The first SMS message was sent in 1992, and your target audiences have grown up texting their friends and family. Because your college aims to serve these digital natives, adding a messaging communication channel will help you reach this audience every day. 

Compliance — Your First Step

Before we jump into the benefits of using messaging, your university will need to take the essential first step of getting permission from your students and leads. Even if you’ve been in contact through email or phone calls, you’ll still need to obtain their express written consent before you send the first text.

You can stay in compliance with the anti-telemarketing laws in your country, like the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) in the United States or European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), with opt-in opportunities and language in your digital spaces like social media and websites, as well as in printed material like applications, flyers, business cards, and mailings. Make consent a standard part of materials designed for students and a part of your website. Once you have permission from your audience, you’re ready to start using messaging that benefits everyone — from your staff to your students.

Send marketing information with messaging to change leads into students

In 160 characters or less, you can drive prospective students toward enrollment with a simple conversational message. Most of your leads are already checking their phone more than 96 times a day, and you can reap the benefits by sending SMS texts that include a clear call to action right to their screen. Your enrollment team can send these short, relevant messages about new changes on campus that include links to the application or an interesting fact with a link to your college newsletter. Asking questions is a great way to get them interested while also unveiling what your school has to offer.

Your message can be as simple as:

Hi Jamal! Did you know XYZCollege
has an open house this Sunday? 
Reply OPEN for more info. 
Sean XYZ College

Messaging can free up university staff and increase productivity

Messaging is an efficient communication channel that can save productive hours for your university team. A quick message is easy for your staff to send compared to making numerous unanswered phone calls or emails. Your counselor’s caseload can become more manageable when they can use messaging to engage in conversations, saving valuable time they can use to guide and ultimately enroll more students. And since messages are read and responded to faster than other communication channels alone, your university staff will be able to serve more students in less time.

Messaging + your existing student database = engagement

With SMS-Magic, your staff won’t have to spend all day at their computers or on their phones to send engaging messages. Once you’ve stored vital student information in your CRM database, your team can create segmented groups that will receive specific marketing or SMS messaging campaigns. Send relevant and personalized messages to these student groups based on their enrollment or housing status, major, interests, or campus location to snag their attention and trigger engagement.

Messaging automations can work for you and your students

Messaging automation can also save your staff valuable productivity hours by responding without staff intervention at any time of day. With SMS-Magic, you can create messaging flows triggered by keywords, numbers, or phrases. This process can allow your team to collect data, assist students, and send applicable information using messages they’ve previously written. If a student requests information about your school while a counselor is in a meeting, a triggered conversational text can respond instantaneously, starting and continuing that vital conversation.

Sending confirmations and reminders to keep students on track

Even though students may schedule a meeting or plan to come to an event or orientation, sending reminder messages and confirmations can help increase their attendance. These reminders can be automated and scheduled to send multiple days before, one day before and the day of. Your school can also use this reminder strategy to send messages about important due dates for enrollment and financial aid applications, school and course registration, parking passes, and housing.

Using conversational messaging in higher education is a great way to stay in touch with prospective students and current students – even students who might be taking a semester off. Sending hundreds or thousands of messages and keeping track of them, however, takes a little help. SMS-Magic has the tools that will make your messaging campaigns easy to create, easy to implement, and easy to track. You can’t easily send thousands of messages using your mobile phone, but you can easily send thousands of messages through SMS-Magic.

Let SMS-Magic help you communicate your educational offerings and services to your students each day. Ready to get started? Contact our SMS-Magic team for a demo or a free trial today!

HeyTutor is a company dedicated to the supplemental education of children and adults from pre-K to college and beyond in more than 250 subject areas. The company has developed a dynamic e-learning platform to help students fulfill their school goals as well as their career aspirations. The core of their business is one-on-one, online tutoring sessions, but the company is expanding its business with in-person tutoring, early childhood prep activities, and social and emotional learning, just to name a few of their recent initiatives.

As they prospected for new business, HeyTutor found that their best potential clients were working parents and students who were busy with other commitments most of the day. Parents would fill out lead forms in response to marketing efforts, and a HeyTutor staff member would initiate contact with a phone call or email.  Unfortunately, many calls and emails went unanswered. HeyTutor believed increasing their response rate was vital to their continued success.

In short, HeyTutor needed to get their prospects involved in conversations early in the sales journey. They knew that the average response rate for emails was less than 10 percent and responses to phone calls weren’t meeting their expectations. Messaging seemed like a great solution to their problem.

