Building Loyalty and Reducing Melt: University of the Pacific’s Sustainable Welcome Package

The University of the Pacific aimed to build deeper connections with its confirmed students, ensuring they felt welcomed and valued before arriving on campus. This welcome package was designed to prevent melt—encouraging students to stay committed throughout the summer and reducing the risk of them choosing another university. The initiative also served to instill pride and excitement for the upcoming school year. 

Challenges Addressed:
The university wanted to enhance retention by ensuring confirmed students felt a sense of belonging before their first semester. By sending them thoughtful branded merchandise, the university could foster loyalty and drive anticipation for the start of classes, mitigating the potential for students to change their college choice.

Branded Merch Strategy:
The welcome package included functional and pride-driven items such as a branded water bottle, PopSocket, and a double-sided sticker sheet featuring a personal note from the ASuop President. The design also included a branded box that had specific messaging in the bottom, encouraging students to keep and repurpose the box which elevated sustainability through reusability and helped to directly align with the university’s sustainability efforts.

Positive Impact:
The campaign received positive feedback from students and faculty. Students were excited to receive the package and proudly displayed the items, helping to promote the university within their communities before arriving on campus. The buzz generated on campus highlighted the successful engagement this initiative fostered.

Unique Aspects:
The messaging and the integration of reusable packaging made this campaign stand out. The branded box’s sustainability message encouraged students to reuse the packaging with such ideas like: store your art supplies, make a bed for your cat, or keep your coolest socks in it. This messaging extended the life of the campaign beyond the immediate unboxing experience.

By combining student pride with a focus on sustainability and practical, engaging items, the University of the Pacific ensured that this campaign left a lasting impression on incoming students.

U of Pacific - inside of box
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Variable Data Best Practices

  • At the quoting stage of your project, please let us know how many fields of variable data your piece will have as this can affect pricing.
  • Data should be provided to us as an Excel spreadsheet with only the applicable data included.
  • Verbiage for variable data fields on artwork file should match up exactly with data fields on spreadsheet.
  • Spacing on artwork must allow for longest data entries. We recommend that your designer tests this in advance to confirm that the fields in the design can fit your longest pieces of data.

Postage Permits

We are happy to mail using a client’s USPS non-profit number. Here are a few best practices for this to go smoothly. Let our team know up front on the project so we can make sure to get the information we need right away. 

While our mail house does prefer to use their permit number for the mailing, we can use the client’s permit, If using their permit number, ensure there is enough postage to cover the mailing.

The information we need to in order to use a client’s nonprofit number includes the following:

  • CRID (customer registration ID)
  • Non-Profit Authorization Number (with USPS, not their nonprofit number for the university)
  • Non-profit indicia
  • Return address that is on file with USPS for the non-profit authorization number
  • Permit number

Formatting the Mailing List

Our account team will advise on specific requirements for your project’s mailing list.  We generally recommend these best practices to format the mailing list:
  • Send your data in a spreadsheet, saving it in the comma-separated values (CSV) format
  • International addresses must be separated from domestic addresses
  • Domestic addresses should at least contain data fields for “first name”, “last name”, “address 1”, “address 2”, “city”, “state” and “ZIP code”