Educational institutions aren’t necessarily “selling” their value proposition to eager consumers, the way a retailer or a restaurant might. Instead, their target audiences are made up of alumni, current students and potential donors – and they need effective methods for reaching them.
Today, relying on basic communication platforms doesn’t always cut it. It’s easy for a message from an educational institution to get lost in the chaos of other calls, emails, direct messages, and paperwork—and that’s where Education SMS text message marketing comes in.
Educational SMS messaging enables fast connections with target audiences and helps your messages stand out. With an open rate of 99% and a click-through rate that’s 13x higher than email, it’s hard to find another channel that connects and converts as effectively as SMS.
What Is Education SMS Marketing?
Education SMS marketing, also known as text message marketing, is an incredibly effective way for educational institutions to send targeted, personalized communication directly to your target audience.
Just like individuals use SMS to interact with friends and family, educational institutions can use SMS marketing to communicate and connect with their alumni, students, and potential donors. It’s a more personal, direct way to communicate with everyone in your ecosystem. These messages are sent through an aggregator and delivered by a mobile carrier.
How Do Marketers Use Texting?
There are many types of use cases to consider for your own Education SMS marketing efforts. The best approaches for you depend on your goals, your clients, and their audience. Here is a deeper dive into just a few Education SMS marketing examples.
1. Share admissions, enrollment and academic updates.
You may be an institution whose student audience has a lot to juggle. They may not have the initiative to log into email account to track admissions, enrollment, class adds/drops and academic updates. Automated email updates can be easily misplaced or overlooked (or can sometimes be routed to junk or spam folders, where they disappear forever).
To help a student audience understand their standing, you can use B2B SMS marketing to send real-time text updates about admissions updates, enrollment news, academic updates, and reminders.
This helps your student audience prevent small issues from turning into big problems. This level of proactive transparency can also help this audience build trust and confidence in their institution, generating longer-lasting loyalty.
2. Timely reminders and notifications.
One of the most proven ways to drive audience retention is by keeping them properly informed about things that, without being properly alerted, can easily disrupt their day’s workflow.
Educational SMS marketing provides you with a channel that can easily be used for delivering timely, highly accessible notifications about things like financial aid, weather alerts or the status of a Customer Service team troubleshooting an issue. With SMS as a channel, you can provide your audience with peace of mind by ensuring they’ll never miss a message that requires their attention.
3. Nurture alumni relationships.
In educational environments, alumni donation decisions are often coupled with long giving campaigns and frequent outreach. Once your institution makes an alumni connection, it must be fostered and maintained if you want it to survive.
By taking time to identify what this audience needs, you can more confidently develop programs and messages that resonate with them and, therefore, produce results.
For example, you can leverage Education SMS marketing to support continuous communication, cultivate loyalty, and nurture relationships by providing helpful information - like giving initiatives or new campus developments - that will enable your alumni audience to make more informed decisions.
You can also use SMS as a means of following up on donation opportunities to see how your institution can help direct their support appropriately.
You can even set up automated, response-driven drip campaigns using texting. This allows you to send relevant content to the right audience at the right times.
Unlocking the Benefits of B2B Text Messaging
Sending SMS messages to your audience allows you to put all the information they need right at their fingertips, without the lag time often associated with missed calls, unclear emails, or pieces of mail that don’t get passed along.
Education text messaging offers other benefits, too.
Better engagement.
Text messages have much higher open rates and response rates compared to other communication platforms, such as email. In fact, the click-thru rate for SMS is 13 times higher than email.
Faster to launch.
Think about all the work that goes into building a call campaign or email message.
To create a call campaign, you must build scripts for cold and warm calls, as well as for voicemails. Then you must find time in your day to make the calls and track responses so that progress can be reviewed later.
Creating an email campaign requires the development of both the email’s content and the design work to create imagery and set up the message in an email marketing software platform in a visually appealing way.
SMS campaigns can be created and launched much faster than either of these approaches. No design skills or pictures are necessary (unless you want to include images in your message, of course), and you only need to write a sentence or two to communicate an effective message. Your education message campaigns can be ready to launch in minutes instead of hours.
