Breaking the Curse of Stagnation on an Online Business Education Platform

The Background & Mission

• PRODUCT: Online Business Course for CEOs and Executives
• LOCATION: The United States
• PRICE: $2,790

When one of our first US clients approached us in May 2017, their online education business was experiencing a stagnation phase. The ratio of CAC to LTV was equal. Social media and PPC advertising were not bringing the expected amount of leads and the amount of organic traffic being generated based on brand keywords was not enough.

Despite having multiple products on their platform, including a few with the potential to really take off, the business had become stuck in a rut. The sales team did not have the capacity to reach all potential leads, and because the courses only ran at certain set times, a lot of opportunities were missed. Over the course of several years, the client sought guidance from the different US and international agencies but no one succeeded in breaking the curse of stagnation. Since online courses are one of our main specialties, we decided to take this challenge. Here is the story of our valiant quest for growth.

Key Goals

1. Decrease Customer Acquisition Cost
2. Increase revenue growth for the business
3. Decrease the amount of calls involved in the sales process

Our Discoveries From Strategy Work

Having analyzed the client’s business and their sales funnel thoroughly, we quickly spotted some missed opportunities:

Content Plan

There were a lot of articles on the client’s blog but there was no clear structure in terms of why certain topics were covered multiple times whereas other topics, which brought the most organic traffic, were not optimized for any call-to-action.

Social Media Distribution

We observed that the majority of articles were only shared from time to time on Facebook. And when articles were posted, they were accompanied by very short, weak and uninteresting copy and a poor quality meta image and were not given a tracking link. Despite having almost 100k likes, the company’s Facebook audience was completely dead. Other social networks like Linkedin and Twitter were completely forgotten.

Lead Magnets

Despite a large number of articles published, calls-to-action were not implemented. In B2B education, when you sell a high ticket product, you can’t drive people to a sales page right away. You need to nurture the audience with y an omnichannel approach to communication. Adding specific Lead Magnets can help you to acquire email addresses to which you can send weekly newsletters.

Webinar Leads Acquisition

To meet the client’s KPIs in terms of revenue and applications, we had to grow the number of webinar subscribers. By using Facebook Ads and combining cold prospecting campaigns with content remarketing, it’s possible to skyrocket the number of webinar sign-ups in a short time.

Dedicated Weekly Content Newsletter 

Our client was sending weekly newsletters on Sundays in which they would cover different topics and make announcements about their range of products and upcoming offline events. We truly believe that having a dedicated newsletter that just features a freshly published article is a better way to keep in touch with your audience.

What We Suggested as a Solution

The 6 Most Important Tactics We Used to Build the Funnel Were:

 1. Long-read Articles

The articles on the blog became the main pillar of our strategy. SEO optimized, long content pieces provided expert knowledge from business leaders and the authors of the company’s online courses. This content educated our persona on how to disrupt and scale a business and accelerate sales growth.

2. Lead Magnets

An integral part of the majority of articles was the lure of additional materials for download. Lead magnets in the form of useful checklists and worksheets that were ready to be implemented in a company were one of the main methods used to increase the company’s audience base.

Users who abandoned the checkout process were sent emails showing the benefits of the trial product. This tactic convinced 7% of them to complete their purchase.
Finally, we used Push notifications & pop-ups to minimize the number of users leaving our website without ordering a trial.

3. Webinar Survey

One of the pages most frequently missing from marketing funnels is the Thank You Page. For this client we implemented a survey on the Webinar Thank You page, so after signing up on the Webinar Landing Page, people were asked for more information about their company, how many years they had been in business, their industry and their employees. We also gave them the opportunity to send questions for a thought leader to answer during the webinar. It gave us a better understanding of the traffic quality that we had and it helped us later on with lead scoring for the sales team.

Furthermore, we used deep remarketing to show ads to people who visited the sales page or who added the product to their cart but didn’t buy it.

4. Facebook Ads Remarketing

One of the common mistakes that we see in online education businesses is a lack of proper remarketing to previously built audiences. With proper communication, content consumers, video viewers, website visitors, webinar subscribers, and attendees n can become clients.

We convert this relevant audience into applicants using different marketing tactics, creatives, and copies. Scarcity, FOMO, Early bird discounts, social proof, and other principles are used here in the form of creatives to overcome any possible objections a person may have to convert. Facebook ads proved very effective for us at the bottom of the funnel; around half of the applications were closed using this channel.

Visit our website to find out about the 2 more tactics and tools we implemented on this project.