Research shows that over 97 percent of Americans use text messaging every day. It’s native to most mobile phones, and over 90 percent of buyers would prefer to hear from companies via message than any other form of communication. In addition, 80 percent of people use texting for business, and 35 percent of these same people say they can’t go 10 minutes without responding to a text.

Messaging also fit into the busy lives of HeyTutor’s preferred clients – students and their parents. Patrick McClure, Hey Tutor’s director of operations, said in a recent interview, “Everyone’s working. If I get a [phone] call right now, I’m not going to answer it. Will I remember to call back in an hour? Probably not.”

But, he said, if a text message comes through, the prospect can easily multi-task and respond. Their response might read, “I’m not available right now. Call me back after work. I’m free at 6.”

Some people, he said, just want to talk via text. Others want to check the price. “It makes it much easier for us to get right in,” McClure said.

HeyTutor had already developed a robust CRM with Salesforce and wanted to integrate the database with its messaging solution. They looked for companies that were experts at Salesforce integrations.

They initially chose a messaging provider that promised to build out the Salesforce customizations that HeyTutor required. The promises, however, weren’t fulfilled. It wasn’t a complete disaster, McClure said, but the badly implemented customizations delayed the entire project. HeyTutor ended the relationship so they could repair the damage their messaging provider had caused. Burned by a bad experience, HeyTutor turned to SMS-Magic for help.

SMS-Magic is an expert with Salesforce integrations. The company is a Salesforce Partner and the top rated messaging application on the Salesforce AppExchange.

SMS-Magic’s Tanmay Ghag started working with McClure to ensure that the Salesforce integration went smoothly and encompassed all the customizations HeyTutor needed. “Tanmay has been fantastic,” McClure said. “Everything that we ever wanted to integrate, has been integrated – flawlessly.”

McClure reported that after the SMS-Magic integration went live, the company saw an increase in lead responses between 35 and 40 percent. McClure said the increase in responses has directly benefited the bottom line.

As the relationship between the two companies has developed, SMS-Magic has continued to work on tailoring the product to meet HeyTutor’s needs. “These guys made it effortless and got everything set up right away,” McClure said. “Also, it was very affordable.”

“It’s been a pleasure to work with SMS-Magic,” McClure said. “They have a customer service team to emulate. It’s remarkable.”

As SMS-Magic develops new capabilities, HeyTutor is looking forward to expanding their messaging program. With shared success behind them, the two companies look forward to growing their partnership into the future.

Since text messaging is the conversation channel of choice for your students, they’ll naturally read and respond to your messages concerning their enrollment process. Thanks to the powerful automation available with advanced conversational text messaging solutions, you’ll be able to share and track all applications using easy workflows and digital tools. This means you focus on students, not on which form they need to sign.

Our clients use text messaging during the recruiting, application, and enrollment processes to simplify and accelerate results while also building a stronger relationship with their incoming students, thanks to personal conversations.

Moving From Email to Text Solutions for Higher Education

There are a number of ways to use text messaging to simplify and improve your application process. Here are a few ideas.

1. Offer text opt-ins for more information or help. Students won’t necessarily pick up the phone and call you if they have questions about the application forms on your website, your curriculum or programs, or need your help. Offering a text opt-in to ask questions or get help makes it easy for digital natives to engage with you the way they want. They’ll like you because you’ll converse with them in the way they prefer, and they’re much more likely to engage with you through a text message than any other channel.

For example, on your website, add a message that promotes the option to text a specific keyword to a specific short code for help, to get answers to questions etc. When they text you, you will immediately be notified and can respond to them quickly, beginning a conversation that’s personal, quick and easy.

2. Invite key prospects to apply to your school. You meet a large number of students. You can easily send the students you select to invite to your program a text message to start the application process.

For example, after you meet with a top prospect, you can send a simple message with a personal link to an application form.

When a student clicks on the link, you’ll know they’ve clicked and be able to monitor their progress.

When they submit the application form, a confirmation message is automatically created and sent.

If the student responds to the text, Jackie is immediately alerted so that she can respond immediately with a personal message to answer questions or simply have a chat.

3. Automate acceptance messages and offer more information. When a student’s application is accepted, an acceptance message can automatically be sent, along with a link to start another multi-message series that guides a student through the admissions process.

