STUDENT CONNECTIONS STUDENT ADVANTAGE
Boston

Even though it knows its customer, Student Advantage has the added challenge of pinning down targets that move?literally?on a regular basis.

The typical customer for the Boston-based marketing company is a college student who’s looking for discounts on everything from bagels and bikes to textbooks and train tickets. They have both a home and school mailing address, but their school address often changes every year, so pinning down their actual physical location can be tough. They are voracious e-mailers and eagerly respond to online offers and targeted e-mail marketing campaigns.

Student Advantage began business in 1992 by providing discount cards to college students. The company’s business plan was to sign up local businesses in college towns that wanted to increase their student foot traffic and then give out discount cards listing those businesses to students. In 1995 and 1997 the programs broadened to a national scale when Student Advantage signed up American Express and AT&T to provide both companies card offerings to its student members. Four years later, Student Advantage launched its first website, a rather primitive online billboard. The company has since expanded into a broad and potentially lucrative network of interactive college student discount and community sites. (Student Advantage makes its money by charging members an annual fee and charging business partners that want to advertise their services on its website or through e-mail campaigns.)

The company’s current holdings include its flagship discount program, student and alumni communities CollegeClub.com and FANSonly.com, student loan resource center eStudentLoan.com, and a free newswire for college media called Uwire.com. Students now register online for each program and then use their Student Advantage ID number for discounts at more than 15,000 brick-and-mortar stores and online business partner websites ranging from Amtrak and US Airways to Tower Records. Student Advantage marketers also keep members informed about special member offers with tailored e-mail notices and updates. All of the partners’ sales data and the members’ information are collected in a data warehouse along with data that comes in from Student Advantage’s call center.

The company has begun applying e-marketing and warehouse analysis tools from E-piphany and customer care tools from Egain and Siebel in a focused CRM effort to better understand how its products are being used and to maximize ROI on marketing opportunities to its client base.

Early on in the process the company realized it had to focus on keeping just the types of demographic, geographic and purchasing data it could use for better segmentation and analysis. "We had a tendency to keep too much data because we thought we’d use it somehow, someday," says Craig Macfarlane, chief technology officer at Student Advantage. "But there is a storage and performance cost for every field you’re tracking." Macfarlane and his group rethought their efforts and trimmed the fields they tracked to match what their business partners were looking for. They chose not to rely on telephone numbers (since those often change frequently and have limited marketing usefulness) and discarded student ISP data, too, because most students use a school .edu address, so there wasn’t a marketing case to track the anomalies.