Go Digital to Recruit Students: Colleges and Text Messaging

Text messaging will help your university win the competition for top high school students. In fact, a recent study by Cappex found that 77% of students want to receive relevant information from universities via text messaging.

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 Your 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.