SMS Marketing: When and Where to Use It

Written by The Enrollify Team | 10/8/19 1:10 PM

LINKEDIN UPDATES TARGET AUDIENCE CAPABILITIES: LinkedIn recently announced an update to its audience forecasting tool, giving advertisers deeper insights into who their targeting parameters will actually reach. While creating audiences and building targeting criteria will remain the same, the audience preview panel will now show a more specific breakdown of the projected audience you’ll reach with an ad, including percentage breakdowns by professional characteristics, top industries, years of experience, or company size.

Why you should care: Let’s say you wanted to run an ad that reaches former undergraduate students, half of whom work in technology and half of whom work in data analytics. Originally, it wasn’t possible to segment audiences that precisely. With LinkedIn’s update to the audience preview panel and addition of audience breakdown statistics, enrollment marketers can now continuously tweak targeting criteria to reach optimal audiences across industry, years of experience, company size, and more.

SHOULD YOU BE USING SMS MARKETING?: On average, people check their phones 80 times per day. SMS (short message service, referred to as a text message) marketing open rates hover around 82 percent with click-through-rates of around 36%. When compared to email, these numbers are astonishing. Most marketers are lucky to get a 20% open rate on their emails. And while a barrier to SMS marketing is getting permission from a contact to text them in the first place, the engagement rates speak for themselves.

Why you should care: Enrollment marketers should try SMS marketing at some point, however, it shouldn’t replace traditional email marketing. With sky-high open rates and click-through-rates via SMS, consider supplementing an event reminder email with an SMS text message reminder. As you grow a larger base of prospective students who have opted-in to receiving texts, there becomes more room to nurture students in creative ways with event reminders, surveys, and even application deadline reminders.

IS IT TIME TO START ADVERTISING ON PODCASTS?: The popularity of podcasts is growing, but new information on listener demographics suggests that advertising on podcasts could be the next big thing (especially for higher education institutions). To start, 28% of all podcast listeners are between the ages of 25-34 years old. Additionally, 45% of podcast listeners are likely to have a college degree and 56% of podcast listeners are likely to be undergraduates. Podcast advertising also pairs well with social media advertising due to the fact that 94% of podcast listeners are active on at least one social media channel.

Why you should care: Enrollment marketers, especially for graduate and adult/professional programs, have a serious target market in podcast listeners! It’s time to test the waters with podcast advertising, perhaps promoting your computer science program in the latest technology-focused podcast. There are plenty of platforms and podcasts to choose from (currently around 750,000 podcasts available) on 3 main platforms: Spotify, Google, and Apple.

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