Show & Tell – Thrivent Federal Credit Union 2016 Student Lending

For the past several years, we’ve helped Thrivent Federal Credit Union with their annual student lending campaign. This year, in addition to their typical marketing strategy, they decided to try something new – marketing to pure prospects.

We helped them source targeted lists to meet the specific demographics they were after – college students of a certain age, in specific geographic areas, who identified with certain religions that align with Thrivent’s target market.

We began with two touch points in January – direct mail and email follow up. From there, the budget allowed for two additional email deployments within the year, which we wrote the copy for. In addition to the loan messaging, a scholarship was added to pique interest and to collect contact info from prospects.

As a result of those two deployments, just over ½% of the recipients applied for the scholarship, and a much smaller number actually applied for a loan. Which, of course, was the main objective.

Given the fact that these were pure prospects, many whom probably had no familiarity with Thrivent, we think these numbers are a good start. It tells us that our lists were reaching the intended audience, some of who reacted to the marketing in some way.

We look forward to applying these findings to future campaigns and getting even more engagement from prospects.