Text Alerts for Higher Education Recruiting & Nurturing Admitted Students
While most of Simplified Alerts clients use our SMS test alert messaging system for sending urgent notifications to their employees, staff, or organization members for things such as emergency weather alerts or office closings, IT status updates and outages, or safety and incident alerts, there are several other ways an business or organization can use our text alert platform.
Take for example, Higher Education. John Marshall Law School in Chicago uses text notification and alerts in two ways: Recruiting and nurturing newly admitted students and keeping Alumni informed of important events or news.
Simplified Solutions, the parent company of Simplified Alerts, has helped the law school develop and execute a series of SMS recruiting and nurture text campaigns programs for the last 3 years. Just because a student has applied does not guarantee they will enroll in the school. The strategy is to nurture recently admitted students who have opted-in to receive texts alerts (surprisingly, most prefer texts to emails) and covert them into enrolled law students. The text alert campaign begins once a student is admitted into the school with a welcome message and link to a video. This is followed by a series of text messages over the course of a few months to promote programs, events and open houses. We also use a Y/N poll to gage a student’s interest in the school or RSVP for events. As the date for the making deposits approaches, we send text alerts to remind them the deposits are due with links to the appropriate website page. If a student has not made a deposit they are given reminders via texts, emails, and phone calls. At the end of the process, students who have made their deposits are encouraged to enroll in their classes. That is the ultimate conversion. In all, the text campaign, along with other recruitment marketing tactics, lasts 7 to 8 months.
Once the campaign ends, we were able to compare students who received text messages and enrolled with those who enrolled and did not receive the text message campaign. Enrollment averages 10% higher for those students the school nurtured with the Simplified Alerts Tect Campaign.
For Alumni, the program is simple: Promote events and news updates about the law school. The campaign drove Alumni to key landing pages on the website. Website analytic showed huge surges to the landing pages on the days the text campaign ran.
