CASE STUDY:
HIGH SCHOOL ESPORTS LEAGUE
Hundreds Of Replies Generated
From New Leads Through Customized Cold Email Campaigns
Brand Story
HSEL aims to turn Esports into a varsity level sport in high schools across the nation. By offering students an opportunity to engage in healthy Esports competition, surrounded by peers and supervised by teachers, organized Esports competition students learn valuable life skills, setting them up for success in academics and future careers.
Goal
Often, the best method to gain the attention of busy teachers and school administrators is to be direct. And cold email is as direct as it gets in marketing.
HSEL’s goal was to expand their customer database by focusing on particular issues facing schools in different states. New York and Texas were chosen for phase one because HSEL was in a unique position to assist schools in these states with setting up an Esports team, and enjoying the benefits of participating in upcoming Esport tournaments.
Nearly 4x Industry Average
- AVERAGE OPEN RATE = 76% (Industry Average Is Approximately 19%)
- AVERAGE ENGAGEMENT = 4% Clicked Links To Reply or Call
- REPLY RATE = 8% (197 Replied During The Initial Phase)
- LEADS GENERATED = 33 Solid Leads Interested In Getting On The Phone
Great cold email campaigns require a perfect mixture of strategy, copywriting, and technical setup. Everyone involved needs to understand the role each pillar plays in creating a powerful cold email campaign that delivers results.
Challenges
The primary challenge facing HSEL’s cold email campaign was that different states have different problems and rules. A “one-size-fits-all” approach to writing the emails would significantly hurt their results. GrowthFront needed to create separate campaigns to generate the best results.
Strategy
To tackle this challenge, the GrowthFront team worked with HSEL to develop a strategy for each state. The copy focused on pain points specific for teachers and school admins in New York, and then another campaign was created for Texas.
We then segmented HSEL’s existing list of cold contacts by state. We also cleaned up their list to ensure we were sending to valid emails (and to prevent massive bounce rates from harming the campaigns).
As per our standard operating procedure, the GrowthFront team began by warming up HSEL’s cold email domains (new domains similar to their current domain) so the outreach wouldn’t trigger any alarm bells with the email service provider.
Once the warmup phase was completed, our implementation specialist begin the cold email sending, ramping up slowly and closely monitoring the results in real-time.
On top of HSEL’s existing cold email list, the GrowthFront lead gen team also began developing more cold email contacts to help fill their campaigns and keep the leads flowing!