Client
National Society of Collegiate Scholars

Deliverables
Email, landing page

Overview
This honor society for freshmen and sophomores wanted to test against their control acquisition email. Eligible students just needed to be introduced to all the benefits of NSCS membership in a more relevant and sincere way. Naturally, I hit the books and went full nerd by writing a new custom landing page too, overall beating the control send by 48%.

Challenges

Sending a cold email, including limited dynamic fields that hindered personalization

Competing with older, more established honor societies with more awareness

Reaching Gen Z when they’re skeptical of marketing and hip to common tactics

Cannibalizing clicks due to too many links in the email and distractions on the lander

Maintaining relevancy and cohesion while pointing to a generic, catch-all landing page

Solutions

Integrating the school more to increase context, credibility, and personalization during the low awareness phase

Dialing up authenticity and humanization by changing the sender to the school’s chapter leader

Using a more conversational and sincere tone for the chapter leader, and separating the more heavy-touch marketing messaging

Trimming and chunking copy for easier reading on mobile, and cutting down on CTAs to focus readers ready to act

Creating a net-new landing page customized specifically for this test campaign