You can create messages to guide a student through the admissions process, from financial aid to housing, campus activities to class schedules. You can also blend messaging with emails based on which channel is most appropriate for the communication.

For example:

• Forms for financial aid, housing and class schedules can be sent to students via email, for ease of access.
• You can monitor student progress by submitting these forms. When they delay, you can automatically trigger text messages at specific points in time to remind them to complete applications and other necessary forms.
• You can also automate messages that offer keywords to text for help, more information, a call from a counselor and more.

By using conversations to remind and encourage students throughout the process, as well as offer them help, you create a stronger relationship with students while simplifying the process for all. Because all communications are tracked in your CRM, you’ll know the history of student conversations whether the communication was made via text message or email.

The Bottom Line

Conversational text messaging is the channel of choice for digital natives, aka your students. By using text messaging for higher education as a key component of your admissions process, you’ll make things easier for your students, creating stronger relationships with them before they ever reach your campus to begin classes.

You’ll also make admissions tracking simpler for your admissions team, saving them time spent on organizational tasks that can be better spent building relationships with the students themselves.

Ready to get started? Reach out and we’d be happy to give you a personalized tour of the product and how it can help you better serve your students. 

Why Use Messaging?

Messaging is an immediate way to start or continue a conversation with your customers. Research shows us that your customers don’t mind receiving helpful messages, and they prefer messages to email or phone calls.

Worldwide, we send more than five billion texts a day – not counting other types of messages – and we open 98 percent of them. We only open emails 22 percent of the time, according to Gigaom. We don’t answer phone calls as often and may delay calling someone back for hours – if we can reach them by phone at all. Research from Asurion, however, shows that we look at our phones 96 times a day or once every 10 minutes.

If the purpose of reaching out to your customer is to remind them of an appointment, check on their satisfaction with a product or inform them about an approaching deadline, your message is of high importance to your customer. You’re helping them manage their “to-do” lists in a way that is frictionless for them. By crafting messages that allow a customer to respond quickly and easily, you’ve made interactions with your company easier and improved customer satisfaction.

By sending messages, you’re helping your customers tame the communication chaos that surrounds all of us. But most messages only go one way – you send an informational message to your customer and they can’t respond to you, except to opt out. Sometimes messages aren’t designed to go two ways.

So what happens if the customer wants to ask a question or change an appointment date? Can messaging help you then?

Enter Conversational Messaging

Absolutely! Conversational messaging allows your customers to send messages back to you. The exchange can be brief or lengthy, depending on the nature of the interaction. You can use AI solutions to drive the conversation, or you can hand off complicated issues directly to your customer service team. Conversational messaging can be configured to your unique situation.

Of course, a short message can’t explain a complicated process, but it can provide a link for more information. Or it can allow someone to upload information. If you’re using multimedia messaging (MMS) someone could send you a photo, scanned image, audio file or video.

Fortunately, customers already express a preference for messaging, and say they would use it for customer support issues, if it were available. But messaging isn’t just for customer support. Messaging is applicable to almost all businesses because every company needs to interact with its customers. Positive interactions are critical to engaging customers, understanding their needs, and keeping them loyal to your brand. Engaged customers lead to higher sales, more applicants, more qualified buyers, stronger leads, and better attendance, just to name a few benefits.

• Colleges and universities can use CM to communicate with applicants, new students, and graduating seniors.

• Financial service firms can reach out to potential customers with products tailored specifically for them.

• Healthcare organizations of all sizes can interact directly with their patients and clients.

The ways you can use conversational messaging are as varied as the products and services you offer.

How Can You Get Started?

If your customer engagement is based on emails, phone calls, or direct mail, we suggest you try conversational messaging as a new channel. SMS-Magic offers a free trial so that you can get a feel for our product. If you’re as pleased as we think you will be, you can choose the level of service that’s best for your company.

If you use a customer relation management system (CRM), we can integrate SMS-Magic into your system. We work seamlessly with Salesforce and Zoho, and we have the capability to work with most systems. If you don’t use a CRM, no worries! You can deploy our stand-alone product that doesn’t require a CRM. Our installation is quick, easy, and supported by our experienced technical staff members.

Let’s Go!

Does SMS-Magic sound like the answer you’ve been looking for? We hope so!

Contact us to set up a demo or to start your free trial. Let us show you how we can help you better connect with customers through conversational messaging!

