Building Your Higher Ed Loyalty Program
Loyalty programs have become a key strategy for many businesses for attracting and retaining customers. Everywhere you look there are reward programs, frequent shopper discounts, cashback awards, branded credit cards, and points programs. Programs are proliferating because consumers value them. A 2022 survey by Lending Tree found that 80 percent of Americans belong to at least one loyalty program; half of the respondents said that loyalty programs are more important than ever. Are these tactics that colleges and universities could be applying successfully?
Certainly, some already are. Social media provides an excellent opportunity to build a relationships and foster loyalty with students and parents. Colleges are investing in social media staff to design quizzes, giveaways, contests, and other content to get students to share, like, repost, or comment. Each of these small touches is an investment in a relationship that can pay off in enrollment and revenue.
Some institutions have been slow to embrace the concept of loyalty because they think the college selection process stops at enrollment. But college selection isn’t a one-time-experience; students decide each semester whether or not they will return to your campus. Similarly, alumni and parents of current students are influenced to give to the college, recommend it, or refer others to you based on loyalty you have built with them. Customer loyalty could be the difference in institutional success.
One key to consider is that students make their first potentially loyalty-building interaction – applying – with colleges for a purpose. In the retail world, most shoppers do not start with “Which loyalty program can I become a part of?” They only consider joining a program after they have determined that a company can fulfill their need.
For students, those needs might include being admitted to a prestigious institution that will impress their peers, being selected for a scholarship, or attending a school with a robust social scene. A college degree – or the college experience – means different things to different people, and the better we understand the particular need we are meeting for students, the better we can communicate with them to win their loyalty. And once you are on a student’s “short list,” an emphasis on loyalty can really pay off. A 2021 Harvard Business Review study showed that loyalty programs were especially effective for influencing customers who were “on the fence” in their decisions.
Obviously, selecting a college and deciding to stay enrolled is not the same as purchasing a product from a retail store. So, the art of utilizing loyalty-building as a college or university is in adapting the approaches of good loyalty programs to a higher education-specific environment. Here are some ideas for injecting loyalty concepts into a college context:
Leverage the “brand” of high-demand programs. Some students in your pool are motivated more by their major than by loyalty to the school overall. For example, for students wanting to study in scarcity programs like nursing or engineering, getting into a program may be more important to them than getting into your program. Speaking to these students in a major-forward way is likely to drive loyalty.
Recruit family members and friends. Send parents discounts for their student or themselves. If families are wearing your T-shirts (hopefully in front of their friends), they are coming. Don’t be shy to aim for retail-level frequency for your communication with parents in this way. Some colleges send campus bookstore marketing emails as often as twice a week, embedding themselves as part of the family’s identity.
Utilize testimonials. People are more likely to make a purchasing decision based on comments from other customers than from the company itself. Overpopulate your website, social media, and print materials with the words of satisfied “customers.”
Involve the senses. Appealing to people’s senses helps them make stronger emotional connections. Send favorite student or dining hall recipes or small food items. Share playlists or invite prospective students to help create one. Give them something to smell, taste, or touch.
Ask students to bring others with them. Encourage students who are committed to enrolling to share their excitement about your school directly with their friends. Students often want to share their experiences with peers or look to them for support. It is not out of line to ask, “Excited about joining the community? Invite your friends to come along on this adventure with us!” Recommending you builds their loyalty to you – and everyone likes tackling a new place with a friend by their side.
Consider gamification to encourage engagement. While most higher ed institutions do not have the type of sophisticated online experiences that allow customers to track “points” they accumulate with companies, you likely do have a customer relations management (CRM) system that would allow for at least some basic tracking of student interactions. Think about how you could creatively utilize this kind of system to assign “points” or define engagement levels to students. Share with them when they have reached benchmarks, and consider prizes – swag, bookstore discounts, even simple digital badges – as fun motivation.
The best corporate loyalty programs give members lots of options to participate and leverage lots of different channels to keep customers engaged, and that should be our goal, as well. Loyalty drives behavior, encouraging people to invest more and more of themselves into the brand of the product or service. And when it comes time to make a choice, whether that is a choice to enroll for the first time, to re-enroll each semester, or to give back to the institution that served them well, every touch that adds to their loyalty account can make a difference.
5° Branding can help you meet your enrollment marketing goals. Let’s talk!
