This is how we do ittt 🎶

I talk about marketing foundations A LOT.

What they are, why they matter, and how to set them up.

But i haven’t shown a real-life example of what it looks like for them to interlock and how long it takes for the payoff.

Today i’m fixing that.

DropEvent, run by Jeremy Noonan, is a photo save and sharing platform for events that requires zero tech knowledge. Everyone from the cookout to the conference can use it to see and save photos in real time.

And in this issue I’m going to walk you through exactly:

• how we set up foundations for our client Dropevent,

• how long it took to setup each step

• how each step fit together

• the delightful payoff of seeing those delightful growth digits ticking up and to the right when the foundations were in place

So, without further ado, here’s what we did for DropEvent: a case study in marketing foundations at work.

Foundation: Customer Research

When we started out, DropEvent had a rough idea of what their customers were and that it was a B2C company. but this was an inkling, not an inked-into-data thing.

What it looked like in practice

So we emailing existing customers (9,000 of them to be precise) asking them if they’d be willing to jump on calls with us and talk about the product because we wanted to make it better.

The email had a 44% open rate and we had over 100 people interested.

Based on that we were able to speak with 23 customers in 2 weeks using a mix of in-person calls and surveys.

What doing Customer Research right meant for DropEvent

After we looked at all the calls, we were able to answer the biggest questions of:

• who are my customers?

• how do they find me?

• how are they talking about what they needed and loved about the product?

• what do they need from the product that isn’t already there?

Turns out, people were talking about DropEvent all. the. time.

And there were a huge amount of repeat customers who used DropEvent in a personal capacity, loved it, and then used it in a business capacity, where more people found out about it, used it in a personal capacity…and the circle continues!

That lightbulb moment transformed our entire marketing and messaging approach for DropEvent.

Plus, it made it real clear that “niching down” into purely B2B or B2C was:

a) impossible and
b) a terrible idea that would lose DropEvent a lot of money.

⏳ Customer Research (interviews, analysis, and reporting) took 6 weeks.

Foundation: Branding

Your brand needs to be clear, consistent and opinionated for your target audience to remember you.

…and organized and simple so you can keep up with it.

What it looked like in practice

What it meant for DropEvent, was going from blue, grey, and kinda blah:

To

• A retro magenta that stuck out and none of the competitors were using

• Didn’t scream “tech” but instead spoke human (because most customers were afraid the tech-less would be left out)

• Messaging that spoke to specific pain points and feature needs that none of the competitors were talking about (“Works for Aunt Cathy that can’t remember how to unlock her phone”)

• Frontloading the founder story and showing that DropEvent worked for business and personal

Looking for a picture of the fresh brand fit? We’ll get there…

What it meant for DropEvent

Clarity on what to say and how to say it.

It’s not the kind of thing the metrics show up on immediately, but keep at it and you’ll start hearing from customers “your product is exactly what i’ve been looking for!” and then they’ll quote your copy back to you.

That’s when you know you’ve nailed it.

⏳Branding took 3 weeks after the customer research was done.

Foundation: Website

Ah. Websites.

The bane of some founders’ existence.

And the object of their customers’ desires.

Ahem. Bridgerton references aside, websites are often something many founders struggle with, simply because they assume having a barebones setup should be enough.

It is not.

While the setup may give you a website, it doesn’t give you one that works, i.e., converts. 

What it looked like in practice

The grey-blue site you saw up there? We changed it to this:

What it meant for DropEvent

When we launched the site, we knew it worked because:

• there was pop on Google (look at that thing go!) which turned to significantly more qualified traffic.

• the bounce rate plummeted

• people were scrolling way further down the page

They were also clicking pricing after the homepage instead of peacing out. A behavior that shows purchase consideration.

Side note: btw - you should track which pages people come to pricing from and how many clicks or visits it takes for them to get there.

Long term it was the foundation for making all the other marketing work - instead of wasting effort once they hit the site

⏳Building the new Website from scratch (copy, design, and dev) took 6 weeks.

Foundation: CRM

When we hit this stage, we were faced with….a spreadsheet. Because that’s where the customer data for marketing stuff lived. no bueno.

We knew who the customers were as people - but as data, well we didn’t have a clue.

