How Prep Expert drove $11K over a weekend using Constant Closer

tl;dr: learn in detail how Prep Expert drove $11,000 in incremental revenue over a weekend utilizing personalized emails that deliver to an inbox, automated follow ups, and AI Agents to scale support.

In the competitive landscape of college admissions, Prep Expert stands out as the premium company that helps high school seniors achieve a high score on their SAT or ACT. Shaan Patel, the Founder and CEO, who famously scored a perfect SAT score and received $500K in scholarships, is constantly looking for better ways to reach parents and offer value.

The setup

Prep Expert successfully utilizes monthly webinars to host parents, answer questions, drive value, and ultimately close the purchase. To continue growing and offering value to parents, Prep Expert needed to get more webinar signups and attendees.

The challenge

Although hundreds of thousands of parents have signed up to receive emails from Prep Expert, email marketing only gets a 15% - 20% open rate, which means that the majority of parents, though interested, are missing out on the webinars, and thus, money is left on the table.

Prep Expert needed a way to reach a parent's inbox, stand out to increase opens, and scale support to drive more webinars attendees.

The solution

Because email marketing was not enough, Prep Expert turned to Constant Closer to drive results.

The impact:

Metric	Impact
Open rate	62%
Click rate	2.55%
Conversion rate	1.5%
Incremental revenue	>$11,000

Here is the Prep Expert set up that lead to the above results:

1. Targeted list of emails

Email clients such as Gmail are constantly on the look out for spammers. One key element that triggers red flags on email clients is sudden spikes in emails. If Prep Expert were to send hundreds of thousands of emails, all in one day, then they may get flagged as spam.

Because the campaign needed an expedited start, Prep Expert chose to send emails to thousands of parents that had opened an email in the last 30 days.

Insight: When you need to send a sudden large volume of emails, focus on a subset of emails that have recently engaged (opened an email) to improve email deliverability.

2. Email personalization

One critical method to demonstrate to email clients that you're not spamming is by introducing personalization into your emails. Email marketing does this by adding static variables into the email: [FIRST NAME] for example.

To take it a step further, Prep Expert utilized the "Personalize Subject Line" feature on Constant Closer:

How it works: Constant Closer utilizes the information available about the email contact in order to personalize the subject line and improve deliverability and open rates.

Not only does this improve email deliverability, by demonstrating to email clients that there is an element of uniqueness in each email, but it greatly improves open rates as well.

Insight: Variable templates offered by email marketing platforms are not enough (insert FIRST NAME for example); to really sky rocket email deliverability and open rates, personalize each email to the recipient.

3. Automated follow ups

Sending an initial email blast is not enough. Even if the email makes it to the inbox and is personalized, people are bombarded with so many emails every single day that they'll ignore it or be interested, but forget to take action because they're too busy at the moment.

In fact, when we look at the customer-wide Constant Closer analytics, we find that >75% of conversions don't come from the initial email, they come from the follow ups.

How it works: Constant Closer generated a series of follow ups for the campaign that sent a few days after the initial email was sent.

Insight: Utilize the jab, jab, left hook, right uppercut strategy -- don't rely on the initial email (jab) to drive all of your conversions, because it won't. Make sure to send a series of follow ups (jab, left hook, right uppercut) that catch the attention of a busy person and reminds them to take action.

4. Stop follow ups when a conversion happens

The reason email marketing platforms don't allow you to easily setup follow ups is because there is a challenge with email logic:

Even if you can set up email follow ups in 2 days, you need to make sure the follow up DOESN'T send if a lead converts.

Why? Because it's a terrible experience if a lead converts, but then gets a follow up email a day later saying that they should take advantage of an offer. Not only could this negatively impact your email deliverability (both by spam or unsubscribes), but it can lead to confusion: "Did I actually subscribe to the webinar or did something go wrong?"

How it works: Constant Closer is able to catch your conversions and stop additional follow ups to the lead. In the case for Prep Expert, when someone signed up to the webinar, they would get an email confirmation and follow ups would stop.

Insight: Only setup automated follow ups IF you're able to intelligently catch the conversions and stop follow ups when a lead has converted to ensure continued email deliverability.

5. Scale support and replies

One of the challenges many companies face when it comes to sending personalized emails and follow ups is managing the replies from people.

Shaan is sending thousands of emails -- it's only natural that parents will respond to Shaan with questions and comments.

Before Constant Closer, Shaan would have either been on the hook to reply to everyone (which is the most expensive option because it requires Shaan's time), or he would have hired someone to handle his replies -- which has overhead due to hiring, training, managing, motivating, and firing a person.

But with Constant Closer, Shaan created Smita, his AI Agent, that handled all of the replies and allowed him to scale a personal touch with his email list.

How it works: Prep Expert created an AI Agent named Smita Shah that is responsible for replying to anyone that replies to Shaan's emails. The emails set the context, are helpful, and ultimately drive a conversion.

For example, here is an email exchange between a lead and Smita:

From the lead:

Response from Smita:

As you can see, normally Shaan or someone on his team would have had to respond to Ronnell, but with Smita as his AI Agent, Shaan can relax knowing that the right person is responding to leads at the right time with the right messaging.

Insight: Your email list wants to talk to you, whether it's questions, comments, or concerns. You can hire someone to send replies, but it's expensive, overhead, and they don't work nights and weekends. With an AI Agent from Constant Closer, you'll have a reliable team members that is available 24/7, 7-days a week, and always in a good mood.

The results

The results speak for themselves -- not only did Shaan drive an incremental $11,000 in revenue for Prep Expert over a single weekend, but he did it without hiring additional people to his team.

When you're ready to drive incremental revenue for your company, utilize Constant Closer to do it.