Social Media Investors

The Strategy

Setting Up an Email Campaign With Marketing Automation we used SharpSpring to launch an automated 24-email campaign for SMI.

• Free trial campaign: 8 emails
• Post sign-up, upgrade to ‘pro’ campaign: 8 emails
• Upgrade from ‘pro’ to ‘premium’ campaign: 7 emails

Challenge 1

Ensure that all of the leads in the client’s database were solid, qualified leads. SMI had collected many leads over the years, so at this point, many were no longer active. Within its first week, the campaign came close to going over the spam threshold. SMI took a look at which leads were not engaging and removed those from its list, which greatly improved engagement rates for the subsequent emails in the campaign.

Challenge 2

The amount of prep time required to set up a massive campaign such as this one. It’s important to be strategic in the planning phases to ensure the campaign will essentially run itself and that minimal work will be needed after the launch. This involves gathering and setting up the right content in your emails and landing pages, and then formulating each task in the automation to ensure leads are properly captured through landing pages and ending up in the sales pipeline, exactly where you want them. The agency had to make some iterative adjustments throughout the campaign, but it learned how to better prepare fully for future campaigns.

Proven Results

This campaign has allowed the sales process to continue in the background, enabling SMI to focus on delivering optimal services to customers who’ve upgraded. This has saved SMI time and money in the long run, despite the extra time spent up front to set up the campaign.

Before Bolt Goodly (formerly Venture Catalysts, at the time of this project) implemented SharpSpring for SMI, the client was closing one or two deals on average per month. Within the first eight weeks of this email campaign, SMI closed 10 new customers. That’s five per month, meaning SMI more than doubled its business and cut its close time in half. Furthermore, demand for SMI’s platform and services has been so high as a result of the campaign, the company was able to raise its prices while keeping all of its current customers, thus increasing its revenue by 10x and its profit margin by 64%.

“Any organization can benefit greatly from marketing automation. The fact is, it can be used not only to sell your services or products, but also to retarget customers and prospects by sending automated follow-ups, thank-you emails, surveys, and so on.”

Kirk Holmes
CEO of Bolt Goodly