It’s no secret that millennials are pretty fond of their smartphones. One need only to have a look around at young people walking down the street or sitting at a restaurant to notice that phones play a prominent role in their daily lives. SMS marketing for universities provides an ideal opportunity to reach students (and alumni) where they are.
Phones these days have apps that help users take care of everything from payments, to getting a ride, to arranging deliveries, to stalking friends’ (and strangers’) social lives, and more. Oh, and somewhere in there is the communication aspect.
Phones aren’t just for calls anymore – in fact, the millennial generation reports sending “a lot” of texts each and every day. Coupled with their aversion to phone calls, you’d better write to them if you want to get your point across.
If you’re in higher education, you likely have a lot you’d like to say to prospective and enrolled students. If you want to truly make a connection, you have to keep up with the times. SMS marketing for universities is the most effective way to ensure you get through to them, making it one of the most reliable approaches to SMS for higher education overall.
What is SMS Marketing for Universities?
Before we begin to dive into SMS marketing for universities, let’s get clear about what the world of SMS marketing entails. In an era where 84% of people say they couldn’t go a day without their phones, the power of connecting with customers is at your fingertips.
SMS marketing is a direct line of communication between customers – whether established or prospective – and your brand. Often sent out en masse, these text messages are a means of sending offers, updates, and reminders to a set of contacts.
You send text messages via a text messaging platform, allowing you to distribute messages to subscribers. The important aspect is the subscription. Legally, you cannot send marketing messages until your audience “opts-in.” Add a call to action (CTA) to your email marketing campaigns, share social media posts with a link to enroll, and find other creative and easy ways to entice subscribers.
Once your audience subscribes, you can send promotions to encourage engagement, purchases, or enrollment in activities with your school. Below we’ll look at some specific ways that SMS marketing for universities can benefit institutions and students alike.
Email inboxes are often crowded with promotions and catchy subject lines to tempt recipients into opening them. Emails have their place, of course, and we don’t suggest you completely scratch them from your marketing calendar. But emails aren’t always effective in certain situations, particularly with college-aged students.
Emails have an average open rate of about 17% and a click-through rate of about 10%. That’s a lot of time and effort invested without a guaranteed payoff.
SMS has an astronomical 98% open rate, and 60% of Americans read a text within 1–5 minutes of receiving it. A quick text can direct recipients to a secure portal to provide their information and can serve as a quick – and urgent – reminder to submit details you’re waiting on.
Related: How Colleges Use Texting to Increase Student Enrollment and Improve Retention
Higher Education Approaches to SMS Marketing
Incorporating text communications into your marketing strategy is crucial, but where do you begin? SMS marketing not only supports your marketing approaches but supplements your efforts for recruitment by communicating in a direct way.
In addition to promotions and enrollments, you can use text messages to remind prospective students of recruitment appointments and special events. There are a number of other ways you can engage your prospective and current students through SMS marketing for universities:
Send Event Invites
Whether you’re sharing upcoming events with current students on campus or have open events you’d like to invite a broader audience to, SMS is your ticket to… well, their ticket. Easily send messages to your subscribers to invite them to your campus or online events, encouraging easy participation.
Mass text messaging for universities can help increase event attendance. You can craft SMS messages to extend invitations to events such as sporting events, volunteer opportunities, career fairs, and more.
Include links for sign-ups where relevant. Once students have signed up to attend an event, you can distribute messages to remind them closer to the date as well as send relevant information such as time, location, requirements, and more.
Share Your Content
In order to bring a well-rounded content marketing strategy, make sure you include SMS outreach. You can use text-based content marketing to cultivate future students by sending out text messages with information and free offers. If you have eBooks or videos you’d like to share, send them with an enticing caption.
Up Your Conversion Rate
Once prospective students sign up to receive messages, you can send them polite nudges for appointments. Send out friendly texts encouraging them to set up appointments with recruitment officers. This will help you stay front-of-mind with students who are considering calling your campus home and will give them an easy avenue for booking their appointments.
Provide Useful Reminders
Once you’ve booked appointments, text messages are a great way to send reminders to ensure they show up. You can send texts to prospective students about their appointment times, where to go, and anything they need to bring. You can also use text with your currently enrolled students about important engagements. Consider how much easier it would be to queue up texts with payment deadlines, homework due dates, and more.
Not limited to admissions and enrollments, reminders can be distributed for other useful deadlines and events. Use mass text messaging for universities to send reminders of submission deadlines to add value to your students.
SMS can also be used to offer other useful reminders, such as admissions and course registration deadlines, upcoming tests, payment due dates, and other events. SMS triggers can also be set to alert parents, guardians, or other family members of upcoming events relevant to them.
Encourage Contest Participation
Contests are a great excuse for communication. Of course, you should make sure they’re valuable and relevant to your audience and your school. Try leveraging contests to encourage survey participation. This is a great way to gather more information from students about their experience, and the potential for a reward for completed surveys will go a lot further than posting on notice boards around campus.