Easier to track.
Depending on how you send your Education SMS marketing messages, those text messages can be easily tracked in terms of open and response rates so you can see when messages are being delivered, read, and acted on. Tracking campaign results can also help you document your return on Education SMS marketing investments.
Finally, you can test content and offers to see which campaigns and promotions perform the best.
Follow These 5 Education SMS Marketing Best Practices
Following best practices for Education SMS marketing can help you optimize communication, productivity, and outcomes. Here are a few recommendations to ensure success.
1. Make your message clear.
The shorter your messages are, the faster and easier they’ll be to read. Remember, you only have 160 characters to get your point across, so be brief and include a clear call to action (CTA) so recipients know exactly what to do after reading your message. Good CTA examples may include:
- Schedule a call
- Book a meeting
- Confirm today
- Start now
- Text to subscribe
- Get more info
2. Keep it personal.
After you’ve built a database of an audience that wants to hear from you via SMS, then you can create highly targeted content based on their preferences, behaviors, and engagement history.
For example, you can segment your audience into different groups based on whether they’re a new or returning student, how much they’ve donated in the past, how recently they’ve donated, etc. Each of these groups can be sent a different message based on what may appeal to them.
3. Create and stick to a plan.
Timing can influence the performance of your Education SMS marketing campaigns. Unlike text messages that are sent to consumers, you likely want to keep work- or school-day schedules in mind when choosing appropriate send times, aiming to catch your audience during their most productive and responsive periods of the day.
4. Stay professional.
Educational SMS messaging is a great way to create a personal connection with an audience, but you still want to be professional. For consistency and recognition, as well as to build trust and credibility, make sure the messages you send align with your brand and mission.
As a rule of caution, stay away from excessive capitalization or the overuse of punctuation (like too many exclamation marks!!!!!). Instead of aggressive sales pitches, prioritize education and value: you want to be informational and helpful to your audience so they feel like your text messages offer additional value that can’t be found elsewhere.
5. Analyze and act on performance.
Keep track of Education SMS marketing results over time so you can see what’s working and what isn’t. That way, you can carry over the messaging and strategies that resonate while revisiting the ones that don’t. This will improve your engagement strategy over time.
Answering a Common Question: Is Education Cold Texting Legal?
There are many stipulations around cold calling and sending unsolicited email, but does the same hold true for Educational texting?
There are several sets of rules mandated by various parties that a company must abide by before you can begin to reach your audience through SMS, from The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) to the CTIA.
Failure to comply with certain rules or requirements could result in steep penalties, such as hefty fines.
As SMS regulations change over time, it’s important to do your research to make sure you comply with the latest laws and requirements. Trusted mobile marketing partners who understand the importance of SMS compliance can support your mobile efforts by keeping you informed on the changing carrier, CTIA, federal and state regulations.
Vibes Can Set You Up for Long-Term Education Audience Engagement
As North America’s most trusted and last independent Tier 1 SMS aggregator, Vibes makes sure your messages take the fastest path possible to reach your audience. Our direct carrier connections and hands-on personal service pair the messaging reach and reliability with the trusted long-term relationship you deserve.
Want to integrate your existing tech stack for campaign and message personalization for your education audience? We also make it incredibly easy to maximize your technology investments by bringing enterprise-grade SMS into the tools your team already uses every day. This means you can create and easily feed thousands of event-triggered text messages through an API from your customer relationship management (CRM) or CDP (customer data platform).
Finally, we always keep our ears to the ground on the ever-changing mobile compliance laws and requirements, enabling us to provide general guidance around what you can—and can’t—do with your Education SMS marketing.*
Get in touch with us to learn more about how we’re helping educational institutions and businesses across multiple industries drive true engagement with their audience.
*LEGAL NOTE: Vibes' mobile compliance guidance is not legal counsel. Companies must work directly with their own legal teams to determine what is required for their SMS campaigns.
