What We’ve Done 

Product Marketing

Since our last update, Product Marketing has grown! We’ve welcomed two new team members in Jay Odebunmi (a familiar face coming over from CX Enablement) and Matt Martin. We’ve grown and organized the team to be more embedded with our cross-functional Product teams. You can reach out to Jay for all things PMM on Market, Manage, and CX; while you can reach out to Matt for all things Build, Sell, and Themes.

As part of our growth, we’ve doubled down and committed to more frequent announcements and launches in support of all the awesome work our Product and Dev teams have been shipping. We’ve been doing this by offering a more consistent stream of communication to our customers across our development cycles. The most prominent of these updates this cycle has been the New Website Builder. Since we launched on 11/11, we’ve seen strong adoption of the new site builder (2K total installs, existing customers are installing at 1.5x frequency versus premier, 2x number of pages created versus premier, and 30% faster time to first dollar), and are looking forward to amplifying the awareness and education around it further with customers.

We also launched several prominent features throughout the cycle in Custom Email Domain Sending and Contact Imports, along with several feature enhancements (our partnership with Cloudflare, making multiple payments more secure, automated list hygiene, and more).

 

We also launched several prominent features throughout the cycle in Custom Email Domain Sending and Contact Imports, along with several feature enhancements (our partnership with Cloudflare, making multiple payments more secure, automated list hygiene, and more).

Our cycle recap event for Cambria, hosted by our CPO Jeremy, will be this Wednesday, 11/25.

Last but not least, we also launched Kajabi Access. The first revenue expansion opportunity for Kajabi, in strong partnership with the CX and Info Dev teams. In its first month, Access has generated almost $130K in revenue, with 328 customers (and we expect this number to grow as users with Access monthly retain their program).

Growth

 

Performance Update: While the spike we saw during the initial lock down of COVID-19 started to taper off towards the end of Q2, overall performance across continues to remain strong. Organic and affiliate trial starts continue to pave the growth in new trial starts as we continue to build up our paid advertising growth. Further, the months following Q2 continued to see gross subscriber additions of about 2.5k each month, and our total subscriber count continues to grow ~4% each month.

Above: Kajabi Quarterly Growth

Paid Performance: 

After pushing paid advertising to over $1mm in September, we have tested the efficiency of our current campaigns. Since then, we’ve normalized our ad spend to $500-700k of efficient ad spend. On a last click basis, we now see roughly a $400 Cost per Trial (CPT) implying about a $900 Cost per Acquired Customer (CAC). The main channels for our advertisements continue to be Facebook/Instagram, Google/Bing Search, and Youtube. In Q1 2021, we look forward to testing new channels such as GoDaddy, Flickr, Taboola, and Outbrain.

Content Marketing:

Starting in Q3, the marketing team moved towards putting greater emphasis on content marketing. Starting in September, Marin Perez joined as our Director of Content marketing. With Marin, we plan to turn the Kajabi blog into a content engine that will deliver robust organic traffic by targeting middle and bottom-of-the-funnel audiences with an SEO-based strategy.

Some quick wins that we achieved in Q3 and Q4 include a 47% increase in Page 1 keywords for blog, 25.9% increase in blog traffic, 37 posts published: 16 optimized refreshes, 7 Product Go-To-Market posts, 14 net-new pieces and a comprehensive editorial calendar.

New Website:

The Growth team has begun testing and continues to iterate upon our marketing site with the help of the creative team in a push to maximize our “homecourt” marketing efforts. The Kajabi homepage receives 5-10k New visitors daily and we currently see a CVR around 1%. By continuing to a/b test website design, headlines, and CTAs, we will continuously improve our opt in rate, bounce rate, and CVR. Make sure to keep your eyes peeled for new variants of our website and know that feedback, questions, and comments are always welcome!

New Challenge:

As we work to streamline our marketing efforts, we will be standardizing our trial length to 14 days across all channels starting in December of Q4. By standardizing the trial length, we hope to make our marketing messaging across all channels more consistent and improve scarcity value of extended trials whenever they are introduced. As of now, extended trials will only be offered for partners exceeding referral milestones or special promotion windows at Kajabi.

During Q4, we will be sunsetting the existing 28-day Challenge in its current form. For those unfamiliar with the existing 28-Day Challenge, this was an extended trial program Kajabi used the past 3 years aimed at new prospects in order to help them build their website, create products, and launch their business in 28 days.

Starting January 2nd, we plan to launch a new challenge for prospective customers. This will incorporate the best components of the existing 28-Day Challenge into a refreshed program that aims to help customers earn revenue as soon as possible. Further, we plan to spruce up this new challenge with more personalization, engagement, and support resources available from Kajabi.

 

Brand

Lots happening on the Brand side this last quarter! An exciting update is that in September we launched our first-of-its-kind advertising campaign called Get Out Of Your Own Way! This campaign was targeted around the concept of Imposter Syndrome and how so many entrepreneurs deal with this at some point in their business journey.
This deck went out to the company with details around the campaign and gives all the details. This campaign ran on TV, streaming and digital, and aired on a variety of networks including ESPN, NBC, AMC, and more. Hopefully you were able to see it air while you were watching one of your favorite shows!

