Student Advantage is also a firm believer in starting small with pilot projects. "Pilot programs have helped us analyze how new programs are working and let us tinker with and adjust them before rolling it out," says Macfarlane.

One of its first successful CRM applications was a targeted e-mail offer for Amtrak discounts it sent to college students around the country whose schools were within 30 miles of an Amtrak station. The offer of discounted train tickets was snapped up by students, and Amtrak saw a "significant increase" in student ridership, Macfarlane recalls. In the first year of the program, more than 90,000 train trips were purchased by Student Advantage members, raising close to $4 million in revenue. In the fifth year of the program, members booked more than 300,000 trips, generating more than $13 million for Amtrak.

More recently, Student Advantage has been dicing its database of 2 million registered users into very small segments. "One of our partner-advertisers only wanted to target students in Florida with their offer, and Dollar Rent A Car was interested in only reaching students over 21," says Sarah Suppes, vice president of marketing at Student Advantage. "We were easily able to do both and charge [the advertisers] a higher cost-per-million to focus [an e-mail campaign] so narrowly."

Another Student Advantage goal is to use CRM to ease customer service down a level: from phone to e-mail and from e-mail to webpage FAQs. Updated FAQs help keep the volume of e-mail questions down. Prompt e-mail responses likewise keep down calls to the customer service call center. "We’re handling many more support questions by e-mail now than we were a year ago," Macfarlane says, and the ratio of e-mail to phone questions has been swung the way Student Advantage has intended?toward e-mail.

This year for the first time the company has also developed a membership renewal campaign to proactively reach out to students instead of waiting for them to re-up on their own. Students pay $20 per year ($10 to renew this summer). "Doing this in any sort of direct [U.S.] mail campaign would be prohibitively expensive, and mailing address data for students is notoriously incorrect because so many move every year," says Suppes. "By running an e-mail campaign we’ve already had thousands of students renew in just the first weeks, two months earlier than ever," and quickly generated more than $70,000 in revenues.

To gather all this useful data, Student Advantage had to help students understand how they benefited by giving precise personal data. "For some of our services students didn’t see the value in filling out every field accurately," says Suppes. "So we showed them what kinds of offers, like last-minute air fares, they would receive if we could dependably and reliably contact them. We had to show them what was in it for them."