Case Study: How Cold Email Became Juno’s #1 Registration Source
110 Registrations. 39% Of All Sign-Ups. One Channel Beat Them All.
Juno helps families save on student loans through free college financing webinars for school counselors and district administrators. Hard audience to reach, slower to act, and every channel was chasing the same registrations.
We built a value-first cold email program for it. No pitch, no links in the first touch, just a genuinely useful offer that read like a note from a colleague. The graphic below tells the rest of the story.
The Challenge
Counselors and administrators don’t respond to pitches. They’re busy, skeptical of anything that smells like a sales email, and a “sign up now” ask gets deleted before it’s read. Juno needed a way into that inbox that didn’t feel like an ad.
The Strategy
We led with value, not a pitch. Every email was built to look and read like a note from a colleague: plain text, no links in the first touch, nothing that signals mass send. The offer itself did the work, a genuinely useful webinar that helped counselors do their job better. A test campaign found the strongest copy first, then a winner campaign pushed those proven variations out to the rest of the list.
Why It Worked
Relevance beat volume. The offer helped counselors do their jobs, the copy felt personal instead of promotional, and constant testing kept putting the best message in front of the most people. Cold email out-registered Facebook and every other channel Juno was running, becoming the single biggest driver of sign-ups.
Contact us for email marketing that drives real results without the operational headache.
How I Discovered Email Prospecting
In early 2020, I was approached by a recruiter for an exciting new role at a fast-growing video production company based in LA. The company, Lemonlight, was revolutionizing video production – a process that had remained static for over 80 years – by modernizing procedures, increasing delivery speed, reducing client costs, and enhancing the overall experience. Despite having enjoyed significant growth in both revenue and clients over the preceding five years, their sales had somewhat plateaued.
The leadership team at Lemonlight was stellar, openly discussing their current revenue, marketing channels, and above all, their ambitious goal for the year: to double their revenue.
As the newly appointed Director of Marketing, I quickly grasped the company’s current standing and future needs. It was evident that to attain the aggressive revenue goals, we needed to extend beyond the easy, quick wins I could identify. Without delay, I commenced some basic page conversion rate optimization and streamlined the inbound booking process. If you’re in the B2B sector and neglect to provide your leads with a scheduling option immediately after they fill out a form, you’re certainly leaving money on the table. I could extensively discuss this one small, effortless change, but that’s a topic for another blog.
Once I ensured that inbound leads were converting, I initiated a straightforward, bottom-of-the-funnel Google search campaign with remarketing. This drove traffic towards our optimized homepage and form submission process.
And just like that, we had more leads.
These early victories were crucial, persuading the executive team that marketing would be a primary driver of tangible revenue this time around. However, these measures alone were not sufficient.
As SEO and PPC became active and started generating leads, it was clear we needed a more potent lead source. I conducted a basic cost per lead and customer acquisition cost by channel analysis and stumbled upon something intriguing.
A small pilot project had been launched, led by two relatively inexperienced members of the sales team. After reviewing their costs, it became clear that the return on investment from this modest pilot project was exceptionally high.
I arranged a meeting with them to understand what exactly they were doing that was driving such high-quality, low-cost leads – and most importantly, leads that convert.
We quickly realized that what these two had stumbled upon was about to change the game completely. It was Outbound Email Prospecting.
