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.

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.

Customer experience is one of the key factors to increasing the emotional connection your customers have with your brand. Consider an omni-channel experience, as HBR’s analysis shows this increases emotional connection. Messaging should be included in your channel mix as it’s a more personal form of communication and provides a means for agile engagement that addresses context in a way that more hands-off communications like email cannot.

Building Empathy Requires Insights

It’s very difficult to empathize with your customers if you don’t know much about them. Gaining insights that help you step into their shoes and see the world through their eyes is the only way to put them at the center of the customer experience. Empathy is defined as the ability to share and understand the feelings of another.

When building buyer personas, for example, it takes empathy to understand the perspective of the persona in relation to the challenges they face and objectives they aspire to achieve. Observing how a lead interacts with your brand can give you clarity about whether your content and communications are connecting with your audience in the way you want.

You’re not only looking for what they think, but how they express what’s important to them. The words they use are a good indication of words you can incorporate into your messages to create instant resonance. User reviews and open-ended survey questions are good places to start. A phone call is even better.

Infusing Marketing Messages with Empathy

Now that you’ve gotten to know your audience, it’s time to apply what you’ve learned to your messaging. Let’s say that you’re an admissions officer at a university. You’ve learned your incoming freshman class’ greatest fears include not doing as well as they did in high school and not making a solid set of friends.

In between their acceptance and arriving at campus, you create and send text messages to help new students increase their comfort levels and confidence.

Empathy Increases the Effectiveness of Sales Messaging

Empathy is also important for closing the deal. Let’s say you’re a real estate agent with lots of younger, first-time home buyers. Buying a home is a major decision and financial commitment. There are lots of things your buyers need to consider.

So instead of pushing them to make an offer, creating a messaging strategy that helps them build confidence in their decision and find an acceptable comfort level can do wonders.

Build Stronger Connections by Applying Empathy to Support Messages

Customer service agents who feel their clients’ pain and let them vent before replying, get them to calm down faster. They think about the consequences of the issue on their client’s business and apply that concern to helping them get to faster resolution of the issue.

A financial software company discovered during quality assurance testing that their application wasn’t as intuitive as they’d intended it to be. The first customers to use it confirmed their suspicions. They immediately created a course as a series of videos that walked customers through each step and helped to orient them quickly about how to use the interface.

They sent out messages to every customer to invite them to use the course-before they became frustrated enough to call customer service, or worse, stop using the software. They also knew their customers were very busy so they kept the videos short, showing them how to do one task in two or three minutes.

The company saw that most clients watched multiple videos in the series. They also replied instantly with high ratings in the survey they received by message, as soon as the course ended. Clients wanted tips on how to get more out of Finopia, in the same format-short, easily digestible messages.

Future Finance Software sent bi-weekly tips by message and saw a marked increase in usage and customer satisfaction. Messaging has become a critical tool for building strong connections with their customers which has also reduced churn.

The Bottom Line

Tapping into what motivates your buyers is critical to establishing an emotional connection. Using a communication channel that they prefer, like messaging, further reinforces your thoughtfulness. More customers will think that you ‘get’ them. Isn’t that what every company wants?

^[1] An Emotional Connection Matters More than Customer Satisfaction
https://hbr.org/2016/08/an-emotional-connection-matters-more-than-customer-satisfaction

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.