What it looked like in practice

A whole lot of lists and spreadsheets

• Choosing a CRM (we went with Ortto, formerly Autopilot)

• Uploading the existing customer data we had

• Mapping out what we needed to know about customers moving forward and making sure those fields were in the CRM and linked to places we could get the data (onboarding surveys, templates used) on the website and in the product (enter: Posthog!)

• creating lists and segments in Ortto so we could automatically send emails to the right people

Easy? no. Necessary. abso-frickin-lutely.

What it meant for DropEvent

Immediately after doing this we could

• clearly map the B2B ←→ B2C referral loop

• see what plans and use case were making the most money → our best-fit customers we wanted more of with the data right there

But the biggest win was seeing upsell opps.

DropEvent had users at Hilton and Hershey already using the software on low-price one-off purchases that he could easily pitch for a higher tier and a lot more functionality.

Without organizing the data we’d never have seen them. They weren’t the kind of people who were gonna respond to a customer interview email.

⏳Setting up the CRM + product data and tying it to the website took 4-8 weeks
We did this concurrently with emails and content writing so things would move faster

Not to mention we could now segment and improved email sequences, which takes me to…

Foundation: Emails!

You know how i was talking about a brand that stands out?

Emails are where you can show up most often in front of your customers or trialers and remind them how great the product is and keep them engaged.
And it doesn’t cost you extra every time.
And it can be automated.

Ka-ching.

What it looked like in practice

• Writing all of the missing transactional and marketing emails

• setting them up in Ortto

• tying them a combo of time and product-milestone-based triggers so they were relevant when they hit inboxes.

We setup a total of 12 different sequences, including the 5 must-have ones:

1. Free trials/Onboarding

2. Post-call followup

3. Testimonial asks

4. Announcement + feedback request (two-fer!)

5. Good bag (aka lead magnet delivery)

We also started sending a monthly newsletter.

What it meant for DropEvent

In quick stats:

• Free trial conversions doubled

• New features were used immediately after launch

• Helped us launch a Christmas special that bumped new MRR by 3% in what was usually their slowest month

• Dropped support requests for new features - because most were for features that already existed and they now knew about in the onboarding sequence

For DropEvent, the highest engagement email campaign (based on open rates and microconversions and macroconversions) was the monthly newsletter.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because I just talked about this on LinkedIn!

Here’s a snapshot from one of the months:

⏳ It took 3 weeks to get all 12 of these sequences loaded in, running, and optimized once the CRM was setup.

Next up: Content + distribution

Great, the website is done, the product and marketing has stats…

Now all we need is…more customers! That’s where the content comes in to drive traffic.

🤖 Quick Disclaimer - we did this before AI became The Next Big Thing, and we’re actively working on figuring out what works best for content in the Age of AI.
More on that to come soon hehehe.

What it looked like in practice

Because we knew

• the target audience and which features they cared about the most

• the customer language that we mined from support tickets and reviews

• what made a B2C buyer into a B2B referral

We knew what blog posts to write and what to put in them to rank.
And what to add to the individual audience sales landing pages.
And that we needed A LOT more case studies → and what customers were down to chat

What it meant for DropEvent

Once we started posting new content to the blog the traffic upped by 20% Month over Month for DropEvent (and the bounce rate stayed down and the MRR went up).

⏳It took 4 weeks to get the first blog posts and case studies out, and then there were 4-8 new posts a month. We did this concurrently with the email sequences launching.

And then came Marketing Experiments 🧪

Those enterprise customers we found? Now we had case studies from SMB customers and a real good grasp of what they needed, so we could expand those customers and get more of them.

And with all the pieces were in place, it was relatively easy to setup and run marketing experiments from here on out.

What it looked like in practice

We started with re-bundling the pricing and adding another tier on a monthly subscription (the rest were one-time purchases).

What it meant for DropEvent

A 20% increase in MRR within the first month of updating the pricing.

Boom.

All told, it took 7.5 months of work to get to a killer MRR boost.

There are no “quick fixes” when your marketing foundations aren’t in place.

But once they are? Every month can feel like Christmas. And the results compound.

Foundations. You have to have them.
Otherwise you’re just a sky full of stars
and you will tear your (marketing) apart.

Sorry, couldn’t resist. 😉 

See you in your inbox next week!

Sophia 💜👩🏽‍💻 & Aelia ⚡️🧕 

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