Agency: Bolt Goodly – a digital marketing agency that specializes in the creative use of marketing automation, analytics, social media, and other digital marketing tools.

Client: Social Media Investors – a foundation that helps small business owners use social
media to compete for market share on limited budgets.

Social Media Investors (SMI) is an integrated digital marketing communications company. It was founded in 2011 with a vision to change the way small businesses compete in the digital world. As social media grew in popularity, SMI saw casual users becoming empowered by platforms like Facebook and Twitter, while small businesses stumbled over the best ways to utilize them. SMI knew that social media was a critical link in sales and marketing, but so few entrepreneurs were maximizing that potential.

When SMI came to Bolt Goodly for help, it was working with a small sales budget, very little time to spend on marketing, and a disjointed list of about 20,000 contacts from business meetings, networking events, friends and family. The company was looking for an affordable way to organize those leads and reach out to ones that were promising.

Bolt Goodly had past experience with more expensive platforms like HubSpot, Marketo and Salesforce, and knew those options were out of the question given SMI’s budget.

Bolt Goodly 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

Bolt Goodly faced a couple of challenges during the campaign, but it was able to resolve them and improve its processes going forward.

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 SMI had collected many leads over the years, so at this point, many were no longer active.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.

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 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%.