Do you think being a top social media influencer is enough for your product to sell successfully? Organic reach is very important but it’s nothing without a properly functioning funnel. Read this story to find out how we helped a fitness subscription-based business avoid stagnation and achieve scalable growth.
When one of Eastern Europe’s top fitness personalities approached us in April 2018, the growth of their VoD subscription platform was about to enter stagnation unless action was taken to optimize KPIs. Despite a big organic reach on social media, the number of new users on the website wasn’t growing stably. No communication had been established with acquired clients inside the platform leading to low engagement and a high churn rate. As a result, the platform’s bestselling offer – a 3-month package – had the lowest LTV! We like our clients’ clients to be charmed, not churn, so we rolled up our sleeves and got stuck in.
Our main objective was to help the business grow its revenue as the amazing potential of social media reach and massive website traffic wasn’t fully leveraged.
For the business to grow we needed to start converting more website users into clients.
We needed to create a funnel that would allow us to be able to predict how the business performs and stably acquire new users.
Due to poor user experience and lack of communication, the users quickly lost their interest.
After analyzing the current stats, we concluded that – as often happens in subscription businesses – the company’s growth would soon stagnate due to its high customer churn rate. If you want to learn more about churn, you can read a great article about it on Gocardless blog.
Even if the business continued to acquire the same amount of new paying users, the income generated wouldn’t be enough to cover the number of users canceling their subscription. Lowering churn is one of the keys to increasing your users’ lifetime value (LTV) which in turn boosts the overall value of your business.
This is what the client’s funnel looked like when we started work. As you can see, there are only a few organic traffic sources, no communication with users while they’re in the checkout process and even after they became clients!
Client’s old funnel
We created a multiple step funnel and started with adding more traffic sources (also paid) at the beginning of it. Adding a blog and establishing a content publishing strategy helped us rank better on organic keywords and also engage our acquired users. We also created multiple landing pages for seasonal campaigns and optimized home page to increase conversion rate. When it comes to the checkout process, we added email abandoned checkout sequence for users who entered the process of account creation and also started remarketing users on both Google Ads and Facebook. It was very important for us to make sure that after users became our clients they’re also being communicated – via newsletters with blog content, messenger bot and regular updates on changes in the platform.
New funnel created by Tribe47
Users in content subscription businesses quickly lose interest; to keep them engaged requires daily hustle. We won their loyalty firstly by establishing multi-channel communication with all users, both before and after the purchase. To do that we used social media (Facebook, Instagram), a bot for Messenger, email campaigns, a newsletter, and also push notifications to make certain that proper communication reaches the user at each stage of their journey with the product.
We decided to create a cycle of marketing campaigns to build momentum and motivation to join the platform. All of them were pre-planned and synchronised across all digital channels. Creating a sense of urgency builds excitement and gives users the feeling that they’re about to join a powerful community.
Before we started work, the landing page had multiple CTA’s which linked to different pages. The text on a few of the buttons was too vague, which according to Wishpond blog is one of the top mistakes that can kill your conversion rate. The solution was simple – we implemented one consistent ‘call to action’ button throughout the whole landing page. The button bore the crystal-clear message ‘Create an account,’ which is exactly what the user could do by clicking it.
A long and confusing onsite purchase process made it hard to buy the product, even for users who were very eager to do so. What’s worse was that before making a purchase, users had to create a free account which prolonged the whole process without adding value for the user. By shortening the process to just 3 simple steps and adding an abandoned checkout sequence and deep remarketing for users who were in checkout, we boosted the checkout conversion rate by 25%!
We started by optimising the performance of existing pages using SEO tools like Screaming Frog, which helped us to lower bounce rates on key pages. After establishing a new blog with proper categories, we mapped out the keywords that would let us achieve a good ranking quickly and easily and we started blogging. 🙂 After 6 months we were pulling in an average of 16k unique users every month via the blog.
We decided to go for a trusted and stable solution in terms of email marketing – we used Mailchimp for ongoing communication
To engage our audiences during seasonal launches we started a hashtag campaign on social media and then embedded it into the challenge page using this tool. After the first month we gathered >10k photos with our hashtag!
To get in touch even more (it turns out there’s no such thing as too much contact when it comes to a content subscription business) we started to send newsletters and personalized quizzes via this chatbot tool.
Your best users are the ones that recommend you, so we instigated a viral freebie gateway campaign that netted us >6k leads.
We used it to gather user feedback on the blog and landing page (both from future and current users of the platform) which helped us know our persona better.
For scarcity notifications for users in the checkout process we started using Fomo.
Typeform is our no. 1 choice for lead-generating quizzes.
It’s our favorite non-stocky stock with beautiful images.
Short-term growth is (deceptively) easy to achieve for subscription businesses and can often be accomplished via a single well-designed online campaign. But before you know it, those satisfying numbers – which had you and your team high-fiving – will be eaten up by the churn rate.
Fortunately, this can be avoided. This checklist will show you HOW.
By creating a multi-channel funnel with that included more sources of traffic and user communication on every stage, we were able to triple monthly revenue in 6 months time. Using perpetual launch technique and series of seasonal campaigns, we were able to lower churn which resulted in the higher lifetime value of users and also increased profits.
In 6 months we had 2x more active users on the platform.
Our bestselling offer due to lower churn became the most profitable one.
Due to lower churn, higher LTV and bigger amount of active users monthly revenue grew by 300%.
Ready to expand your reach? Briefly tell us about your business and we’ll schedule a 1-hour meeting to show you how we can integrate our digital marketing approach into your business.
