Challenges: Reaching Parents Who Don’t Read Their Emails and Eliminating Mathnasium’s Phone Number Confusion
Mathnasium is a K-12 math-only learning center franchise with roughly 1200 locations worldwide.
Karen Flyer and her husband own three Mathnasium franchises in Roseline, Great Neck, and Fort Washington, New York
A typical day for Karen involves:
- Updating parents about student performance and appointments
- Creating and sending marketing campaigns
- Communicating with prospects and leads
- Coordinating with center directors
- Managing business operations
But one of the more challenging aspects of running Mathnasium is communicating with parents.
Karen was using Constant Contact to send promotional emails and updates. But she found that many parents weren’t reading or engaging with her messages.
She needed a different way to reach her leads and communicate with parents.
In her own words:
“The problem I was looking to solve, quote, un-quote is, ‘I don’t read my emails anymore’... I realized that all the emails I was sending to leads about, ‘Hey, special $50 off this month if you enroll before Labor Day’ or whatever; parents just aren’t reading their emails.”
So Karen turned to business text messaging to help solve her parent engagement problem. She knew that texts have much higher open, click, response, and engagement rates, especially compared to email.
But every Mathnasium needs to figure out its own phone situation.
So after some initial searching, Karen started texting using Google Voice––which created several problems.
Karen’s first problem: she now had two different phone lines. Parents were getting calls and texts from the Mathnasium main number and the Google Voice number. This created confusion.
The second problem: Google Voice doesn’t support bulk text message broadcasts. It also lacks contact management and list segmentation features. These are only available in business text messaging software, like MessageDesk.
So Karen needed a Google Voice alternative.
Solutions: Porting Mathnasium’s Google Voice Number Into MessageDesk and Organizing Contacts Into Groups for Bulk SMS
Karen searched for group texting apps using Google. She found MessageDesk among several options but chose MessageDesk for its user-friendly bulk text messaging features.
“I liked that MessageDesk could import my contacts. MessageDesk also made it easy to segment my contacts into different groups. I was able to flag different groups of customers and, specialize messages to each.”
These features finally made it possible for Karen to organize her contacts into lists. She could now send personalized bulk text message broadcasts.
To solve her number problem, Karen worked with Josh, one of MessageDesk’s Solution Engineers.
Josh helped Karen overcome her single biggest hurdle to getting started with MessageDesk: porting her existing SMS number.
This took some time. Karen noted, “Google is not easy to deal with”. But once MessageDesk successfully ported Mathnasium’s Google Voice number, sending texts came fast and easy.
Finally, Josh was also able to get Karen’s phone number approved through carrier registration for high-volume bulk text messaging. This ensured near 100% message delivery rates for Karen’s messages.
Results: Customer Engagement Rates Improved to 75%+
It’s been two years since Karen started texting with MessageDesk. In that time she’s improved her customer engagement rate from around 50% to a solid 75%+.
“Before MessageDesk I was getting engagement with around 50% of my customers. Now I'm getting around 75% engagement because I'm texting and emailing… When I send out a text message promotion like, ‘save $50’ or advertise an upcoming boot camp, I get a bunch of inquiries. I really like that because that shows me parents are actually reading and engaging with my messages.”
Now text messaging is integral to Karen’s parent communication strategy.
“I have a tier system. First I send out an e-blast. Then I send out an email. Then I send out a text blast. And then if it's say September 1st and I haven't heard from you, I start calling parents.”
All of this adds up to at least 1-2 mass text message broadcasts to parents every month.
When asked about what other Mathnasium owners should know about text messaging and MessageDesk, Karen had this to say:
“Broadcasts––that's what I use most. The group broadcasts––I love those! I'm so surprised sometimes when I'm at a convention or something and people aren’t even using texting. Like, how do you run your business without a texting software like MessageDesk?”