How Frasers Group Uses Student Offers to Build Gen Z Loyalty

July 31, 2024

According to our 2024 Consumer Report, Gen Z now makes up 2 billion consumers worldwide with $450 billion in spending power — and they’re looking for brands that resonate with their values, offer personalized experiences, and maintain a strong presence on social media.

That’s exactly what Danielle Woodland and her team at Frasers Group are delivering, and why we were excited to hear about it in a recent Adweek webinar. As Frasers Group’s Performance Marketing Manager, Danni came armed with insights about how her team builds loyalty with Gen Z across the company’s portfolio of European sports and lifestyle brands, including Sports Direct, Everlast, and Flannels.

Without further ado, here are some of the highlights of Danni’s wide-ranging conversation with SheerID’s Chief Customer Officer Anjanette Hill Mendoza — from A/B testing her way to the perfect student offer to nailing a Gen Z-friendly tone of voice across 50+ brands.

The following conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Creating Company-Wide Loyalty

Anjanette Hill Mendoza

Let’s start with an overview — how do you think about customer loyalty at Frasers Group?

Danni Woodland

We’re a multi-brand retailer that owns 50+ brands across different pillars like sports, premium, and luxury. Each pillar has its own strategy toward a bigger business goal, but with a very different customer audience, price point, etc.

We’re fully aware that not every customer is going to be interested in sport and in high fashion. But we’ve found that if a customer shops across more than one of our brands, their lifetime value is 17X higher than an individual brand customer.

Using a Student Discount to Win Gen Z and Their First-Party Data

Anjanette Hill Mendoza

In our studies, 90% of all college students say they research brands to see if they offer a student discount before they even make a purchase — which is a huge advantage if you’ve got a student offer. How did you decide to develop an exclusive discount verified by SheerID?

Danni Woodland

Through our in-store and online data, we found that the majority of our customers were between the ages of 16 to 24. But we learned from research and A/B testing that the younger generation wasn’t likely to refer us to another customer.

We did more A/B testing to figure out what we wanted to offer our students. Some brands do a percentage off and others do monetary value, and our testing found that 63% of people preferred having the percentage off.

We also saw that our average order value (AOV) and our items-to-basket went up with the percentage, because they felt like they were getting more off all the time. “Oh, I’ve got a percentage off, so I can just add that one more thing to my basket.” Even though it might not seem like a lot to the shopper, that metric is really key to us in our business.

Anjanette Hill Mendoza

What are the benefits you’re realizing from verifying your student offer?

Danni Woodland

Our business is very cost-effective, so using a verification solution like SheerID was a cost-saving exercise to start with. But now that we’re approaching a year of offering a student discount with SheerID, we can really understand the value of verification and the first-party data we get there.

Anjanette Hill Mendoza

How are you using that first-party data once you collect it?

Danni Woodland

We’re trying to build a community with Gen Z where they feel valued and heard.

We understand who the customer is, when they graduate, what uni they’re at. We’re capturing them at a young age so we can grow with them, and they feel like we’re growing with them along their life journey.

When I graduated, I got a few emails from brands acknowledging that milestone, and I thought it was so nice. And I still shop at those places today, because I felt valued when I was coming into the age of having more money and being able to spend more freely than when I was a student.

For us, the first-party data we get through verification is invaluable. We can grow customer profiles out of it, and make sure what we’re doing is direct and streamlined to the person. We build a lot of our digital marketing on this first-party data — targeting people through paid social and other channels because we have the data and we know our customers are there.

Growing a Gen Z Loyalty Program

Anjanette Hill Mendoza

What does your loyalty program look like today? And how is Gen Z responding to it?

Danni Woodland

We noticed there was a massive gap in our market for Sports Direct — our key brand and the one we feel targets Gen Z the most. We’re very much positioned against competitors that have these reward schemes and loyalty programs. We don’t have one, but we’re launching it in September this year.

In A/B testing with select customers, we found that Gen Zs are really responding to having that loyalty program and building that community. Within ours, slightly different to everyone else, we’re doing personalized offers — we’re watching what they’re purchasing or looking at on the app and in-store to be more targeted with what they’re showing them. It’s made a huge difference.

Running in the UK is a massive thing at the moment, and recently, we started holding running clubs that you can only access through the app — and the uplift with Gen Z has been phenomenal.

We’ve been able to put events on and get face-to-face time with those customers and have them feel like they’re being valued and getting something back from the brand. It doesn’t cost them anything to come to these events, and they normally get a free Sports Direct T-shirt.

We’ve also done a few events with Flannels and invited customers down to a party in the basement of our Flannels store in London. It’s been a really nice experience for them and we’ve had really good feedback as well.

Word of mouth has seen phenomenal growth since we’ve started putting these events on. We’re going to continue doing them, and hopefully target them towards different age groups as well.

Building a Bright Future

Anjanette Hill Mendoza

What are you most excited about with regards to your college student program in the next year?

Danni Woodland

We’ve only just started to scratch the surface. We’ve been with SheerID for less than a year now, and the verification data SheerID has given us is enabling us to develop our own graduate program to grow with those customers.

We’re looking towards the growth of Gen Z and student verifications — but we’re also going to open it up to different communities like NHS workers, first aid, army, and police. You name it — we’re considering opening it up to all of them to try to understand those customers as well.

We’re looking forward to the growth with SheerID, and you guys have such a fantastic team that’s helped us understand what our customers need and want. Now that we’ve got that relationship, I don’t think it’s going away anytime soon.