Opascope Cut Marketing Costs in Half

For nearly a decade, the startup had stood out in its market with a dual offering that included access to a SaaS platform and personalized services.

Over the past few years, thanks to world-class sales and customer support teams, a high-functioning platform, and positive brand recognition in the market, the startup went through a massive growth spurt with revenue scaling in multiples. But its marketing team hadn’t grown to match.

The company had gotten by with a small internal marketing team and freelance contractors managing its ad accounts. Historically, the founder, who had a very technical marketing background, was able to step in and right the ship when he saw performance slipping.

But as the company grew, the founder had less time to take such a hands-on approach. And when marketing costs began shooting up, he needed help assessing the situation and getting it under control.

He called Opascope.

We found two primary issues driving up costs and limiting performance.

The startup had scaled its Google and Meta ad accounts to seven figures a month and settings that had worked in the past were no longer working.

When we audited the company’s accounts, we could see where the prior agency had made major changes rapidly in an attempt to improve performance. But in our experience, the types of changes they were making wouldn’t work for an account of this size. What might’ve been minor issues on a smaller account now had major financial implications.

Like the ad accounts, the landing pages hadn’t scaled well either. They were too slow.

A large part of the paid budget was tied to Meta advertising which lends itself to mobile traffic, and mobile often has slower connections. The landing page loading time was significantly impacting conversion rates.

Once prospects entered the funnel, the startup faced new issues with qualifying leads.

The company managed a high-end service with different packages depending on a prospect’s potential lifetime value (LTV). Targeting the right prospects was one challenge in and of itself. Another was qualifying them during the sign-up process and scoring them appropriately.

The sign-up flow was designed to pre-qualify prospects and route them into two funnels. Top candidates — those with the highest predicted LTV — were routed to an inside sales team, while others were given a self-serve option with a default offer.

Because the startup had been around for years, many prospects entering the funnel had previously been customers or had clicked an ad in the past. And the platform wasn’t set up to optimally handle these prospects.

A prospect’s situation — such as location and other criteria used in the lead grading process — may have changed since they’d last applied or been a customer. But if their information was already on file, the system would automatically use it to route them to the default offer or to the sales team.

During the audit process — before we’d even officially signed a contract — we were able to send over a list of recommendations for ad account setups that increased performance right away.

But this was just the beginning.

Once we were officially engaged on the account, we began to test various lookalike models to hone in on the startup’s ICP. Successful lookalike audiences reduced overall ad spend while sending better leads to sales.

Meanwhile, on the creative side, we introduced smaller campaigns to test out new creatives without impacting the performance of core campaigns.

Through continuous testing and audience building, we drove better leads into the funnel. The next step was to improve the funnel’s performance and allow for more personalization while increasing the ability to route leads.

The startup’s existing landing pages were created in Webflow, a low-code solution that is quick to set up but doesn’t handle large amounts of traffic well.

With thousands of visitors a month, the landing pages were slow to load — especially on mobile. We discovered that the startup was losing 10% of its leads due to slow loading time.

To solve this issue, we recreated the landing pages using Next.js which significantly accelerated the page loading speed. As a result, top-of-funnel costs were cut in half.

To optimize lead scoring, we partnered with a data enrichment provider that enabled us to verify self-reported information. The result was a significant improvement in the quality of leads that were sent to the sales team.

We also learned that the sales team didn’t have a nurture program in place post-call. We recommended the use of a tool like Salesloft to automate follow-ups, which has improved the company’s close rates.

The biggest success is an increase in the efficiency of the startup’s performance marketing and overall marketing stack, including:

• 34% increase in average order value (AOV)
• 49% decrease in the cost of sales

The startup can scale its ad spend as needed while trusting that its lead funnel — from optimized landing pages to automated nurtures — can support it.

“Beyond just the advertising work, Opascope has been embedded into our full revenue team. They’ve been integral in shaping our revenue operations management,” Steve said.

Kenneth agreed: “It’s a huge boon in anyone’s pocket to have Opascope as an extension of their team to really raise the baseline of what performance marketing can do for an organization.”