Scaling an Email Database Quickly

YRV Dynamics accepted an assignment as the paid search and social media agency of record for a self-help platform start-up. The client wanted to release new online classes that were six weeks long with a designated start date and corresponding curriculum. Some quick highlights of the courses:

• Included 1:1 sessions with a teaching guide and group learning sessions to facilitate larger questions and foster discussion of the week’s lessons.

• Courses were taught by notable leaders in therapy, counseling, and thought leaders in the self-help zeitgeist.

• Course order value was $700 per registration.

• As a paid search, social, organic, and PR were secured; the client requested a one-thousand-email goal to begin a drip campaign for their email marketing team.

The Assignment: Build a concurrent email base to supplement the other marketing pillars to warm users who opt-in to be part of the self-help platform’s ecosystem:

• Mimic compelling targets used on paid conversion and traffic campaigns as those had success via KPIs (CTR, ROAS, and Cost Per Conversion, CAC). As YRV Dynamics was running paid media, this assisted in our efforts for pixel sharing, site domain access & various performance data for email lead collection.

• Social follower growth hacks were not included as the client understood how an email list of quantifiable users who re-enroll is extremely valuable. In this case, the client owned the email list instead of the social platforms owning the followers.

Objective: Generate email leads for an online course with $700 price points

Media Approach:

• Use of mixed placement FB/IG for ease of lead event conversion. In this case, Meta views both platforms as one and optimizes to each for efficiency.

• Start with platform-based lead forms to facilitate ease of opt-in to enter the client’s ecosystem. Download from Meta suite — → upload to Klaviyo.

• Any opted-in emails were uploaded and not included in the prospecting campaign.

• Client and YRV Dynamic planning estimates were at the $5 to $10 level, as these were qualified audiences in the self-help audience. These included 1% LAL and retargeting audiences as users engaged with social profile pages and previous paid campaigns.

• Use one month, and analyze performance for the following months. Spend aggressively at first to scale performance to bring the cost per email as low as possible. If the cost per email lead was higher than $10, the email campaign could be deemed a failure after twenty-five emails.

Results

• Results initially stayed at $7 per email lead but steadily decreased as the campaign optimized. This led to an overall cost per email of $1.82, which was 64% more efficient than the lower part of our estimate.

• Earned 2,015 total emails; an interesting note was the frequency was 2x, meaning the average user needed to be hit twice before opting into the email newsletter list.

• Three additional courses were added, ranging from $400 to $1,000. Course efforts from subsequent sales campaigns generated emails due to qualified conversion traffic from conversion campaigns.

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