Read-A-Thon

Digital Authority Partners created a digital marketing strategy to help Read-A-Thon meet its growth targets through paid search & email marketing.

— Objective:

Quickly scale Read-A-Thon using paid media.

— Challenges:

Many keywords have high search volume; however, they are not specific enough to education—for example, GoFundMe, churches, and more.

Managing media spend & demand is difficult due to seasonality. Search traffic for relevant terms is significantly suppressed during the summer and doesn’t pick back up until the Fall season and the start of the school year.

— Our Approach:

Create a paid ads strategy based on three target personas. DAP identified people looking for fundraising opportunities at their schools. We determined the right people to target including principals, PTO/PTA, and librarians.

We created a priority list of keyword types to focus on the most specific keywords for our target audience:

• Top Prioritized Keywords that contain tokens that eliminate all vagueness Elementary, PTA, PTO, Reading, Book 

• Secondary priority are keywords that come with partial vagueness school, educational, education 

• Tertiary keywords include competitors in the same elementary focused space Scholastic, give a thon, book it Tokens that signal a user is searching for “like” / similar companies will be prioritized Fundraisers like, competitors, alternatives, etc. 

• Lowest Priority keywords are brand-agnostic “ballpark” searches for all KINDS of fundraisers cookie dough, pizza, fun run, candy, etc. Ad copy was focused on Read-a Thon position as a healthier alternative, more educational, more revenue, etc.

• Demand generation: Utilization of display, video, and social

• Demand capture: Non-branded search, remarketing campaigns, and branded search

— Results:

• 3x lower cost per conversion than predicted by Read-A-Thon
  • Branded keywords: $2.85/conversion
  • Non-branded keywords: $16.04/conversion
  • Competitive conquesting: $32.64/conversion
• 2.5x higher click-through-rate than industry averages at 8.6%
• 20.7% conversion rate by creating highly targeted landing pages (6) for each keyword grouping & persona type
• Very high campaign optimization score by Google causing ads to be served cheaper & appear higher in paid search results.

— Objective:

Enhance email marketing performance to increase brand awareness.

— Challenge:

DAP built two versatile email templates for Readin-A-Thon for their email marketing campaign that would be used for the RAT team to plug-and-play in their copy and automate into their workflows. The first template was designed to align with the landing pages created by the DAP team. The second template was created from this Unlayer template and was made to match the branding of Read-A-Thon. These templates allow for easy updates, allowing Read-A-Thon to modify content, visuals, and layout elements quickly. 

— Our Approach:

• Conducted an in-depth analysis of Read-A-Thon’s customer personas to customize content and calls to action. 

• Create six email templates based on Unlayer, tailored to match Read-A-Thon’s current brand guidelines. 
• Built templates to be intuitive, allowing users to make quick updates, add new content, or change designs without technical expertise.
• Structured the backend of the templates for A/B testing, allowing the analytics team to execute data-driven optimizations. 
• Focused on boosting key performance indicators like deliverability, open rates, click-through rates, and overall conversions.

— Results:

• Highly effective templates achieve 2x the industry average click-through rate.
• Email templates optimized for Read-A-Thon branding & ability for business users to update the content.

— Objective:

 Review and optimize the Nurture workflow set up by the Read-A-Thon (RAT) team to ensure it functions as intended.

— Challenge:

The initial audit of the Nurture workflow revealed several issues, including an incorrectly configured “RAT – Nurture Flow – Enrollment” trigger that excluded the intended audience, an inadequate list size of only 24 contacts, inconsistency between RAT’s custom “State” property and the default “State/Region” property, and shortcomings in the PTA/PTO, Librarians, Principals, and Other branches within the workflow, including missing actions and content placeholders.

— Approach:

• Conducted a comprehensive workflow audit and provided recommendations to the RAT team.
• Analyzed enrollment triggers and recommended updates, including “No RAT Deals, State is TX, FL, CA, and Tags are Librarian, PTA/PTO, Principal” as the enrollment trigger.
• Compiled a list of contacts based on specific criteria, resulting in approximately 19.6K contacts, which seemed appropriate for the workflow.
• Addressed the “State” and “State/Region” inconsistency by suggesting the use of an If/Then Branch to set the “State” property accordingly.
• Created four branches for PTA/PTO, Librarians, Principals, and Others for Texas, Florida, and California in the workflow.
• Recommended the creation of 9 placeholder emails for PTA/PTO and Librarians, and advised on actions for the “Other” branch, either with similar tags as previously or a more generic email.

— Results:

• The results of the review and recommendations included improved enrollment triggers, a more suitable list of contacts for the workflow, resolution of the “State” and “State/Region” inconsistency, and action suggestions for the PTA/PTO, Librarians, Principals, and Other branches within the workflow. 
• These changes aimed to enhance the workflow’s performance and effectiveness.