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HubSpot's SMS Feature for Maricopa Colleges

HubSpot’s SMS feature can significantly enhance communication strategies across Maricopa colleges, allowing teams to send critical updates and personalized messages at the right time. This tool can be especially effective in student recruitment, engagement, and retention efforts.

Resources

🥇 SMS Best Practices

Identify Your SMS Use Case

Effective planning is the key to achieving success with SMS marketing and outreach. As you prepare to launch an SMS campaign, it is essential to have a clear idea of your message's use case.

Consider these common SMS use cases

Informative

Promotional

  • Registration Updates: Inform students about their class registration status, including waitlist updates or changes to their schedule.

  • Important Dates: Remind students of key dates, like the start of the semester, drop/add deadlines, and tuition payment deadlines.

  • Financial Aid Notifications: Provide updates on the status of financial aid applications, deadlines, or disbursement details.

  • Enrollment Campaigns: Encourage students to register for classes during specific enrollment periods or highlight late-start classes.

  • Event Announcements: Promote campus events, workshops, job fairs, or graduation ceremonies for student engagement.

  • Program announcements: Share news about new academic programs, certificate courses, or degree pathways.

Student Services

Enrollment/Admissions

  • Advising Appointments: Remind students of their advising appointments or make it easy to schedule one via SMS.

  • Onboarding and Orientation: Guide new students through orientation and provide reminders about onboarding activities.

  • Campus Support Resources: Share information about support services, such as tutoring, career advising, or mental health resources.

  • Follow-up on Inquiries: Provide timely follow-ups for students who have inquired about programs, ensuring they feel supported throughout the enrollment process.

  • Re-enrollment Reminders: Encourage students who have paused their studies to re-enroll by highlighting upcoming deadlines and support options.

Use a Compliant SMS Consent Process

Utilize opt-in terminology. Contacts can opt-in using the three words START, UNSTOP, or SUBSCRIBE. Every SMS message must include a clear opt-out option. Prioritize giving your contacts the option to opt out of receiving messages.

Send the SMS and Manage Subscribers

Segment different groups: By categorizing your audience into segments, you can tailor your SMS campaigns, ensure message relevancy, and optimize engagement with specific segments of your target market.

Manage your subscriber lists: Effective contact management is crucial for successful SMS marketing and ensures you send the right messages to engaged contacts at the right time.

Review your SMS scheduling options. By default, HubSpot has quiet hour restrictions on SMS sending. You can only send SMS messages from 8 AM to 7:59 PM in contacts' local time zones.

Write Actionable SMS Copy

  • Know your character count. While HubSpot allows a 300-character limit SMS messages max out at 160 characters—if you exceed the 160 count, your text message will be sent as two separate texts. Get to the point quickly, and use links (and link shorteners) to fill out the details of your message.

    • Say hello! Send a welcome message to any new contact. Clearly state who you are and why you're messaging to provide valuable context.

    • Get to the point: By keeping messages brief, recipients can easily read and act on the information on smartphones, watches, and digital assistants like Siri.

    • Don’t overdo it: SMS is a high-cost communication channel. Reserve SMS for use cases that are deeply personalized and/or express urgency.

    • Personalize your copy: Tailor SMS communication using personalization tokens to automatically insert relevant details like a student’s name, program interest, or other preferences, creating a more meaningful connection.

How to Use Personalization Tokens

  1. Add personalization to your message by clicking Personalize.

  2. Click the Type dropdown menu, then select the type of personalization token to insert.

  3. Click the Property dropdown menu to select which property value to pull into the message body.

  4. Enter a default value that can be used for any contact without a value populated for the property, then click Insert.

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For more details on how to use personalization tokens this, you can explore the Create and Send SMS Messages in HubSpot resource guide.

  • Be transparent: Consistently reintroduce your brand, purpose, and message frequency.

    • Opt out: Every message should include the option to opt-out.

Examples

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📇 Manage and Reply to Marketing SMS Messages

How to view/reply to SMS replies

  1. CRM > Inbox > Go to your college’s inbox (GWCC - SMS)

  2. Reply to the text messages through the inbox. When you reply, it will show who is replying.

  3. Once the conversation is completed, click close the conversation in the top right conversation. Please note that the SMS conversation will reopen if the person texts back.

There is a comment section next to the SMS reply box where you can tag people for support. Students can’t view this.

Create and send SMS messages in HubSpot

  • Sending

    • Sending to a list

    • You also have the option to send SMS messages to individuals

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