Customer Story
Challenge: Needing a faster, more reliable way to reach students and applicants who weren’t engaging with email reminders about enrollment, bursaries, and important college updates.
Solution: With Sinch Engage’s powerful yet easy-to-use HubSpot integration, the college sends personalized SMS and RCS messages for a large variety of student communication needs, both in real-time and automated.
Results: Higher engagement, more bursary applications completed, and stronger enrollment attendance from students and apprentices, while also reducing administrative work for outreach across college programs.
“It’s a good position to be in: We can reach students instantly, and they actually respond. SMS and RCS through Sinch Engage, integrated directly with our HubSpot workflows, have completely changed how we communicate.“
Shrewsbury College is a leading education institution in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England, offering A Levels, vocational qualifications, apprenticeships, and higher education programs for students aged 16+, with a focus on excellence in education and training.
From the moment a student applies to the college, they’re sent a steady flow of information via email – from financial aid options to exam results and class reminders. But potentially with months between application and the start of term, it was important for the college and the student to remain in touch.
“We felt that a multi-channel approach to communication would be the best way to keep young people engaged with the college. We found that a number of young people just weren’t seeing our emails,” said Miles Porton, Website Coordinator. “They get so many that they either ignore them or miss them completely.”
The team needed an alternative and complementary way to reach students. While they’d tried SMS before, finding a way to expand, automate, and improve communication through SMS was what they wanted to test.
The team ultimately turned to SMS and RCS messaging with Sinch Engage, fully integrated with their HubSpot workflows. And what started as an experiment quickly became a valuable communication channel – helping them achieve more responses and better engagement across enrollment, tuition, and more.
The college’s first SMS test with Sinch Engage was simple: send a text reminder to students eligible for financial support.
“We’d emailed a few hundreds of students about the bursary scheme, but a noticeable percentage of eligible students didn’t reply hardly anyone replied,” Miles explained. “Then we sent a single SMS with a link to the form – and saw a noticeable spike in applications right away.”
From there, the team expanded its use of SMS and RCS across multiple touchpoints:
“An SMS is hard to ignore,” said Miles. “It’s direct, it’s simple, and it lands right where students will see it – on their phones.”
Learn more about Sinch Engage’s powerful integration that
enables HubSpot SMS, MMS, RCS, and WhatsApp.
Before using Sinch Engage’s SMS integration with HubSpot, the college sent messages via standalone SMS providers. Now, every message is fully automated through HubSpot workflows, seamlessly pulling in student data like name, course, and ID for personalization in a matter of a few clicks.
“We’ve built some really complex workflows,” Miles said. “Before Sinch Engage, if a student didn’t respond to an email, we didn’t have an alternative communication channel. Now we can trigger a text or RCS message as a follow-up, which keeps the conversation going.”
And since using Sinch Engage, the overall positive impact they’ve seen across the organization speaks for itself:
If you’re curious about what HubSpot SMS automations and workflows are possible with Sinch Engage, read more in our HubSpot integration support documentation.
There’s another major benefit the college has seen from working with Sinch Engage: RCS.
After finding success with SMS, Shrewsbury College became one of the first in the UK education sector to pilot Rich Communication Services (RCS), thanks to taking advantage of Sinch Engage’s fast innovation in the emerging new messaging channel.
RCS is like SMS, but much richer, brandable, and more secure.
And believe it or not: even with thousands of students, RCS is actually cost-effective for education texting, too.
“At around 7 pence per interactive RCS message, it’s excellent value,” said Miles. “Compared to numerous reminder emails, messaging is far more efficient – and it has the added benefit of being highly measurable.”
RCS allows the team to explore interactive messages – complete with buttons, media, and carousels – for campaigns and student engagement.
“We’ve got the best of both worlds,” said Miles. “Simple SMS for important updates, and RCS for richer, more visual storytelling.”
The college now plans to embed SMS and RCS into its year-round communication strategy with Sinch Engage’s easy-to-use and scalable texting solution, from marketing campaigns to student retention initiatives.
In particular, the college plans to roll out RCS quick-reply buttons to re-create the chatbot-style experiences – but now fully integrated within HubSpot.
All in all, expanding their communications strategy to SMS and RCS with Sinch Engage’s HubSpot texting integration proved to be the right choice. Having chosen Sinch Engage over other providers for its ease of use, reliable delivery, and deep HubSpot integration, the college has built a more efficient messaging strategy that saves time and strengthens student connections – from application to enrollment and beyond.
