Hendrix

Thoma Thoma

HENDRIX COLLEGE

Like many colleges today, Hendrix College must fight for every student. As its leadership looked for a competitive advantage, it was interested in exploring various pricing models that might draw interest or lower barriers to application. A host of questions had to be answered before making such a significant strategic move and the college turned to Thoma to help it evaluate the options.

Thoma designed and completed a multi-stage qualitative and quantitative study that shed light on how pricing factors into the student decision journey; the research made it clear that a program similar to its Arkansas Advantage scholarship would be well received by out-of-state students and parents. Thoma launched Hendrix Advantage Plus, a scholarship program that meets 100% of the demonstrated financial needs of high-achieving students.

Tactics:

Creation of a high intensity six-week surround-sound campaign that included collateral, direct mail, landing pages, email marketing, press materials, paid social ads and paid social influencers.
The distribution strategy included look-alike audience based on current student population, custom audiences of students who followed competitors’ pages, geo- targeted custom audiences pulling high school markets and high schools and custom audiences built on particular models with which Hendrix excels – student athletes, the Odyssey, pre-med and the arts.

Outcome:

Thoma was able to garner significant online impressions and engage prospective students through social ads, print collateral and email marketing. Over the course of the campaign, Thoma sent a total of 283,700 emails to prospective students, clergy members, counselors and parents and through A/B testing was able to increase clicks by 40%. Through Thoma’s engagement with influencers, more than 2 million impressions generated more than 300 visits to the Hendrix website.