The use of mass text messaging for universities can also increase interaction with and encourage participation from students. Use SMS to facilitate voting on campus, distribute satisfaction surveys, invite participation in contests, and solicit feedback.
Surveys are a crucial way to gauge student satisfaction and experience in daily life. RSVP tactics help schools and event organizers accurately estimate and prepare for student attendance at lectures, functions, events, and more.
Send Timely Emergency Alerts
Whether they’re in the same town or across the country, a majority of your students are likely living far from home. It may even be their first time in a chapter of life outside of the “nest.” Campus emergency alerts are not only great for updating students about important information, but you could use this SMS approach to share with their families as well. Weather events, natural disasters, security issues, pandemics (let’s hope these will be a thing of the past soon!), and other urgent messages are best sent via text.
The need for a centralized and reliable distribution method for emergency alerts has become apparent in recent times. With information being so frequently outdated and updated during the pandemic, it’s crucial to have a clear way to share current status updates with students.
Extreme weather, security or crime alerts, or even location changes for lectures can all be effectively sent using mass text messaging for universities.
Bulk SMS is ideal for sending urgent messages to students, faculty, and staff. Some SMS platforms enable you to send mass student SMS text, email, and voice message alerts with a single click, as well as continue the dialog one-to-one if a student replies to the text. You can also segment your audience by location. For example, if your university has multiple campuses, you can send a mass text message to only the students affected by the urgent event.
Admissions & Enrollment
Higher education institutions can use SMS to reach prospective students for admissions. SMS services can be leveraged for recruitment and for sending status updates to applicants. These messages can also distribute admission confirmation to students.
Use mass text messaging for universities to send texts with embedded links, initiating a call to action for prospective students. These links can direct subscribers to various departments or provide useful information. SMS can also be used by your admissions department to streamline workflows and provide tuition payment and enrollment reminders.
The majority of students research multiple colleges and universities before they apply, giving you a prime opportunity to set your institution apart from the competition and provide a responsive, supportive environment, even before a prospect becomes a student. You can use SMS to reach out to prospective students to answer questions, encourage tours and advisor meetings, and remind them of application requirements and deadlines.
Once they have applied, you can use the texting platform to engage in one-on-one, two-way texting to humanize your communications for a more personal touch. Answer questions and keep them updated on the timelines, next steps, and acceptance notifications.
Financial Aid Information
Financial aid often has deadlines all its own, which find their place amongst institutional calendars. Distribution of financial aid updates is crucial to ensure students don’t miss their deadlines and are able to take advantage of the aid available to them. You don’t want your students missing out on FAFSA opportunities because they were too bogged down with their to-do list and deadlines slipped their mind.
Moreover, financial aid can be confusing for students looking to understand and leverage these options. For example, what happens when a student registers for a course that doesn’t count toward their degree plan? They may not understand the implications of that, particularly around payment for the course itself and the trade-off involved around credit hours and graduation trajectory.
Text messaging for universities can help you distribute this information to your students to help demystify the financial aid submission process, ensure the deadlines are clear, and provide them with resources and contacts to support with any further questions they may have.
As many as 85% of first-time, full-time, degree/certificate-seeking undergraduate students were awarded financial aid in the past couple of years. As common as financial aid is, it still remains a complicated and daunting process for students and parents alike. Bulk SMS gives universities an easier and more effective way to help students navigate FAFSA and scholarship opportunities.
And while financial aid information can often be subject to privacy compliance, texting is a great way to get students to log in to their portal to complete required documents and make payments. You can send messages to parents as well, reminding them of upcoming due dates and other important messages related to financial aid.
Student Retention & Success
University students can quickly fall behind, especially during their first year as they get their feet on the ground and learn how to “do” college. SMS is a great way to stay connected with students along their journeys by sending them real-time messages, notifications, and reminders to keep them on track. You can also connect them with university resources to help them get more engaged and feel part of the institution.
This sense of belonging is critical to student success. A recent study by the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) discovered that institutions that successfully promote belonging and invest in a supportive environment realize higher rates of student retention.
Career Services
Career services are an important part of a student’s life as they think about what comes after college and get closer to graduation. Texting is a useful way of communicating important information about upcoming career fairs, campus speakers, student events, job listings, and internship opportunities.
Alumni Engagement
Alumni are an important part of any higher education institution, yet they can be challenging to reach once the school deactivates their school email address. Bulk SMS is effective in keeping in contact with alumni and encouraging them to get involved in alumni events and donation campaigns. The best texting platforms will enable you to segment your audience so you can customize messaging to their preferences.
Related: Alert Notification Best Practices
How to Get Started with SMS Marketing
Now that you see the variety of approaches you can take to text messages, how do you get started? We’ll cover some of the more practical bits to ensure you can execute your creative and thoughtful marketing strategy to its fullest potential.
Understand Short Codes
SMS marketing for universities all originates from your own unique number, similar in the way your personal text messages work. What’s different, however, is the length of the number you’re sending from.
