What We’ve Accomplished
Growth
Performance Update: Kajabi completed Q2 at a record number of new trials and activations of new subscriptions seen in company history. While there certainly were tailwinds for Kajabi with the current environment, this record growth is also attributable to a job well done by everyone in the company! We look forward to keeping the momentum going throughout the year.
Above: Kajabi Quarterly Growth
Bi-Weekly Growth Meeting: With the start of Stephen Fong, our new VP of Growth, the team began to conduct bi-weekly growth meetings in Q2 as a way to focus efforts on growth. During these meetings we conduct reviews of growth performance, our most recent experiments, and discuss the latest experiments to run going forward. While the growth team is focused on growing revenue and subscribers, the product of the bi-weekly growth meeting truly is a whole company effort. Please reach out in case you are interested in attending or participating in these growth efforts!
Attribution work: One of our primary focuses in Q2 is setting up the right infrastructure to scale paid advertising in order to grow subscribers. In order to do this properly, attribution of where subscribers come from is key. While historically the growth team measured last-click attribution to understand where trials come from, getting attribution right for paid ads also depends on understanding if ads drive discovery of Kajabi early on in their purchase journey.
In order to understand this, the growth team implemented attribution measurements earlier on in the user funnel where a potential user first becomes a lead (enters name and email), including a signup question (“where did you hear about us?”) at lead gen stage and HubSpot forms dedicated to each paid channel. The growth team is optimistic this will provide clarity to understand “first and last” click attribution to paid ads.
Paid Channels: The growth team continued to run and test a variety of paid channels. In particular, they tested Quora in Q2, which so far has been promising with a ~$10 cost per lead. The growth team currently sees ~2% of leads converted to trials, implying a $500 cost per trial and $1,000 cost per acquired customer (CAC). With revamped lead nurturing work and more time for these users to “fill in” by doing their own pre-purchase research, the growth team expects a larger percentage of leads to become trials and activations, thus reducing CAC.
Kajabi Optimizations: In addition to the paid advertising work, the growth team is also focused on the Kajabi properties that contribute to driving discovery, awareness, and consideration for Kajabi’s product plans. In particular, the growth team conducted over 35 home and landing page tests and its first cart abandonment email test. The growth team is particularly excited about our cart abandonment email series, which also serve as a lead nurturing sequence. The first test variant showed promising results (32.9% lift in conversion from lead to trial among a 2,835 variant size), and the growth team hopes to continue iterating and scaling this to drive conversion.
Creative
This biggest project the creative team was involved with this quarter was the Self-Made Virtual Summit - the team created over 350 assets across all of our channels, and launched the landing and sales pages, which was a monumental effort that ultimately paid off in two big ways. The first is obviously the straight up success of the summit and the fact that we blew through our attendee and signup goals. Secondly, the pressure created was essentially a crash course in how this relatively new team is going to work together, what our expectations are, where the trouble areas may be, and all the things that help us bond as a team and get in sync.
To that end, it also exposed a lot of opportunity around process. After a couple of months observing the workflow between the creative and marketing folks, we were ready to take all the learnings and built a whole new process to relieve friction and pain points across all teams. Ultimately, the goals were to:
- Provide a consistent and reliable briefing process for the business
- Provide transparency into the workloads and priorities of the creative team
- Increase accountability for type, volume and deadlines of inbound requests
- Increase accountability for time spent on tasks and on-time asset delivery
- Track creative team’s time and bandwidth
- Provide at-a-glance visibility on current state
- Deliver reports on productivity, types of projects, and where our energies are going
- User friendly interface to ensure adoption and frequent use
- Scalable, automatable and efficient
The process officially rolled out on the last day of this quarter so we’re excited to report back to you with some successful (🤞) stories/metrics in the next newsletter.
Another major area of focus for the Creative team has been the updated Brand Identity. We defined a direction for this at the beginning of the quarter and have been working to implement the aesthetic changes using a phased approach.
