in the "Subject:" field > SFMC-Sub: College/Unit name - Email name.