Summary
Headspace is on a mission to improve the health and happiness of the world. The company wanted to honor educators—an undervalued group it sees as pivotal to society—but needed help creating a personalized offer to engage them. By partnering with SheerID to create an audience marketing program, the company was able to acquire 25,000 new educator subscribers in three new markets, reduce offer abuse by 41%, and boost engagement.
Challenge
Headspace is continually looking for ways to bring meditation tools to groups that both need its service and can impact the lives of others. Educators are one of the company’s ideal consumer audiences. The work of educators is stressful and often undervalued, and this group is well-positioned to further Headspace’s mission by fostering mindfulness in the classroom.
To support educators, Headspace created a personalized offer that gave them free access to its meditation app, and then began building coalitions with school district superintendents to spread the word. It was a great approach, but having to go through layers of school administration ended up creating bottlenecks. It limited the company’s ability to reach educators directly—and to scale as the initiative grew.
Headspace decided it would be more effective to reach educators with a direct-to-consumer strategy instead. But since “free” is an attractive price, Headspace needed a way to verify educators to avoid fraud that would cut into their commercial sales.
Solution
Headspace selected SheerID’s Audience Network to deliver its personalized offer and digitally verify every educator who redeemed it. The move protected the offer from offer abuse and gave Headspace the means to fully engage educators by honoring and rewarding them.
“Educators often face limited budgets and receive little recognition for their work. Giving them our app for free allows us to thank them for their service and nurture an authentic brand relationship built on trust,” said Lino Reveles Trujillo, social impact lead for Headspace. “Using SheerID not only protects our margins, it keeps the offer truly exclusive, which underscores our commitment to educators and makes the offer even more valuable in their eyes.”
Headspace not only gave educators free access to the Headspace app, it also provided best practices, tips, and tools to help them leverage the app in their classrooms.
The company used a three-pronged marketing strategy to get the word out to educators:
• Leveraging both paid and organic social channels
• Emailing their current members and encouraging them to“tell an educator” about the offer
• Working directly with education partners like Pure Edge that have incorporated Headspace into their services and professional development offerings for educators
Using SheerID not only protects our margins, it keeps the offer truly exclusive, which underscores our commitment to educators and makes the offer even more valuable in their eyes.
Results
Launching the personalized offer to educators brought Headspace more than 25,000 new users. And using SheerID to protect the offer reduced fraud by 33% in the US and 41% internationally.
While those numbers are remarkable, making the app free still might seem like a big investment for an offer that generates no direct revenue. But Headspace is also using the program to boost customer acquisition and loyalty, and that’s a smart move.
The US alone has four million K-12 educators who—like all audiences—have strong networks that like to spread the word when a good thing comes their way. Agile Education Marketing’s educators survey showed that 65% of educators will ask colleagues about a brand when researching a purchasing decision, and 98% of educators would share a personalized offer with other educators.
Headspace saw this powerful word-of-mouth marketing in action when it sent an email to all its US members encouraging them to tell a educator about the offer. “It performed extremely well,” Lino said. “In addition to our broader referral campaign, we found that our second hyper-targeted educator referral campaign had open rates that were 10% higher than our typical email campaigns, and click-through rates that were 15% higher than average.”
It’s easy to see why: a brand that engages educators also engages their community. Educators that use Headspace inspire parents, friends, and other adults to pay for the app and follow suit. And when educators bring Headspace into the classroom, students form good habits they’ll want to maintain by becoming paid subscribers when they graduate.
Lino is excited by the potential the educator program has to impact both Headspace’s mission and its bottom line. And he is counting on SheerID to make it happen.
“Our audience marketing program is a strong extension of our marketing strategy, and it’s helping us create lifelong customers,” Lino said. “SheerID gives us the ability to continue expanding internationally and to build programs for other consumer audiences that align with our mission and vision, such as the military and first responders. It’s a win-win for our company and our audience.”
Our audience marketing program is a strong extension of our marketing strategy, and it’s helping us create lifelong customers.