Spinning straw into gold at Youth Marketing Strategy LDN 2018

Insta selfies, bunny ear filters and stalls manned by twenty somethings with a skin fade wearing Augmented Reality headsets. Yes that is what I walked into last week when I headed down to Brick Lane in London’s East End to present at Voxburners Youth Marketing Strategy (YMS) LDN 2018

Two days of discussions from organisations on how to engage young people with brands and products. From Snap Chat to Love Island, Google, to well Bedfordshire, there was a range of insight shared from brands across the event.

So, I was asked to speak on day one alongside four other universities as part of the higher education strand. It was great for Bedfordshire to be asked to share or story of how we engaged young people into converting their offer with us during clearing into an accept. To be honest the story is a pretty good one and one worth sharing. So here is a quick synopsis.

As part of our clearing operation we needed to up our game with conversion. Each year we generate thousands of calls to clearing hotline and make thousands of offers, but we often fall down when it comes to converting those offer holders into actually accepting. During Clearing 2017 we pioneered something new. Now it’s not often we get to say we pioneered something, especially one with such impact, so stay with me, it gets good.

We bought the licence for an app called Bonjoro, it’s a tool that lets you film short personalised videos to an individual and send them via email. We asked our academics to record some to offer holders and send as a follow up to the call they had received where the offer had been made. It sounds simple right?


The most labour intensive part was actually uploading all the email addresses, which isn’t too bad as I initially thought the worst bit would be getting buy in from the academic to take part. You see quite often academics and marketing don’t mix, unless it is a poster created using clip art and Publisher. With this proposition though they seem to love it, possibly something to do with the personal nature of it and they got to talk, and academics love to talk.

But here is the good bit, over clearing we sent 672 Bonjoro videos via email to offer holders. Of those 534 recipients opened their emails; that is a 74% open rate! Pretty good conversion right there.

Of those who opened the videos 316 were watched; that is a 47% watch rate. Of those who watched 288 accepted their offer with us.

The cost for a 12 month license was under 5k however, the 288 undergraduate offers that we accepted after receiving a Bonjoro would, after completing a three-year undergraduate degree, have generated £2.5m revenue for the University. No other conversion tool has spun straw into gold the same way as this during clearing. The moral, it is a tool we will be using again.


It wasn’t just Bedfordshire talking personalisation though, it seemed to be a major theme in many of the brands presenting, and was certainly coming through in all the research presented as something young people want more and more of.


The rest of my day at the event consisted of learning more about how young people want to be engaged and a big part of this was around authenticity. One of the challenges I have brought back from the event is asking how do we tell the student story without endless amounts of case studies that risk being seen as edited and manipulated? How do we strip back our messaging to begin telling our student success in a raw authentic unedited form, while still being part of a brand? I’ll leave that one there to perhaps pick up on a future blog. 


While we ponder the above, the one thing we can definitely continue doing is personalising beyond sending an email and inserting name here. Let’s hope we have a new, exciting, creative tool to present at next years conference, and in the meantime, here are some of the Bonjoro's sent during Clearing 2017.