Text messaging gives higher education leaders the capability to respond at any time, day or night, with automated personal responses. You can also send tuition reminders, event updates, and gather critical loan information using automated campaigns.

We put together this infographic to give university leaders a quick overview of how you will better respond to, and connect with, students and alumni for colleges and text messaging from SMS-Magic.

If you haven’t yet adopted text messaging for your university and want to learn more, schedule a demo and we’d be happy to share our expertise with you, answer questions and show you what text messaging can do for your organization.

Since the majority of your alumni use text messaging every day, it’s a natural way to begin and continue a conversation with them about your institution, your plans for the future, and what matters most to them.

When using text messaging to have donor conversations, here are three key strategies to increase your success, and have fun along the way.

Colleges and Text Messaging: Learn About Alumni as Individuals

Asking a recent graduate, with thousands of dollars of student loan debt, for a large contribution isn’t going to work. It’s surely not going to help you impress them with how much you care about their world.

The same can be said for asking a patron of the arts to fund your new basketball stadium, or asking a sports fan to contribute to the purchase of that new library.

Engaging alumni via text messaging gives you the power to quickly learn more and more about your alumni, so that you can tune your requests to match their financial situation and areas of interest.

You already know their graduation year, which helps you better segment your alumni based on their projected financial giving ability. Use text messaging to survey your alumni to learn more about their passions and interests. For example:

When your alumni respond, you’ll know exactly which type of funding opportunity will interest them.

Engage Alumni via Text Messaging to Build a Relationship

Now that you know what interests them at a high level, you can tune your requests. You can continue to ask them questions to learn even more about them, giving you the key insights to build a relationship.

Just remember, you won’t build a relationship by only asking them for donations. It’s just as important to give back to them with programs or opportunities that match their interests. You want to be a partner for life, not that pesky organization that always asks for money.

Use text messaging to invite alumni to networking events, special programs at your campus, or continuing education opportunities. Texting makes it so easy to keep your alumni in the loop concerning key news and updates, fun announcements, and more. For example, colleges and text messaging can invite your alumni to a special networking function, then remind them of the date and time.

If you want to get donations from your alumni, always continue to give. That’s the foundation of long-term relationships.

Ask Alumni to Help You Fundraise, and Make it Fun!

Alumni can help you with more than money. When you make it fun for them to help, it’s even better.

Every activity can become fun and engaging when you turn it into a game. Text messaging helps you create that fun environment for fundraising. You can incite alumni to get involved in your fundraising goal, based on different actions that contribute to your success.

For example, you can award prizes for alumni who capture different levels of investment, create campaigns within their local networks, contribute new fundraising ideas, and more.

Engaging alumni via text messaging makes it easy to gamify fundraising. You can announce the program, send promotional texts to keep the game top of mind, feature winners and their ideas, offer special prizes, and share each alumnus’s personal status with them.

The Bottom Line

Text messaging gives you the chance to have important conversations with your alumni, for fundraising and continuing to build long-term relationships.

You’ll communicate the way they like, learn about what matters to them, as you show you care about them as individuals, and build relationships that fuel ongoing fundraising success.

Let’s face it. Your students are all digital natives. They spend more time on their smartphones than they do anywhere else. When you communicate with them the way they naturally like to converse, everybody wins.

That’s why text messaging for Higher Ed is such a powerful communications channel for universities and other educational organizations. Your students will read your messages. They will respond. In fact, text messages get 6X the responses vs. email and 10X vs. phone calls. How’s that for connection power?

Colleges and Text Messaging

You can use conversational text messaging for virtually any communication you want to share with your student population. And they will love you for it.

Following are just a few examples:

1. Campus announcements.

Whether you want to send out information about classes, campus schedules, and updates or simply let your students know about something that just came up, text messaging is the fastest and most effective way to reach them.

You can send out a simple outbound informational message to your entire student population.

You can send a message to a select group of students, from everyone in a specific class to those in a school to those with a certain GPA.

2. Events and special opportunities.

Some campus events require registration or some kind of response from students. You can easily use text messaging for Higher Ed to manage those events, as well.

For example, let’s say you want to promote and sell tickets to your Fine Arts production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. You can promote the event, guide your students to their discounted ticket sales and remind them of the upcoming event, all with a single multi-touch messaging campaign. Here’s how.

First, you send a message telling them about Hamlet.

Next, you can send a message a week later offering them a student discount.

