Fusion Students
The Student Room helped Fusion Students attract local student tenants. We ran a geo-targeted early engagement campaign combining high-impact display with emails which had open rates of over 40%.
Raising awareness of their flexibility
Student accommodation was getting a lot of bad media coverage during the pandemic. As a result, many students were delaying renting properties.
Our recent work with Fusion Students is an excellent example of how we helped an accommodation brand to communicate meaningfully with students.
What was the objective?
Fusion Students is a leading accommodation provider operating in four major cities across the UK (Cardiff, Hatfield, Swansea and Sheffield). Fusion Students wanted to let students know how flexible they could be.
Why did Fusion Students choose The Student Room?
“The Student Room provides great insight into how students are feeling as well as, by volume, where their current focus lies. We wanted to be able to advertise to students at the right time. The Student Room was great because we could target students who were already asking about accommodation in the cities we operate in - no more advertising to all and hoping to get a hit.”
- Alastair Strauss, Digital Marketing Manager, Fusion Students
"The team at The Student Room are great! Always happy to help and give insight and advice."- Fusion Students
How The Student Room helped Fusion Students achieve its goal
The campaign strategy
Purpose: Early engagement/awareness
Live: March - June
Products: Targeted display banners and four targeted emails
Fusion Students wanted to reach UK students who were showing a strong interest in universities in the cities they operate in.
The Student Room has access to 10 million users a month nationwide, so we could easily pinpoint large audience segments of students who were looking at or talking about those universities.
We track user's online engagement to determine what they are interested in (for example if they have recently viewed content about accommodation). These insights allowed us to strategically target the students who were most likely to respond to the Fusion Students campaign.
Attention-grabbing display banners raised awareness, while a series of targeted emails were used to amplify Fusion Students' story and win over prospective tenants. We ramped up the display banners before and after the email sends to maximise awareness and recall.
Results
The email had an impressive open rate of 42.4%.
The targeted display campaign exceeded benchmarks for click-through rate.
It also achieved 434 clicks and directed high-quality traffic to the client's website.
Client feedback
"The aim of the campaign was awareness and the campaign delivered against this goal in a great way. The engagement rate for emails was just under 50%, this is an excellent open rate and shows the emails were targeted at the right people at the right time. Add the referral traffic from our targeted banners to that and I am pleased to say that the campaign delivered on the objectives set.
I can confirm that during the months we were running our campaign with The Student Room we had 434 referrals visits to our site from the targeted banners and over 300 site visits from the emails. I would expect a good number of them would have registered and hopefully gone on to book."
- Alastair Strauss, Digital Marketing Manager, Fusion Students