NUS case study

The National Union of Students (NUS) has offered support and guidance to University attendees since 1922. As well as serving the 7 million members in its organisation, NUS has a rich and proud history of inciting positive change in politics and higher education.

In 2017 NUS-Extra launched a re-branding campaign for their student cards under a new guise, TOTUM. This would include the launch of a new website and domain, new cards and an accompanying app. The client approached PushON to research, plan and help support the TOTUM card launch via a paid media campaign.

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Strategy

Totum required a paid media campaign that would communicate the new brand, inform current customers and obtain new customers as TOTUM.

We targeted people who were both aware of the NUS Extra brand using branded keywords (e.g. NUS), together with campaigns targeting those previously unaware of the brand by using keywords such as ‘student cards.’

In addition, location modifiers were deployed to ensure ads were more visible in high density student locations; halls of residence, campuses and student housing areas.

Totum card and website demonstrated on mobile

Campaign

The campaign employed day-time targeting to engage students when they were most active online, taking into consideration their ‘student lifestyle’ habits. Ads offered different discounts with tailored ad copy to ensure that the click-through rate was high.

Remarketing also captured students who had abandoned their baskets, and negative remarketing was implemented to ensure that ads were only shown to students that had not bought the card.

Additionally, Ad copy was personalised to students to ensure maximum click-through rate and capitalise on the high number of searches for NUS and TOTUM. The campaign also included ads that synchronised with the offline marketing campaigns on university campuses.

Results

The adaptation of this highly-targeted ad strategy to suit student cultures and lifestyles produced good results, demonstrating Sundays as consistently delivering the highest number of conversions, which is uncommon for most businesses. Conversely, Tuesday was one of the worst converting days – usually one of the best days for B2C.

As predicted, lunchtime and early afternoons had the highest conversion rate in terms of time of day and most of the revenue was taken throughout the working day rather than after 5pm, which is usually the case for online sales.

The campaign generated over 1 million impressions for Totum keywords and drove over 100K Totum users to the site, all of which had been unaware of the brand previously.

Click-through rate improved from 4% to 25% over the course of the strategy giving an indication that students were engaging more with the brand and had become more trusting of it.

1m+ Impressions

525% Click-through-rate Increase

100k Registrations