Segmenting Students

How to setup an automated Student Discount programme on Shopify

Students typically are cash strapped due to relying on a student loan and paying high fees to attend college or university and not having much time to work part-time. However, this group of consumers are also very active shoppers and are constantly buying online.

With free overdrafts, maintenance loans and other banking promotions they often have access to a lot of disposable cash and are constantly looking to spend their money on the best student deals out there.

The draw of a student discount is the key to brand loyalty as TUN 2016 study found that 97% of students would try a local business solely because it had a student discount. In the same study, 75% of those students said they would feel loyalty towards that brand after they graduate and enter the working world.

Set up a Student Discount programme on Shopify

Below we walk you through the steps of setting up a simple Student discount programme, allowing you to give codes to students only and create marketing lists and begin to build a student following.

Apps needed:

• Customer Tagger
• Email Service provider such as: Omnisend, Klaviyo or MailChimp

Create the customer group

Firstly, you need to create a group of customers called Students. To do this you need to go to Customers Click on the filter and select the option 'Tagged with' and type 'Student' and click add filter

You will then need to save this search, which will create the customer group. Therefore the customer group will be all customers tagged ' Student'.

Create a Workflow

The next step is to begin highlighting all those customers who are students. The best way to do this and prevent the system being abused is to use students email addresses. In the UK a University email address will end 'ac.uk' for example, Bournemouth University is @bournemouth.ac.uk. In the states, it's '.edu', so you can only provide student discount to those who create an account within your Shopify store, using that email.

Here you can use Customer Tagger app, to create a customer tagging workflow that will automatically apply the tag 'student' to all customers who create an account with a qualifying email address or place an order with a qualifying email address.

The first step is to define the trigger and for this workflow we want when a new customer registers for an account. Any customer who registers an account on your store, will trigger this new workflow to fire.

The next step is to add some criteria to determine which customers should qualify for the 'student' tag. 

For this particular trigger there is only one available criteria: Customers email address.

Click the Use in your workflow button on the right to select this criteria.

You will then be presented with the following screen:

The criteria options are simple:

Criteria Options

The following Criteria options allow you to check the Customers email address for various matches:

contains: Does the Customers email address contain the string you have specified anywhere in the value? does NOT contain: Does the Customers email address NOT contain the string you have specified anywhere in the value?

Select a criteria option based on what you are trying to identify from the Customers email address.

For this example we will check for a UK university email address:

We would also like to check for a US university email address.

We can either use the Add more criteria button and follow the previous steps:

Or perhaps quicker for this example, is to use the Duplicate button and edit the criteria accordingly:

Select the Any of the criteria can match (or) option:

Once the criteria has been defined, you can determine what tag should be applied to the Customer record. Here we're simply going to go for a fixed tag of ' Student'.

Once you have clicked Add fixed tag, you can give your workflow a name and hit save! 

Setting up the discount code

The next step is to create a discount code which is exclusive to the Student group. To do this go to Shopify Discounts Create new here you can set all the value and details on the code.

We recommend you set the usage limits to 1 per customer (defined by email address).

The one required step in this setup is to apply this only to a specific group of customers. If you select that option and search that box for your newly created student group it will show up, allowing you to save.

You're all set!

Now you have a system set up to automatically add customer tags based on their student type, you can now think about how to distribute codes and automate the campaign.

Here, we won't dive into the detail too much but our recommendation would be you create a list within your email service provider for all customers tagged ' Student'. You can then set up new automation to automatically email a customer when they are added to this list.

You also have this list for marketing purposes for future promotional discounts!