With many campuses moving online due to the coronavirus pandemic, colleges and universities are looking for more virtual communication strategies to connect with their students. One method to consider is text messaging.
Students need new ways to connect with their career centers and advisors more than ever before. The question for many universities is how to deliver the support students need while keeping them engaged. Automated text messaging is a popular communication method that allows universities to communicate with their students quickly and efficiently.
Many colleges and universities already use email but they’re missing out on a big opportunity if they aren’t using text messaging with their students. Here’s why:
- Nearly everyone receives texts and over 90% of them are opened within the first five minutes. Source
- Texting is the most used mobile app and 97% of Americans use it at least once a day. Source
- 98% of texts have a response rate of 45% while the open rate of emails is about 33% with a response rate of 6%. Source
Students generally see a text sooner than an email because not everyone has their email set up to their phone, but everyone receives texts directly. Text messages are also shorter in length which forces schools to limit the content to the most important information whereas emails are longer and leave room for less important content.
Text messaging allows schools to communicate with an entire student body within seconds. Here are some popular uses for colleges and universities:
- Event reminders for career fairs, advising appointments, on-campus interviews, etc.
- Hot jobs and internships
- Reminders to complete applications and graduation forms
- Upcoming due dates
- Weather and emergency alerts
Schools can personalize and customize each message to ensure that students will engage. When a message seems like it was created primarily for the student, they are more likely to respond. Automated messages can also be utilized in certain situations in order to quickly inform an entire student body.
As schools look for ways to stay connected to their students, they should take advantage of the most popular modern communication tools. Text messaging is a simple method to keep students informed. GradLeaders offers text messaging capabilities and our partner schools have utilized this feature by sending over 140,000 texts in the last year. Our system allows users to send both personalized and automated messages for a variety of uses.
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