Student CRM allows you to send out personalised email campaigns with its built-in email broadcasting system. No need to pay for MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, etc (in fact, at the bottom of this article is a compelling case for why you need to take extra special care when using those tools).
At the bottom of every email & SMS you send out is a link. Students just click that to immediately adjust their communication preferences, as follows:
Topics
These are the types of content they want you to send them. You could select students who just want to hear about 'Careers' for example. There are two types of topic:
Mandatory topics - these allow you to continue to contact them with regard to their original request, so you can process their application or enquiry. Shown above as a greyed-out button.
Optional topics - students can opt in or out of these whenever they want. These are shown above as two green sliders.
Channels
These are the 4 ways that you can communicate via when contacting them. You could select students who just want to hear from you via email, SMS and Phone, but not by Post for example (as above). There are four channels:
Email
SMS
Post
Phone
Instant removal
Student CRM process changes in real-time. That means that if a student unsubscribes just before they are due to be sent a second scheduled campaign, they are instantly removed. Other unsubscribe systems still say "this may take 7, 14 or even 28 days to take effect" (just how do they still get away with that??!!). Ours is instant.
Styling and branding
You can change the appearance in the 'Privacy Centre' app. For more information click here.
Advanced features included
To see the full range of features available if a student wishes to log in and see more information about how your university processes their data click here.
😲😲😲 Why you need to take extra special care when using other email broadcasting systems with downloaded Student CRM data.
You can build a segment of say, 20,000 students and download them as a CSV file. Easy. If you planning to use MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, Constant Contact etc, to broadcast emails to those 20,000 students then you need to be aware of the following considerations. Stop and read on before broadcasting, please.
Seeing the exact email that each student received. Only in Student CRM is this one click away in the Student's Activity Log, as each email is logged as it sends, and is stored forever for one-click viewing.
Respecting the Topics that the students want to opt into or out of. Your third party broadcast tool will not be up to date with the topics that new students opted into today or will opt into next month. Only in Student CRM's Privacy Centre app do you provide real-time privacy centre controls that are there forever.
Offering all 4 channels. Your third party broadcast tool focusses on email only. Only in Student CRM's Privacy Centre can you provide instant channel opt-outs that all Student CRM communications respect.
Undeliverable emails. Student CRM keeps the emails list clean after each broadcast with no work required on your behalf.
Calculating each student's engagement score. If you send an email via a third party broadcast tool, there is no way of adding 2 points when they open, 3 points when they click, etc. All that valuable engagement data is lost and stays off-platform.
One single source of truth. If other colleagues at the university are each using their own preferred email broadcasting tool, you will never know when you look at a student's activity log. All the log will display is "Karen Smith downloaded a CSV data file containing this student on 12 Aug 2020 at 13:40" but who knows where that data went next? Use Student CRM's built-in email broadcasting system every time to keep a complete and accurate log of every email sent to every student.