This entire article could cover off the ins and outs of SMS short codes, but let’s keep it brief. Short codes are five- or six-digit “phone numbers” that appear as the sender of the text messages you distribute. You can choose a random, dedicated code or a vanity code – a unique one you create based on your school, often spelling a word on the keypad for easy recollection.
Once upon a time, brands would share a short code to distribute costs. Shared short codes created a lot of confusion as it was difficult for recipients to opt out of the single service they weren’t interested in hearing from, without potentially opting out of the ones they wanted. Carriers finally got rid of them because they were too “spammy” and uncontrollable.
Dedicated short code programs offer a platform to distribute mass messages from your dedicated short code. You can use short codes for opt-ins and sign-ups (“Text VISIT to 123456 to schedule your campus tour”). They’re also a great originator for the above marketing approaches we covered, allowing you to send bulk messages to your subscribers.
Gather Consent
It may be tempting to go through your contact lists and begin sending messages to all of the phone numbers you have on file. We have one important thing to say: that’s not how you do it.
You want to start off on the right foot by ensuring your recipients are open to getting messages from you. But that’s not all. There’s someone else who also wants this – the government. That’s why they’ve made it compulsory for your contacts to opt-in for your service.
You can add this to your marketing strategy, and get the word out about the benefits of your SMS service via email, social posts, and on-campus activities. If you have print materials you distribute, add a noticeable section with your short code and an indication of why someone would like to sign up to hear from you via text.
Decide on Your Message Strategy
It likely goes without saying that sending messages from your university isn’t like sending them to your friends. You want to be short, to the point, and initiate some sort of action, be it signing up, showing up, or following up.
Send practical messages, but don’t bombard your subscribers. Relevant messages help you stay front-of-mind without being a nuisance.
With CRM integration, you can create automated messages. For example, you may wish to send a confirmation text when someone completes an inquiry form or an online scheduling request. If you’re organized with segmenting your audience in your CRM, you can personalize your communications based on these segments. For example, you may have a specific message you’d like to send to prospective students who live out of state.
A cohesive strategy is effectCoordinating your text and email strategies help you get your message out. If you’re promoting events in emails, send shorter, less-frequent texts to reinforce this messaging. Remember, an effective approach to SMS marketing for universities shouldn’t be as frequent as email campaigns.
Texting and email can go hand in hand. The same goes for texting and social media, voice calls, and secure portals. Texting is a way to get students’ attention and can direct them to emails or secure portals when more detail is needed.
Choosing the Right SMS Platform
Bulk SMS for universities is easier than you may think. It doesn’t require heavy lifting or massive technology investment. Many higher education institutions have already implemented a bulk SMS solution as a way to target messages, notifications, and alerts to students, as well as faculty, staff, and parents.
The ease of deployment will depend on the texting platform’s API. It should allow you to seamlessly integrate the platform with your CRM and other institutional and marketing apps. It should also be intuitive and easy to use at scale.
Key features include:
- Bulk + one-to-one SMS.
- Ability for multiple staff to manage threaded conversations.
- Scheduling & reporting.
- Audience segmentation.
- CRM integration.
Benefits of SMS for Universities
- Text messages are cost-effective.
- Campaigns are measurable and trackable.
- SMS is direct and personal, arriving straight to the inbox.
SMS Marketing Can Build Your Relationships
Organizations and customers alike see the value in receiving SMS messages for information sharing. With poignant, relevant messages, you’ll reach your customers directly with a more personal touch. Supplementing your existing marketing strategy with SMS helps ensure your message reaches your audience swiftly and builds value.
Platforms such as TrueDialog will help you effortlessly create effective messages and deliver them to your audience, offering one of the most practical SMS solutions for universities looking to scale communication.
FAQs
What is SMS marketing for universities?
Think of SMS marketing for universities as a way for schools to meet students where they already are — on their phones. It’s a quick, reliable way to send reminders, updates, and important info without getting lost in crowded email inboxes.
How can SMS for universities improve student communication?
SMS for universities makes it easy to share event details, appointment reminders, or deadline alerts instantly. Instead of waiting for students to check email, you can reach them directly with a simple text.
Why is SMS for higher education more effective than email?
Students are far more likely to read a text than an email — most texts are opened within minutes. That’s why SMS for higher education is so powerful, especially when time-sensitive updates matter.
What are the benefits of using bulk SMS for universities?
Bulk SMS for universities lets schools send out one message to thousands of students at once. Whether it’s a campus-wide alert, a financial aid deadline, or a last-minute schedule change, everyone gets the same info right away.
What should I look for in SMS solutions for universities?
Good SMS solutions for universities make life easier. Look for features like two-way texting, integration with your CRM, and the ability to segment students so you can send the right message to the right group.
How does mass text messaging for universities help during emergencies?
Mass text messaging for universities is one of the fastest ways to spread urgent information. In cases like severe weather or safety alerts, a quick text ensures students, parents, and staff know what’s happening in real time.
Disclaimer: Please note that this advice is for informational purposes only and is neither intended as nor should be substituted for consultation with appropriate legal counsel and/or your organization’s regulatory compliance team