Another major area of focus for the Creative team has been the updated Brand Identity. We defined a direction for this at the beginning of the quarter and have been working to implement the aesthetic changes using a phased approach. You’ll see the changes most actively reflected in social, email and some of the faster turning machines. While we ramp these up we’re also planning how to best expand the vision across the website, the app, and our content channels. The team has also worked on some exciting pieces for the new office which we’re anxious to finally see come to life. A few other highlights include a complete update to the Help Center, in collaboration with our fantastic Product and CX teams and our revamped onboarding email series.
Brand
This last quarter, we officially implemented the Brand Marketing team here at Kajabi which consists of social, PR, and brand marketing. We’re very excited about this new function and the impact that this team will drive for brand awareness, messaging, sentiment, and more. One of the bigger projects this team has been working on was onboarding a new creative agency called Observatory that will be partnering with us on our first-ever large-scale brand campaign set to launch later this year. In conjunction with this brand campaign, Creative and Brand have been collaborating on a new brand identity that will act as grounding design and brand principles that will reflect in all facets of the org; the product, marketing, CX efforts, and beyond. The goal is to have this rolled out entirely by the end of 2020, though you may already see some new elements on social and the website.
On the social side, we created a robust Social Media Strategy that will be our north star for social moving forward. From this strategy, we’ve been seeing some significant growth over the past quarter. One very exciting milestone was reaching 20k followers on Instagram! This time two years ago, we were at 3k followers, so we look forward to continued growth across channels. Two campaigns that we can attribute significant growth to were the Let’s Build Together campaign and the Self-Made Summit campaign. The outpouring of positive comments and feedback from both of these campaigns were very inspiring and really reflect all the work that the entire org has done towards those efforts.
This time two years ago, we were at 3k followers, so we look forward to continued growth across channels. Two campaigns that we can attribute significant growth to were the Let’s Build Together campaign and the Self-Made Summit campaign.
The Brand team has also made some significant strides in the PR realm. We began a partnership with a new PR agency based out of New York, as well as welcomed a new member to the team—our PR Manager, Amanda. While the PR climate has been tough the last couple of months with COVID-19 and racial injustice dominating the news, we’ve seen some traction with reporters and are in process on some tier-one publications due to hit in the next month or two. Having a dedicated function that is obsessed with PR has been a great addition to the marketing team and we look forward to seeing the fruit of these labors throughout the remainder of 2020!
Brand Experience
The Brand Experience team has been hard to work turning our physical events into virtual experiences for our prospective customers and loyal users alike. This quarter alone we introduced Kajabi Virtual Meetups which have hosted almost 2,000 users all ranging in experience levels. These meetups are a place of networking where we bring users together in breakout rooms on zoom and have guided discussions on set business topics. The impact these meetup events have had on users is fantastic. We have heard everything from “this convinced me to stay with Kajabi” to “I needed this to get started” to “I feel empowered to keep going”. Kajabi users (new and experienced alike) are hungry for connection.
Another virtual experience that the Brand Experience team was hard at work on this quarter was our first-ever virtual summit called Self-Made Summit. The summit was a smashing success as a driving force in our front end acquisition. We had over 15K registrations and never fell below 1,000 viewers the entire day. We had Jamie Kern Lima, the founder of IT Cosmetics (which sold for $1.2 billion cash) and former CEO of L'oreal join us as our keynote. She was a fantastic addition to the day and really inspired our audience that if she can do it, anyone can. Our panel of Kajabi Heroes was a perfect bridge of inspiration and strategy and left people fired up to the beginning implementation.
Here is a recap of the specific details but at a high level, Self-Made brought us almost 600 new accounts (over 450 of which were annual accounts) and brought in a projected $1.1 million in potential LTV revenue. As a comparison, Self-Made Summit brought us more growth annuals in 5 days (447), then the entire month of May (335). Our average ratio of monthly accounts to annuals is 6:1, but during Self-Made we completely flipped it to 1:3 (1 monthly for every 3 annuals). It was a huge lift by the entire marketing team, so hats off to all parties involved! We will be continuing this strategy once a quarter on the Brand Experience team to continue to drive impact to our customers and prospective customers.
