7% response rate on waterfall email campaign
30% increase in revenue in first 3 months
Conversion rate on advertising campaign rose from 0% to 3%
My client had a well built out product but hadn't invested much into their marketing. The web design was pretty basic and they hadn't thought out their messaging too much. They needed to figure out how to correctly educate and address a very niche, highly educated market of developers.
Their goal was to create a full marketing pipeline for inbound leads. This meant building a more effective landing page and website funnel, fixing their ad campaign conversion rates, and deciding how best to advertise to a very diverse set of companies.
My entire career has been in marketing for developers. I have a lot of experience tackling products where there's a surplus of complex technology attached and am an expert at distilling it all into simple value propositions. This made me a perfect fit for the project.
Everybody involved in the company had a very compact view of what they were building because they were so invested in it. I came in with an outside perspective and encouraged them to expand their picture.
I did some research into the company and the cybersecurity field at large. I spent a lot of time talking to the sales team and CEO about what issues their clients were facing, which ones we could solve, and what sort of things held sales back.
From there, together with the engineering team, I created tailored messaging for a number of different uses, each of which changed how we talked about the product. These were based on the product’s features and benefits and the company’s values. Once we had the information distilled into text and visuals, we could expand it into more and more content.
The company had a Google ads account that functioned for getting website traffic, but it wasn't converting very well. So, I created many different tests on their account to see what sort of messaging might work with their audience and generate conversions. This would indicate whether what we’d done in messaging was working or we needed to change tack.
I had assumed up until this point that with such an educated market of developers, the target audience would understand all the concepts we were throwing at them. But, as often happens with this demographic, I discovered that even at my level of comprehension, we had been a shade too technical. The truth is, when people are reading ads, something appeals to them in an instant. So they need a few keywords that they can grasp onto; anything beyond that dilutes the message.
The company’s landing page was relatively basic. It wasn't branded especially well. The website is the most complex process in an entire funnel, so you need to involve someone experienced in communications if you want to make it work.
I personally did some basic wireframing and all of the copy, and worked with the sales team to create visuals to explain their value concepts. Then, with a trusted contractor I had collaborated with several times before, I moved on to the development itself.
The site had a lot of visitors who would sign up to the company’s mailing lists, but they weren't contacting those people in a fruitful way. So, using the different value propositions we’d sketched out at the beginning, I created a sequence of five emails that went into increasing depth about the product.
I went in a direction that they didn't really understand at first. Developers hate feeling like they're being marketed to. So the last thing I wanted to do was create an email that resembled an ad campaign. I tried to emulate the newsletters these people would receive from open source projects. Keeping the tone casual, I covered industry news and studies related to our product.
The webinar is a classic marketing tactic that's super effective in SaaS and B2B, so I created an introductory webinar to talk about the product, do a demo and receive questions. The sales team could use the same one time and again, scheduling more whenever they wanted. This converted some of the mailing list into active leads without those leads feeling like they were investing too much or being sold to.
Analysis and troubleshooting were going on all throughout the project. But at the end, I wanted to conduct a final, full analysis to leave the client in the best possible position. We tied the whole thing together and made sure the funnel functioned properly.
We noticed a few elements on the landing page that weren't functioning perfectly and fixed them. Since the landing page is such a complex portion of a project like this, I often need to adjust it based on what I've learned in the later stages of the process.
The company had a 30% increase in revenue in the first three months of the campaign being fully functional.
The bounce rate on the landing page dropped from 66% to 32%.
Our most outstanding result was on the email campaign. It had a response rate of 7%, which is an excellent result for this medium.
Messaging is key in this type of company, especially when you're building brand new technology, and especially with bigger clients. When I harp on about messaging, sales teams will often say, “Oh, that's something we think about every day.” But I push them to think it all the way through from top to bottom, because all the work moving forward depends on it and if they don’t, their funnel will only be half-developed. You don't have many opportunities to make a first impression but, at the same time, it’s a multi-touch funnel, and it’s crucial to have the full picture in mind in order not to lose people.
