SMS Enrollment Marketing: What Higher Ed Teams Get Wrong

By Angela Brown, Head of Marketing, Halda 

You know the drill. Every summer, enrollment teams double down on email. But your open rates might be slipping, subject lines are getting longer and every send feels like a gamble. Deposited students feel like the hard part is done, and prospects in rolling admissions pipelines are weighing options against the pull of summer plans. Both groups are harder to reach by email alone right now than they were in spring.

Meanwhile, student texting platforms have become a common but underused fixture in the higher ed enrollment stack.‍

This is not an argument to abandon email. Email still belongs in your summer funnel, and it handles things SMS can’t: detailed checklists, multi-step instructions and long-form documents. But if texting is part of your tool set and you are only using it to fire off deadline reminders, you’re treating one of summer's most effective engagement channels like a last resort.

What Changes About Student Communication in Summer

Email keeps working in summer, but what changes is how prospective and deposited students relate to it. A student actively weighing enrollment decisions in the spring reads your outreach differently than that same student does in July, once the decision feels settled or summer has taken over. For deposited students, urgency fades after May 1. For prospects in rolling admissions cycles, summer is a distraction from a process they are likely putting off. In both cases, a crowded personal inbox is a harder place to get traction.

SMS reaches these students where they are. It fits the pace of summer communication and asks for one clear action at a time, which is exactly right for a student whose attention is elsewhere.

SMS Works Differently, and That Is the Point

A text message gets seen—almost 98% of the time. That’s a function of where texts live, not a marketing claim. There is no spam folder, no promotional tab and no crowded inbox requiring a scroll. The medium does part of the work for you.

More importantly, the format requires you to keep things short, which is exactly what summer communication demands: one message, one request and one clear next step. Students in transition are not reading three-paragraph emails about orientation preparation. A targeted text about one specific action hits differently.

What Higher Ed Teams Can Get Wrong

In many cases, texting is used reactively. When a deadline gets close, a message goes out to every deposited student with the same text. That’s a start, but it’s not a great strategy.

Batch-and-blast messaging. Every deposited student gets the same text at the same time, regardless of where they are in the process. A student who completed housing and FAFSA weeks ago gets the same reminder as one who hasn’t opened a single email since May 1. That takes away from the credibility of every message you send after it.

No connection to the student's behavior. If a student opened your financial aid checklist email three times but never clicked, that’s a meaningful signal. A targeted text to that student — instead of  a generic alert — is where SMS starts functioning as an engagement tool.

Treating SMS as a standalone channel. The texts that drive action feel like a natural continuation of a conversation that’s already in progress. When outreach reflects where a student is in the process, response rates go up. When it doesn’t, students learn to ignore it.

Using it only for operational alerts. Deadlines and logistics belong in summer SMS. So does relationship-building. A text from a named admissions counselor checking in on a scholarship question is a different message than a system alert, and it produces a different result.

What a Good Summer SMS Strategy Looks Like

The most effective summer SMS strategies share a few characteristics.

They’re triggered by behavior, not the calendar. Instead of scheduling texts on fixed dates, effective strategies tie distribution to what a student actually did (or did not do). Opened the orientation email but never clicked? That is a trigger. Submitted the housing form? That is a moment for acknowledgement, not another request.

They’re short, specific and attributed to a person. "Hi [first name], your financial aid checklist has one item left. Reply here or reach [counselor name] directly at [number]" does more work than a follow-up email covering the same ground.

They keep the request small. Summer is not the time to push for several things at once. Students in transition respond to one clear next step. Large, multi-part requests usually produce silence.

They work with your other outreach, not beside it. When a student fills out a form, gets a confirmation email and then receives a follow-up text that acknowledges that action, the communication feels coordinated. When every channel behaves independently, it reads like three different offices chasing the same student.

Your Three-Text Summer Sequence 

Here’s a simple example of how a behavior-triggered SMS sequence might flow for a student who deposited but has not started the housing application:

Text 1 (triggered at three weeks post-deposit with no housing form started): "Hi [name], housing selection opens soon and spots fill quickly. The form takes about 10 minutes to complete: [link]. Reply if you have questions or want to connect with [counselor name]."

Text 2 (triggered if form was opened but not submitted, five days later): "Hi [name], looks like you started the housing form but did not finish. [Counselor name] is happy to help if something came up. Reply here or call [number]."

Text 3 (triggered if form is still incomplete 10 days after text 2): "Hi [name], the housing deadline is [date]. A few spots are still open in [residence option]. Reply to this text if you need a hand."

Each message reflects the student's real circumstances and gives them exactly one place to go. None requires the student to sort out the next step on their own.

The Real Problem: You Might Have the Tool, But You’re Missing the Strategy

Student texting platforms have become a standard part of the higher ed enrollment stack. Using them for deadlines, reminders and date announcements is common. And while that baseline is useful, it’s not what keeps a deposited student on track or moves a prospect toward committing.

What keeps a deposited student moving forward, and nudges a prospect to take the next step, is the sense that someone knows where they are in the process and cares enough to be specific about it. SMS connected to enrollment data can do that at scale. SMS disconnected from everything else is just another notification competing for attention.

How Halda Approaches SMS

Halda's SMS sits inside a connected enrollment system. Every touchpoint across the web, email, SMS and voice builds on the last. The text a student receives reflects what they did on your website, what they opened in email and where they are in the funnel. The message fits their actual situation.

That’s the difference between a texting platform and an enrollment platform. The channel is the same, but what it knows about the student isn’t.

Frequently Asked Questions

When should colleges use texting vs. email for enrollment?

Email handles longer, more detailed communication: checklists, multi-step instructions and documents. SMS works better for short, action-specific nudges, especially when a student has already received an email and has not responded. During the summer, when engagement with enrollment emails tends to decline, SMS can be more reliable for time-sensitive outreach.

How many texts should a college send in summer?

Volume matters less than relevance. Three to five targeted, behavior-triggered texts across a summer engagement window tend to outperform high-volume broadcast schedules. If texts are going out frequently and response rates are low, the issue is usually relevance, not frequency.

What makes an effective enrollment text message?

The most effective enrollment texts are short, personalized to where the student is in the process, include one clear task and are attributed to a specific person rather than a generic institutional sender.

Can SMS help prevent summer melt?

Yes. Summer melt is largely driven by students losing momentum during the unstructured period between deposit and first day of classes. Timely, specific texts that move students through key tasks — housing, financial aid and orientation registration — reduce the friction that stalls progress. SMS alone is not a melt prevention strategy, but as part of coordinated multi-channel outreach it addresses the inertia that causes melt at the individual level.

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As Halda’s Director of Marketing, Angela Brown brings more than 15 years of experience leading marketing and content teams in education and B2B SaaS. When she isn’t at her computer, you can find her reading, watching a true crime documentary, or driving her son to basketball practice.