Product Marketing
Product Marketing is a brand new function at Kajabi (est. April 2020), so much of the first two months has been focused on detailing and sharing a functional overview of Product Marketing. Specifically, Product Marketing exists to unlock the value proposition of Kajabi for our prospective, new, and existing customers by partnering with Product and CX on informing the product roadmap and leading the go-to-market strategy for our products (e.g. name, value prop, messaging framework, marketing channels). Much of this is also highlighted in our launch tier framework that we use to inform how we approach specific product launches.
Our first project was establishing a baseline for a new onboarding email journey for new customers to more clearly identify the calls to action and ensure the experience was more on brand. We tested to specifically optimize for activation rate, retention, support tickets, and retention. While we saw a slight dip in activation with the treatment, we saw an uptick in retention rate, and scaled to 100% a couple of weeks ago. Moving forward there is plenty of room for continued optimization with several new onboarding properties in Hubspot.
We saw an uptick in retention rate, and scaled to 100% a couple of weeks ago. Moving forward there is plenty of room for continued optimization with several new onboarding properties in Hubspot.
We also added a competitive intelligence tool in Crayon recently, that we are right now ramping up on as an MLT to help inform our brand and product positioning across our competitive set, while thinking about the appropriate way to roll out access to the platform and/or specific insights across the org. More to come on that in the coming couple of weeks!
In terms of Product launches, while our more major launches are still in development, we have to date supported the launch of Colors in Mobile, the sunsetting of Static Pages and the Relay app, and are partnering closely with Product and Consumer Insights to rename and rebrand Pipelines.
Consumer Insights
The Consumer Insights group recently completed a survey following the conclusion of Kajabi’s Self Made Summit to understand what types of people attended, why they are using or considering Kajabi, and also receive feedback on each of the Summit Sessions. Amongst the survey respondents, approximately 50% had both an online and offline business, while 43% had just an online business and the remainder were looking to start an online business. Most were relatively new to e-commerce, with a little over half of respondents having run their business for under 2 years. From a demographic standpoint, the majority of respondents were women (65%) with 90% over the age of 35. While Kajabi was the primary platform for most of those with an online business, Wordpress and MailChimp were also being deployed by these respondents. The primary reason for selecting Kajabi was it’s all-in-one capability. In terms of each of the Summit Sessions, the Keynote and Panelist sessions received high ratings with approximately two-thirds giving them the highest possible ratings for being Extremely interesting and helpful. We look forward to learning more about our current and future users going forward and how best to encourage and support them.
The new study was kicked-off in early July with initial results available in 4-6 weeks.
In Q3, the Consumer Insights team is launching a new Brand Tracking Study. The study will establish benchmark measures for brand funnel metrics including awareness, familiarity, opinion, and purchase consideration. It is important to determine how Kajabi is currently performing in order to measure progress as we move forward with the launch of the company’s first integrated brand campaign. In this study, we also hope to capture our potential customer’s perceptions of our brand and how we are positioned versus key competitors. The new study was kicked-off in early July with initial results available in 4-6 weeks.
In the first couple weeks of July, the Consumer Insights Team will be testing some creative concepts that will be used in the “Get Out of Your Own Way” brand campaign that extends through the second half of 2020. We will be conducting online “mini focus groups” with some of our active trial users as well as existing leads to test themes and messaging which will be used in social media ads on Youtube and Facebook? channels. The respondents in the mini-groups will provide feedback on the advertising and whether the executions resonate with users who are relatively new to Kajabi. By doing this testing we hope to ensure that the campaign will ‘cast a wider net’ and align with people who identify with and want to overcome ‘self-doubt’ hurdles on their journey to online business success.
