Case Study
How Brightside decreased
its CAC by 71%
↑ 17.6x
increase in weekly transaction volume
↓ 71.2%
decrease in customer aquisition cost over 1 year period
The company
Brightside is a mental health care company with a mission to help people lead healthy, vital, and productive lives by making it easy and affordable to get the highest quality depression and anxiety care.
The challenge
Brightside was struggling to build and grow their paid customer acquisition efforts sustainably, unsure of the right way to take early product-market fit and scale it to profitable user acquisitions without cashflow hurdles common to subscription businesses.
The strategy
We stepped in when Brightside was post-product-market fit but pre-scale, looking for help with their growth trajectory. Our first goal was to spin up Facebook, Instagram & Google ads to start to gather data and iterate. With a limited ad spend at our disposal (owing to the increasing costs at acquiring each user and a fixed cash flow requirement) we had a restricted playing field with less room for error and experimentation than competitors. Here’s how we turned this around in our favor:
Audience testing & Creative
Other agencies duplicate ad sets, tweak one little thing, cross their fingers and hope they get a lift by simply changing the bid type. This approach works temporarily, but typically only fetches a feeble improvement of 1% - 5% at best in the long run and is susceptible to seasonality. We instead focused on finding a creative audience match with extensive audience and creative testing. We built a creative experimentation and roll-out strategy that increased the chances of a home run on each creative item we tested while limiting wasted budget.
CRO on site
We started our CRO efforts with Brightside’s home page. Using big and divergent sets of value props and positioning angles we tested into 60% improvements in conversion rate with only a few variants. We didn’t stop there. We then rolled out a broader strategy across all key touchpoints pre-purchase. We tested into new landing pages with specific audience segments and continue to iterate on this strategy to this day. What was the goal you ask?
The Results so far
↑ 17.6x
Increased their weekly transaction volume 17.6x from 10 purchases to 176.
↓ 71.2%
Blended CAC on a $95/month subscription product from $299 to $86 leading to a 71.2% decrease over a 1-year period
I jumped into building my start-up head first, doing everything manually, but thankfully I was connected with Ben. He helped me save time and money by providing guidance, that helped me avoid typical early-stage pitfalls. He is extremely efficient in suggesting and delivering creative solutions. Ben just doesn’t get stumped! He knows all the best automation and marketing tools, is well-connected, and provides highly valued advice. I’ve asked to clone him, but no luck yet.
David Stone
CEO, Brightside
Why ColdBru?
Our goal is to get you to spend an infinite amount of money without increasing CAC so your business actually grows.
We don’t charge a % of ad spend. We believe in delivering true results without a conflict of interest. We do better when you do better, not when we con you into believing you should spend more with some meaningless vanity metrics other agencies love to talk about.
What are you waiting for?
Get in touch to see what we can do for you and your business.
