Success Story
How South Arkansas College boosts enrollment rates and student service with SMS
Overview
Company: South Arkansas College is a two-year community college in El Dorado, Arkansas.
Challenge: Prospective students weren't responding to their emails. Marketing Director Heath Waldrop recognized a need for a platform that could allow for one-on-one text communication with students and prospective students wherever they were.
Results: With personalized, text-based student services in place, the school has seen major increases in community satisfaction as well as consistent engagement from first contact onward.
Heath Waldrop is the marketing director at South Arkansas College. His goal is to draw as many prospective students to the school as possible and get them enrolled.
The challenge: Reaching a young demographic
Heath’s team began seeing consistently low engagement rates from their email campaigns to prospective students, which led them to look into texting, given that it’s a preferred channel for their target demographic.
The solution: Allowing for fast two-way communications with current and prospective students
With SimpleTexting, South Arkansas College was able to implement a text-based customer service tool, building strong relationships with students.
According to Heath, SimpleTexting has all the capabilities that he was looking for when searching for a text messaging service. His team has found the platform easy to use, supportive when they have questions, and affordable.
That one-on-one approach is super important. And this platform allows us to take notes on individuals to be able to look back and see conversations that we’ve had, what we’ve covered or not covered already. They need to know all that stuff, it’s really important in my line of work because we’re doing a lot of hand-holding over time.
The results: Higher conversion rates and more engagement
Implementing SimpleTexting improved student satisfaction (the school’s most important metric) and increased the conversion rate of leads to applicants. The two-way platform allowed South Arkansas College to extend communication from the point of initial contact to their first day as a student and beyond.
In short, texting allows South Arkansas College to be there for students every step of the way as they make important decisions about college.
For us, it’s great, and I think SimpleTexting would be great for someone else who’s in a small-market type of situation like that where they really have to build up a rapport with their customers in order to make that sale. And for us that sale is getting them here as students. It takes a lot of time. SimpleTexting is a wonderful tool for that.
Note: This is an updated version of a previous story on South Arkansas College
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