When your student buys the tickets, you can automatically trigger a confirmation message. You can also offer a keyword response for them to ask questions or get help.

Then, you can send reminder messages ahead of the actual play date, as often as you’d like.

3. Emergency announcements.

Text messaging is a fast way to get emergency information to students. For example, weather advisories, road closings, building closings, class cancellations, and more.

The Bottom Line

Your students are digital-first. They communicate through digital means, like messaging. Colleges and text messaging are meant to go together.

If you want to get their attention, you need to communicate the way they want. That’s just what text messaging for Higher Ed lets you do.

More importantly, conversational text messaging gives you the flexibility to communicate virtually any type of information, quickly and effectively, to any segment of your student population.

So what are you waiting for?

For colleges and text messaging you can get and keep their attention on you, your curriculum and your opportunities for their futures.

One of the biggest challenges every university recruiter faces is getting potential students to pay attention to the information you send them. After all, there are so many options, especially for the students you want. Everyone else wants them too.

Text messaging gives you the advantage, especially with the younger generations of digital natives who already use messaging as their primary form of communication. Why?

• Digital natives read and act on messages. You can send them class information, videos, links to web pages and more and they will pay attention. Try that with email and they probably won’t.
• Texting is a natural conversation. You can interact immediately, answer questions, send relevant information and learn more about your prospective students. Texting is so natural that 50% of students say text conversations are just as meaningful as a phone call.
• Your students will appreciate you. Today’s incoming students are digital natives. They’ll like you and your university/institution better because you’re communicating with them the way they want to communicate. That helps you stand out from the crowd.

Colleges and Text Messaging: How Can You Use SMS to Recruit Students?

When it comes to recruiting, our education clients use conversational text messaging to:

• Share information about your programs and curriculum.
• Invite students and schedule campus tours or calls with staff
• Respond immediately to questions or requests.
• Connect prospects with other students in their school of interest program to have personal conversations via messaging and more.

Reach Out With Conversational Text Messaging

Let’s look at how easy it is to reach out and share information with prospective students. Say you’re a university recruiter for the business school. You’ve met a number of high school students you want to entice to your university’s programs.

First, you’d send a message to all of the students you’ve met that you’d like to recruit. The initial message is designed to remind them you’ve met before and ask if they’re interested in knowing more about your university’s degrees for business. It also serves as an opt-in confirmation for your messaging campaign.

When a student replies YES to the first message, they are automatically sent a series of recruiting messages for the business school. (FYI, for students who don’t respond, you can also send a slightly different message to learn what compels them to respond.)

For YES responses, you can send a variety of information in a multi-touch message campaign. For example, you can send:

• A personal URL to information on the business school, so you can track when they click to do research.
• A video of business school students talking about how amazing your school is and how much they learn, and have fun too.
• A link to a well-known professor’s latest book.
• Whatever else you think will be relevant and enticing to them.

If the student doesn’t respond to your initial information flows, you can send more messages with different content to see what attracts them to take action. All of these sends can be automated by your advanced conversational text messaging solution. You can learn what content compels them to take action, and then focus your campaign on that content.

Schedule Visits and More with Text Messaging

When the student takes action and clicks on a link, watches a video etc., the system automatically triggers a 2^nd message a week later, asking if they’d like a personal tour of the campus, or if they have questions they’d like answered.

When a student texts INFO, Rob (your recruiter) is alerted by the SMS-Magic desktop so he can immediately reply with a personal conversation, answer any questions, send more information or schedule a call.

When the student replies TOUR, they are automatically sent a message that makes it easy to schedule their visit.

When the student schedules a campus tour, Rob is notified via email. The student is also sent an immediate confirmation message.

Students are also sent automatic reminders on a regular basis of their tour date. You can also offer them the option of changing their date through the same automated process.

Follow-up to Visits with Conversations

After the tour, Rob sends a personal message to the student. In this case, he also sends a personal link for the student to enroll.

When the student clicks on the link to submit the enrollment form, a new conversational messaging flow begins to walk them through the admissions process.

The Bottom Line

Colleges and text messaging go together. Messaging is the new conversation, especially for your students. They live and breathe with their smart phones.

When you converse with them the way they want, making it easy for them to interact with you, you get a leg up in their university selection process.

Plus, you get to focus on having conversations with students. Learning about what they need, helping them understand the value your school brings and recruiting the best students for your programs.