Case Study: Building Trust & Improving Performance With Free Offers

I’ve been working with a client in the health/wellness/fitness space for the past few months, and one of our objectives is to drive more customers to sign up for their services at their physical location.

We’ve recently launched a strategy that’s been driving some solid results, but our efforts didn’t start out quite as exciting.

In this post I’ll dive into some of what didn’t work in the past, what we learned, how we pivoted our approach, and the results we’re seeing now.

What Didn’t Work So Well

When initially preparing to launch the Meta campaign supporting this client’s local service, I didn’t conduct enough research.

Sure I had multiple conversations with the client to get their perspective on the offer, I did my research on the offer itself, but one critical item that was missing was customer research.

Upon the initial launch of the campaign we saw some promising results, but those quickly faded. The “new normal” of this effort was not meeting our performance goal. In order to course correct, I initially went down an optimization rabbit hole. I tested making changes to items like:

• Optimization events

• Creative rotation

• Ad types

• Audiences

• Even expanding to other channels

Regardless of how much tinkering I did in the platform, the results didn’t change.

That’s when I took a step back and decided to dig into the CRM data and sales notes of existing customers for the service we were promoting.

What We Learned

When digging into the CRM data and sales notes, I found that almost all of the customers for this service line had signed up after experiencing multiple interactions with the client’s brand.

In some cases these were touchpoints across Instagram and YouTube, in others it was radio and word of mouth. Regardless, it was unlikely that we were ever going to acquire new customers with a one-touch Meta strategy. The few that we did capture early on in the test actually cited those ads as the second or third interaction with the brand.

These insights allowed me to craft a new strategy that would better align with the expectations and comfort level of the target audience here.

What We Changed

We shifted our strategy to focus on promoting a free offer that helped to diagnose the root cause of prospects' pain points, and help them map out a path to improvement.

The goal behind this new strategy was to lower the risk and commitment from prospects to take action, then build trust with the delivery of the free offer. Our hypothesis was that this would increase our lead conversion rate on Meta, which we could then capitalize on with further lead nurturing efforts.

Now that we’ve been running this new strategy, we’ve seen that our hypothesis has been proven correct thus far. Our lead conversion rate improved from 0.96% to 4.74%. While the increase in lead volume has been great, we still wanted to focus on actual ROI.

It turns out that the free offer has been strong enough that it converts roughly 50% of leads to paying customers without any additional follow up. This has improved overall performance to well within the goal range for this campaign.

Wrapping Up

This case study is the result of multiple insights that I now leverage as standard practice before diving into any new campaign.

I dug into CRM data, and worked with the client to leverage a lead magnet to capture interest in a lower risk environment for prospects. The results outlined above speak for themselves here.

I continue to see it in my own work, but sometimes all of the ad platform “best practices” in the world are no substitute for a thoroughly developed strategy!

Have questions, considerations, or critiques? I’d love to hear them! If you’re reading this via email, just hit respond. Otherwise, you can find me on LinkedIn and X (Twitter).