On the social side, we experienced a 73% increase in engagement, 87% increase in impressions, and a 13% increase in cross-channel growth. Surrounding the Get Out of Your Own Way launch, we produced 12,948 views, 3,302 impressions, 6.9% CTR, a 25.74% engagement rate, 226 reactions, 147 comments, and 206 shares on Linkedin ALONE!

In support of messaging around defeating our inner-critic, Kajabi social released the Kajabi Hero AR Filter Mask, a new type of initiative for marketing. This mask generated 7.5K impressions and 5.5K opens to date. Make sure to visit our IG page and use the filter for yourself! 

Finally, our Facebook User Group grew by 13%, reaching a record milestone of 22.2K members.

Over the last several months, we’ve also seen our PR initiatives pick up significant momentum in the media landscape and successfully generate more brand awareness than ever before. Since July, we’ve secured over 35 press placements featuring Kajabi, including online articles, broadcast segments and podcast interviews. Collectively, these placements have a total potential audience reach of over 1.1B people. 

The two primary pitch angles we leveraged were:

  1. Amplifying the success stories of our heroes by putting them in the spotlight to inspire others. We were able to help heroes like Lauren Bongiorno (Diabetes Health Coach), Danielle Leslie (Marketing Coach), Kayse Morris (Teacher), Luke Rosa (Teacher), Phil Black (Teacher) and more share what’s unique about their businesses and how Kajabi continues to help power their journeys as knowledge entrepreneurs.
  2. Championing Kajabi’s growth story by touting key metrics such as seeing a 165% increase in new accounts since the beginning of the pandemic, being on track to make $1 billion in customer revenue in 2020, and hitting $60 million in ARR.

A few coverage highlights from these efforts include:

Lastly, after submitting Kajabi for several industry and workplace awards this year, we’re happy to have seen Kajabi land coveted recognitions such as the Inc. 5000 list, Great Place to Work, and The Timmy Awards’ Best Tech Startup Orange County and Best Tech for Good Orange County.

Brand Experience

The Partner Program continues to drive a large percentage of our month to month growth as an organization. Although we have seen a downward trend in affiliate referrals in the past several months, we have consistently stayed above 1200 new activations a month from Partners since around May 2020. This is likely caused by the “new normal” from the pandemic, but is super encouraging to see, given that last year we averaged around 500 new activations per month from Partners. We are excited to continue to ascend Kajabi Heroes to Kajabi Partners to help scale the platform in 2021.

 

Brand Experience has been busy this quarter continuing to celebrate our customers wins as well as create more moments for them to connect with the Kajabi brand in meaningful ways. First and foremost, we have continued to level up Kajabi Virtual Meetups. Since Q2, we have hosted over 2,500 Kajabi Heroes on VMU’s. After digging through some of the data for these users we found some incredibly promising insights: 

  • Meetup attendees activate their accounts at 30% higher rate
  • Meetup attendees cancel their Kajabi accounts at less than half the rate
  • Meetup attendees produce twice as much GMV as non-meetup attendees

Using this data, we are planning on providing more meetup resources to those early on in their journey with Kajabi, and using meetups as an upsell lever into Kajabi Access. Qualitatively, here is what some customers have to say about VMU’s:

  • “It’s great to meet like-minded people from all over the world.”
  • “You guys [Kajabi] are so terrific. I feel your desire for us to succeed”
  • “The group chats with experienced Kajabi users are priceless”

Additionally, Brand Experience partnered closely with PMM & Creative to pull of the Kajabi Special Event where we launched Kajabi Access. The event was one of our most thoughtfully produced events, drawing a ton of inspiration from Apple events. The special event highlighted both our 10 year anniversary, as well as the launch of the brand new product offering that is Kajabi Access. 

Creative 

The return to 8-week Dev Cycles was a welcome curveball to the Organization. One of the challenges we wanted to solve for was the higher velocity and comms needs that this new system brings. So the team developed a robust branding system that will allow us to relatively easily brand each cycle uniquely, while bringing a visual cohesion across the board as more and more cycles come to life. This deck outlines the approach and provides more context.

The next big project the Creative team undertook was the launch of Kajabi Access. This included developing a brand identity as well as all the assets required to communicate the launch itself. We wanted to ensure that we were positioning Access as an integral part of Kajabi, and another valuable piece of the entrepreneurial solution that Kajabi is - and the logo was designed to be just that. The deck outlines the approach further.

We also played a significant role in the Get Out of Your Own Way brand campaign, fleshing the campaign out beyond the ads themselves. We developed landing pages, product-focussed videos, social content and more – extending the campaign across as many channels as possible. We also collaborated with the Product Team to generate new templates/themes based on the characters of Kim & Carl themselves!

Lastly, the team developed a brand new website for Kajabi. It contains design improvements that bring it more in line with the vision for the brand, while also bringing more comprehensive product information and making things more discoverable, dynamic and engaging than the previous site. We have been doing incremental changes to the site though A/B tests to ensure we are matching conversion rates before making the switch and expect to have it live to 100% of the audience in December.

 

In the last newsletter we talked about the implementation of a new process for the creative team. We’re pleased to say that the changes we made have had very positive results. Since August, we have maintained an average on-time delivery rate of 96% for all of our projects - a vast improvement from the average of 50% in the past. We also have more visibility into where our hours are being spent, allowing us to recalibrate and reprioritize projects much more effectively based on the businesses goals.

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