5 Tips to Leverage Text Messages & Salesforce Education Cloud to Boost Admissions

Prospective students applying to your university have a lot of things vying for their time and attention. Text messaging is a great way for admissions officers to break through the clutter to make sure that key communications are delivered throughout the admissions process. When combined with timing and automations, connected with Salesforce’s Education Cloud, it can also add efficiency and peace of mind to your office’s overall operations.

Tip 1: Get Prospective Students to Opt-In to Texting

It may seem like a no-brainer, but this is a prerequisite for moving forward with any text messaging strategy. Once you’ve gotten permission to send text messages, not only are you safe to send them, but your prospective students will expect to see your messages, rather than wondering who sent them a mystery text.

Tip 2: Application Notifications

Whether you’re sending a reminder to submit their application for faculty review, or following up to fill in a missing piece of information from your applicant, your text message is much more likely to spur action than the email you’re probably sending today.

If your application form is connected to Salesforce as part of Education Cloud, you may also be able to pass data directly from a text response into their contact record. This can enable a frictionless experience for your applicant, who may never need to touch a web form to update information for their application.

Tip 3: Financial Aid Reminders

Beyond reminding prospective students to submit their application, you also want to remind them to submit any applicable non-enrollment forms such as FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid). In addition to sending reminders related to deadlines, you may also want to send a simple survey to find out if your applicants intend to apply for, or have already completed their FAFSA submission.

Tip 4: Leverage Automations

Regardless of how big your applicant pool is, there are a variety of ways that text messaging automations can both boost engagement and increase operational efficiency. Some examples of potential uses for automated text messages include:

1. Reminders for outstanding application items
2. Confirmations of submissions
3. Event related notifications
4. Deadline reminders

In reality, just about any activity that flows through Salesforce can have a text message sent as part of your workflow.

Tip 5: Improve Enrollment Projections

Text messaging from trusted sources boasts an incredibly high open and response rate. For admissions teams, this offers an opportunity to collect invaluable data on the enrollment leanings of an incoming class of students. By conducting a simple NPS style survey with prospective students throughout the admissions process, you can gauge and track their interest and intent in regards to their ultimate enrollment decision. This data can then be easily visualized using reporting and dashboard tools within Salesforce.