What you can do with Student CRM
Student CRM sends outbound text messages (SMS) as:
Hand-written single message: from you to a single student, contact or agent from their record card.
Campaign to multiple recipients: from you to lots of students who you select in a campaign, usually merging in fields and links.
Ad-hoc to multiple recipients: from you to lots of students who you select in a grab, usually merging in fields and links.
Touchpoint to multiple recipients: from you to lots of students who meet the conditions in your Workflow and Touchpoint, usually merging in fields and links.
How do I write an SMS in Student CRM?
You use the built-in editor to write and preview your message (by sending yourself or your colleagues a test).
You can use emoji, plain URLs, merge fields and pretty much type what you want. We recommend that, especially for campaigns and touchpoints, you preview it to check you are happy with how it looks before you send it out.
Can I see all the messages I have sent out?
Yes. Each recipient has an activity log in their Record Card. Each SMS you have sent them is logged there, in date order, and can be opened to see the contents at any time.
What does it cost?
Sending an SMS adds to your Establishment's SMS balance. Find out more about your SMS balance here.
Terminology
SMS stands for Short Message Service and allows users to send a message that started out as up to 160 characters long, but can be any length as phones join together the multiple 160 character parts of a long text message and display it as one, on both the sender's and the recipient's device. We offer this.
MMS stands for Multimedia Messaging Service and allows users to send a message that contains media such as pictures, videos, or audio to other users. We do not offer this.
Content is the text characters that you typed in, including merging in fields and links.
Recipient is the mobile number of the person you are sending it to. This is stored on the record card of the student, contact or agent and must be in E164 format, especially for international mobiles. Note: any mobile numbers collected using your Student CRM Web Form Manager forms will already be collecting all mobiles and landline numbers in E164 format, older web forms and your legacy data may not have.
Sender Name is where the SMS comes from and shows on the recipient's device as a text name. You can set this in certain places.
When able to set the name yourself, please remember that it:
must be between 3 and 11 characters
use only numbers (0-9), upper or lowercase letters (A-Z; a-z) and the special characters:
- . # !
Outbound is where you send a message out from Student CRM. We offer this.
Inbound is where you receive a message back into Student CRM. We do not offer this.
FAQs
Q. Can I send out pictures, videos, or audio?
A. No, that is MMS, we provide SMS.
Q. Can a recipient reply to an SMS they received from Student CRM?
A. Not at this time. This is a feature we may offer in the future, so watch this space!
Q. Does every message sent get delivered?
A. In the UK, usually yes. Internationally, not always. SMS final delivery depends on the following:
a) the recipient's mobile number in Student CRM being in E164 format,
b) the mobile number still belonging to an active mobile account,
c) the international mobile carrier (ie: Altice https://www.telecom.pt in Portugal) accepting the message and passing it to their subscriber (your student, agent or contact).
Summary: it is far better than it used to be back in the wild west days, but no guarantees still.
Q. Can I see delivery reports for SMS campaigns like I can for Emails campaigns?
A. Yes. See SMS Reports in Campaigns, Touchpoints and Adhocs
Q. How can I add links to my SMS?
A. SMS are plain text, so cannot have any formatting added in. However, most modern mobile phones will turn anything that starts with HTTPS:// into a link, for example, https://google.com, however this does depend on the receiving phone.
Q. How can I add an opt-out link to my SMS?
A. By using the merge tag found inside the SMS Merge Tag dropdown. Please be aware, there are two versions of this opt-out tag.
For Touchpoints, use
[xxxSmsOptOutLinkxxx]For Campaigns, use
{|SmsOptOutLink|}
