Kwik Learning: $1M+ in Online Course Sales at 3.65x ROAS

The challenge

Kwik Learning had built a large affiliate network, and it generated most of the company’s sales. That left the business dependent on traffic it did not control, and it paid large commissions on every sale. The company needed its own scalable traffic source that could sell at a lower cost than affiliates. The goal was a minimum 2x return on ad spend at scale.

The starting point was hard:

• The ad account was barely developed. It had no usable data, no verified audiences and no campaign framework.
• The budget was $2,000 a month for a $497 product.
• The audiences, offers and creatives all had to be verified from scratch.

What we did

Retargeting first. Kwik’s sites already got a lot of monthly traffic that was not converting, so we set up retargeting first, and it produced results straight away.

A lead-magnet funnel for a high-ticket product. Cold prospects got a free resource to build trust. The resulting leads were remarketed with the full course, optimised for add-to-carts to train the pixel, and closed with an add-to-cart remarketing campaign. An upsell on the sales page raised order value. For prospecting we built lookalikes from Kwik’s CRM in the US.

Fixing the drop-off after add-to-cart. Leads engaged but did not buy, and research showed that price was the barrier. We offered 50% off to everyone who added the course to their cart. Margins were high enough to absorb the discount, and sales came in faster than new leads. By the end of the first three months the account was producing a consistent 5.12x ROAS. One downsell retargeting campaign reached 20,517% ROAS.

Scaling. Ahead of Black Friday we kept the lead funnel and scaled it gradually. We moved the 50%-off offer to the top of the funnel, added a second product to widen the offer, and introduced a 3-month payment plan on the landing pages. A US pixel-based lookalike held about 3x ROAS.

International expansion. After a strong Q4 2018 we used Google Analytics data to expand into Canada, Australia, the UK and Europe in early 2019. Most of those regions had too little data for lookalikes, so we ran open targeting worldwide, excluding the core markets, and moved it to manual bidding. In under a month the account was above 3x ROAS overall, and it held that level long term.

Results

• $1M+ revenue in under 10 months
• 3.65x average ROAS against a 2x target, after 5.12x at the end of the first three months
• 20,000+ additional leads
• Customers on 5 continents
• 20,517% ROAS on a single downsell retargeting campaign