Case Study
Improving email marketing revenue by 6-figures (52%) over eight months
Sarahpeyton.com is a neuroscience training provider who has helped more than 4,000 people heal with self-compassion. Since the team are educators at heart, many purchases come from their 18,000 strong email list, where subscribers are nurtured with in-depth content to help them understand and build trust in taking Sarah Peyton’s courses.
The problem: decreasing revenue
But through 2022, sarahpeyton.com’s revenue started dropping. When Rachel, Sarah Peyton’s marketing manager, initially got in touch, her hunch was that the audience were overwhelmed by the wealth of courses that they had available.
After sending a survey to their audience, we found:
The newer a subscriber was, the more lost they felt on their learning journey
The amount a subscriber spends was directly proportional to their understanding of their learning journey
New subscribers took 35 days on average to make a purchase
So we had identified a problem - subscribers (particularly new ones) were lost, and this meant they were less likely to make a purchase.
The solution: Provide a clear and simple path for subscribers
To help subscribers feel less overwhelmed, we came up with the following strategies:
A 10-email automated welcome series for new subscribers, containing a wealth of educational content and 2 sales emails
Email campaigns to existing subscribers focused on describing and selling one course, rather than a whole month’s calendar (5-10 courses at a time)
The automated welcome series
Talking to the customer success team, it was clear that a live course would be the best way for a new subscriber to experience Sarah Peyton’s work, so we focused the Welcome Series on one primary call to action: buying their introductory live course. If subscribers didn’t purchase the introduction, we did a downsell to a more affordable pre-recorded course they could take in their own time.
The results show that new subscribers are now worth 46% more than they were the year before, and make a purchase 18% faster.
The single-CTA newsletter
When it came to the newsletter, we tested to see if emails that were focused on educating and selling one course performed better than the existing newsletter emails containing 5-10 courses.
The results were extremely positive - emails promoting a single course often generated more revenue than emails containing 5 or more courses. These emails are now a mainstay of the marketing calendar.
Results
These strategies led to a +52% growth in revenue over 8 months, compared to same period the year before, reversing the -3% revenue drop they were experiencing before our work together.
The results suggest that subscribers purchase more because they are given a clear understanding of where to start, what each course offers, and a simple path to purchase.
On top of that, we have built out comprehensive analytics for sarahpeyton.com. We now understand where each subscriber comes from and what they buy - and we are using this data to optimize their email marketing even further.
“We’re now consistently generating $5k worth of course bookings with each email - Jacob turned our revenue trend from negative to positive!”
Rachel Lewett, Marketing Manager at SarahPeyton.com
