How NUSS went from 378 sign-ups a year to 746 in six weeks
The challenge
NUSS – The Graduate Club had watched membership growth stall for five straight years. The prior year brought just 378 new sign-ups across the whole of NUSS.
The reasons compounded. The same joining offer had run so long it had gone stale. Growth leaned on member referrals and offline channels that had stopped responding. There was no visibility into what any channel actually delivered, so no way to know what to fix. And the wider social-club category was losing ground to the free online communities that now did much of what a club membership used to.
Three audiences, three offers, one engine
We treated it as an acquisition problem to be solved with a sharper offer and sharper targeting, not a bigger budget. First, a genuinely fresh joining offer to restart the growth engine. Then we split the audience into three personas — Current Members, Young Graduates, and Mid-Careers — and built a dedicated track for each: its own landing page, its own ad set, its own email nurture. Current Members were asked for referrals; Young Graduates were sold on getting ahead and belonging; Mid-Careers on a place to spend weekends with family.
The media ran where each persona actually was — Facebook and Instagram, Google Display and Search, and email — with Facebook carrying most of the weight because it delivered volume at the lowest cost per lead. Static ads carried the offer, and video creative carried the reason to care. Nothing was left to instinct. Audiences were launched, scaled, or killed on their conversion numbers across the six-week run from 5 September to 19 October 2017.
Selling the experience, not the discount
A membership is easier to sell when you can see what it buys. This film put the NUSS experience on screen — the guild house, the dining, the people a membership actually connects you to — and ran across the campaign to pull each persona toward its landing page.
The Results
Numbers that pick the winners
Campaign Assets
The Creative Work
