From 0 to $8.9 million in 24 months [DVC]
Introduction
Hey guys,
Deepak here from Pearl Lemon.
If you’re reading this, you have opted into my case study on how we helped (significantly) take one of our clients from 0 to $8.9 million in revenue within 24 months.
This case study will give you an insight into the specific activities we were involved in and walk you through in as much detail as possible how we achieved that kind of result
I’ll then give you some of the key takeaways that you can move forward with when it either comes to hiring us / hiring an agency ‘like us’ / delivering the results for your own agency, OR applying these strategies to your own business.
I hope this walkthrough really helps!
Wishing you every success,
Dee 🙂
Segment: Travel and Vacation Clubs / Disney
Setting The Scene
This client is in the Disney niche and is a client that’s been with Pearl Lemon since May 2020. DVC is a Disney Vacation Club resale company deep within the speciality niche of travel and club memberships. The owners here already had prior experience working for Disney directly and decided to peel off and start their own company offering Disney points for resale. We first contacted them on Upwork back on the 26th of May in 2020 when at that time they were looking for an SEO manager in general
[at this time, Upwork was incredible as a platform for growth for us, and if you’re interested in getting our free guide on how to go from 0-100k using Upwork for your agency, you can head here]
They were very quick to respond and booked a call about two hours after we submitted a proposal.
(The original proposal listing)
Spend over 2 years
Since the start of the project, two and a half years later, DVC has spent about $207,500 here with us.
Overall Results
Over the course of the last 2.5 years, we have been instrumental (their words, haha) in taking DVC from $500k to $8.9 million profit with over $360 million in sales.
I know – even we were surprised at the level of ROI they achieved – however, we’ve actually managed to achieve crazy results for multiple clients who have worked with us over a 12 to 24-month period
So let’s begin with the playbook for this client in the Disney Vacation Niche.
How We Begin Any Engagement:
When starting a campaign for which you wish to generate a serious level of results – these are the important questions we ask:
- Ask them for the company’s financial model (i.e. understand the money)
- Ask them for their deals closed ratio (or eCommerce conversion ratio)
- Understand what they’ve already done to achieve their success so far
- Identify the roster of activities that they believe will work but wish someone could do it for them
- Map out the ‘north star’ number that will constitute the ultimate ‘lead measure’
- Build activity KPIs that would drive us towards this goal
- Understand how we can tweak #1 to get them a better deal (or even just ask the question)
- Examine their (in #2) deal-closing process/eCommerce process to find leverage levers to improve their conversion rate…
I honestly don’t think enough agencies do this – they become too focussed on their own KPIs for their part of the engagement and then run with this.
However – by not taking clients through an ROI framework, you remain disconnected to their overall company goals and miss out on both upsell opportunities and improvement of current service delivery
Communication During The Engagement
During that time, we have exchanged thousands of emails and WhatsApp messages whilst working on the project (this is just my inbox, and generally my team has run 90% of the engagement)
(227 separate email trails in this inbox alone)
What Did They Pay For?
At its simplest level – growth. They wanted to build a 7-figure company and wanted us to help them do it –
And this can be broken down into multiple pieces
Understanding Buyer Psychology
We had a long call with the team to go through a customer avatar to map out who the ideal customer was, what they did with their time and how they spent money online
In parallel with this, we also conducted niche market research to understand the industry at large as being based in London – this wasn’t something we were familiar with – NOT that that was going to stop us.
Once we had an avatar built, we then connected it with HOW they spent money in this market to understand their niche-related buyer patterns.
List Brokerage
Through a series of list brokers, we were able to acquire a massive database of folks who had bought Disney vacation packages in the past (100,000+)
This was no small undertaking and involved chasing dead ends, negotiating with different folks and trying to get reliable and accurate data.
Building A Cold Email Funnel
Whilst list acquisition was underway – we also then built a cold email framework – what would the funnel look like?
What were we saying to these folks?
What would be the call to action?
How would they engage with our client?
How could we measure success?
What would happen if they opened the email, clicked on the link then didn’t take any action?
