5 Ways to Utilize Web Push Notifications for Colleges and Universities

Much attention is given to ecommerce sites, blogs, and SaaS companies (among others) when it comes to web push notifications, and rightfully so. However, there are many of you in the education sector wondering what options you have for engaging your subscribers. You will be happy to know that you have a lot of powerful options that will engage your audience- from prospective students, to current students, teachers, administrators, alumni, parents, and more.

Today we will be discussing some of the best ways that colleges and universities (and related education organizations) can utilize web push notifications. No matter the industry, web push shines as a cost-effective, highly targeted, fast delivering, option for engaging subscribers no matter where they are. Let’s see how you can harness their power for your website!

Top Web Push Notifications for Colleges and Universities

1. Class-Specific Alerts

For students and teachers who are active in a particular class, notifications specific to class-related activity is a great way to keep everyone informed and engaged. These could be more general class announcements (say if class time or location changes, or if new grades are posted) or can be more specific or triggered notifications based on activity, like posting a new discussion on the class message board.

With online classes more popular than ever before, effectively engaging students can be a challenge. Web push notifications can help remind students about new messages or discussion posts that could otherwise easily be forgotten about.

Bottom line: Utilize your web push notifications to keep students and teachers organized, informed, and engaged.

2. Triggered Notifications for Tests

Big test coming up? Whether you are a university or a test preparation organization, reminding students about important dates is something you can easily set up with a triggered web push notification.

This is especially important for students preparing for college. Between AP tests, the SAT, and the ACT, there are a lot of dates to remember. A helpful push reminding a student that their test is coming up can be just the reminder they need to finish studying and make plans for test day.

Don’t forget about graduate students as well! Reminders about important exams like the LSAT, MCAT, or GRE are a great way to ensure nobody forgets a date.

If there are big deadlines approaching you can also remind interested subscribers. For example, why not target any subscriber who viewed the SAT sign up page that the last day to sign up for an exam is coming up?

Bottom line: Keep students aware of important dates so that they don’t miss important exams or deadlines.

3. Retarget Prospective Students

A great way for colleges and universities to make use of web push notifications is to set up some abandoned funnel notifications. This will be most helpful for you on things like form submissions. You more than likely have a form (or multiple forms) at your website that allows students or parents to request information or schedule a campus tour. Why not retarget those who don’t complete the form?

These potential leads have already shown an interest in your school by navigating to your website and your form. Previously, if they didn’t submit the form, you wouldn’t be able to email them to follow up. What’s great about web push is that as long as someone opts in to your notifications, you don’t need their email in order to engage them. Don’t let them slip away- send them a web push notification and get them back on your site and requesting more information!

Bottom line: Retarget prospective students who show an interest in your school.

4. Share School-Wide Announcements

Segmenting your push notifications is always a great idea in order to reach a more targeted group of subscribers. In this case, we recommend creating a segment of active students and teachers in order to send relevant announcements about your school. This could be regarding school closures due to weather, sports announcements, course enrollment deadlines, and more.

In many instances, this is time-sensitive information that you want to share quickly with your audience. Instead of waiting on people to open an email, you can quickly get the information in front of your subscribers by sending them a web push notification that will display instantly on their desktop or mobile device.

While you could send this notification to all of your subscribers, we don’t recommend that because certain subscribers (such as prospective students, former students, former teachers, etc.) do not need this information.

To create this segment, we recommend targeting subscribers who visit a certain URL. Select one that only current teachers or students would access, such as a login page or an enrollment page.

Bottom line: Keep current teachers and students in the loop regarding important campus-wide information.

5. Retarget Based on Subscriber Activity

You’ve also got a lot of options for retargeting subscribers who view certain pages on your website. You can use this information to craft relevant campaigns that will be interesting to that particular segment of your subscribers.

This is another great way to engage prospective students. You don’t have to wait until they start filling out a form to send them a push notification. Retarget them based on other activity in order to get them back to your website! You could also target alumni who visit your alumni page with information about upcoming events, donations, and more.

This is one of the best ways to improve your overall click-through rate. Low engagement is typically the result of broad campaigns that feature no personalization. Boost your engagement by segmenting users based on their behavior at your website, such as viewing a page discussing a specific program that you offer.

Bottom line: Segment your subscribers according to their behavior at your website in order to serve more relevant push notifications.

Wrapping Up

Colleges and universities have a lot of options for engaging and retargeting subscribers at all stages of their involvement. From prospective students looking to schedule a tour, to current teachers and students benefiting from school information or class-specific notifications, to alumni looking to stay connected to their school, you can do it all with web push!

Hopefully this guide has convinced you that web push really is for everyone! These web push notifications for colleges and universities should give you a good idea of what you can do in the education sector to effectively engage your target audience.

If you are new to web push and want to give it a try, you can always start for free with Aimtell. Still need more information? No problem. You can always check out our Beginner’s Guide to learn more.

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