Although they’re only a small percentage of the US population (roughly 9%), college students have a spending power of about $63 billion. The tricky part in marketing to this viable resource comes in influencing those dollars to walk into your store, shop with your brand, and build loyalty you hope will continue as they travel into their adult lives.But don’t forget the most important piece: you have to make it easy. Sounds like an impossible task, but Cambridge, Mass.-based Edhance is convinced it has the ability to make it all happen at once, and it’s as simple as swiping your debit card.
“We’re building a merchant network to ensure we can offer a lot of good deals,” explained Bjorn Larsen, president of Edhance. “Then we let students know it’s free to join with us; they just sign up, register their credit or debit card, and start saving.”
To the benefit of retailers, Edhance’s student verification process, what Larsen calls the “special sauce,” accurately verifies members are students. Rather than requiring students to show their school IDs, of which there are thousands of versions and some without expiration dates, when they walk into a store, students register with Edhance beforehand. The company’s inhouse team verifies the student is still at the college by doing some research or even calling the college’s registrar.
Once the student is verified and tells Edhance which credit or debit card they want to save money on, they save money with each purchase at participating retailers. “The discount happens magically in the background,” said Larsen. “We then leverage that transactional data to create reports for the merchants, letting them know which students from what universities are shopping with them, if they’re male or female, what their age is, when they will graduate, etc.”
Edhance gathered an initial student membership base of 700,000 student cardholders through a relationship with a financial services institution. Including services it provided Student Universe, a travel agency for students looking for discounted farers, last year, Edhance did 350,000 student verifications and has a database of every single university college student in the US.
In addition, the company’s Web site, www.edhance.com, helps students find national and local businesses that participate with the program. There is an online shopping section and a deal finder for local businesses. For the local business search, the site uses Google Maps technology, categories, and keyword searches so students can easily learn where the discounts are.
Edhance is focused on three major merchant categories: retail, entertainment, and restaurant. So far, Edhance has created relationships with retailers such as eBags, Target.com, Drugstore.com, Toshiba, and Barnes & Noble, to name a few.
The technology Edhance uses has been used a lot in the loyalty industry. The company takes students’ shopping information, and, rather than charging a small amount to the merchant and sending it back to the student as points, the savings are sent back to students as cash. This method works particularly well for the 18- to 24-year-olds in college who typically don’t participate in loyalty programs.
“They don’t care about points and miles,” said Larsen. “They want it their way, and they want it easily. Beer money on Friday from us works a lot better than points. We think that’s the real power of this program.”