What could we do with these folks?
These were all questions we needed good answers for
500 Emails Per Day
Using this list, we cleaned, filtered and put together a multi-step email campaign which we worked to ramp up to 500 emails per day.
This took some going and involved a ton of split testing, rotating IPs, working with any blacklisted servers, spam traps and dealing with replies and creating further sequences and responses based on this.
This was a big project as it was key to getting leads pouring in.
This is just a small snapshot of the MANY email lists and campaigns we have run over the course of the last few years.#:
Some unique challenges were that this sub-niche had multiple established competitors that specialise in Disney Vacation Clubs. The market was already saturated.
Retargeting The Email List
One of the other activities was taking this email list and putting it into a retargeting sequence and building a sequence that went:
Email open > into one list > advert to introduce the brand > email reply > showing an offer > visit their website > we miss you come back soon.
We built a series of retargeting sequences to build a relationship fast with our audience – tying into the notion that prospects need 7+ touches before they purchase
A New Website
DVC also needed a brand new website…without fail, we wanted to be their one-stop (professional) shop to get the job done. So in September 2022, we officially launched this portion of the project. A key promise here was that the new website would lead to an immediate improvement in conversions (which it ultimately did)
Success! 3.5 months after signing off on the website – we saw a shift in site traffic, time spent on the page, lead flow and ultimately, more sales Our team did what needed to be done to deliver a massively improved website only AFTER we were able to generate a quantum of traffic
SEO
Now, DVC originally came to us for SEO and PPC- the original onboarding form filled in way back in May 2020 covered both of these scopes.
On the SEO front, we had some strong market competition to get DVC above.
With no preexisting SEO Juice – we built out an aggressive content and link-building plan of attack alongside very strong technical SEO
This is alongside making (one year in) a further push into content production to leverage the SEO juice we had built in Y1 to generate more top-of-funnel traffic
PPC
Now for the PPC bits.
DVC really wanted to focus on all keyword searches relating to those ever-important Disney Vacation Club queries.
This meant all things buying, selling, and learning about Disney Vacation Club memberships.
There was a focus on the US, but because Disney lovers are global, this meant our reach could expand well outside of the US- namely to Canada and the UK.
We build dedicated landing pages, keyword target sets, and negative keyword data and use a combination of programmatic logic plus human intervention to build a high-performance campaign
Challenges along the way
There were tons:
- Google banned our ads temporarily because they claimed we were infringing upon their trademark
- Email IPs getting banned
- Servers getting banned
- A website attack with tons of spam and malware being sent to the site
- Cashflow issues
- Up and down moments when things didn’t go EXACTLY to plan
Key Takeaways For Anyone Reading
It’s important to connect the work you do with the client’s commercial goals.
We did this by taking the time to understand the business model of our client and then focussing intensively on the highest revenue-generating activities that would drive them towards success.
We did this in the short term through PPC and the 500 emails per day campaign.
Then for the longer-term strategy, we relied upon SEO to drive growth over time.
SEO is now a few years later – the fastest-growing driver of new business activity.
Key Takeaways For Us Internally
Keep building the marketing flywheel and uncover ways to generate more growth through SEO in the short-term as well as long term
Build a year-long marketing funnel via email within the first quarter of starting
Integrate video into the email outreach to help generate traffic to their video content
Use the highest-performing channel to cross-pollinate and grow other mediums
Create open loops within the marketing funnels to allow referral-led growth
Have 2x per week meetings with the client every 3 months to speed up accountability and focus
Quick Wins For Anyone Reading
2x a week calls will force their growth to become top of mind
Going deep with one client instead broad with many will help you generate big growth
Integrate short-term pushes (e.g. 500 emails a day) w/long term platforms (social channels)
Follow-up calls with clients weekly are a must
Do ‘innovation sprints’ where you take 5 minutes to brainstorm as many ideas for growth as possible
Understand the value of compounding – 1000 quick wins and collectively generate MASSIVE results
So – I hope this case study makes sense, and for more, keep your eyes on your emails
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