CASE STUDY #01
How Japan Switch reduced customer acquisition cost by 70% through email marketing and organic traffic
The Results
Replaced paid ad acquisition with 100% organic inbound customers
Increased website conversion rate from a .2% to .5%
High trial lesson signup rate for adults of over 80%
Grew SEO from 0 > 20,000 monthly visitors from SEO (Ranked on Page 1 of Google for 69 keywords)
Grew email newsletter to 12,000 subscribers
What is Japan Switch?
Japan switch is the collaboration between a very popular English school and Japanese school in Tokyo to provide affordable Japanese language lessons to foreigners looking to improve their conversation skills.
The Tokyo Japanese language lesson market is extremely competitive with freelancer teachers, super cheap online lessons, multiple language schools at every major station, and everyone's competing for a small segment of foreigners who are willing to pay to learn Japanese.
They had been quite successful with word of mouth and paid acquisition but wanted to avoid being dependant on a “pay to play” system to grow their business and wanted to diversify their customer acquisition channels in a cost effective manner and was willing to invest 1 - 2 years to dominate SEO for anything related to learning Japanese in Japan and develop a large email following.
The Goal
Increase organic
traffic
Increase website conversion rate
Increase email newsletter subscribers
The Japan Switch marketing team wanted to diversify their marketing channels and become less reliant on facebook and instagram ads. Internal changes in the Facebook ads system and in smartphone privacy settings created a volatile and unpredictable business landscape that led them to not limit themselves to one platform, although it was performing very well.
The Japan Switch determined that they wanted to grow their traffic and reach an audience that would lead to conversions and revenue. They wanted to unlock content and email marketing to complement their highly effective paid acquisition that the Scaling Your Company team was already helping them on. They also wanted to increase the website conversion rate because they foresaw the cost to acquire customers from Facebook and instagram increasing.
The Challenge
Japan Switch had zero organic presence on google search so we had to start from scratch. Additionally, they are a weekday morning and afternoon language school that does not provide visa sponsorship, does not provide support for the popular Japanese language proficiency test, nor Japanese reading and writing, nor business Japanese lessons.
This created a challenge for us in the website creation and SEO strategy because most people were looking for a type of lesson the client did not provide. We also had to answer the question of how to balance the SEO budget by evaluating high search volume traffic that won’t convert and highly relevant keywords with less search traffic and what words we can rank for considering we had just started the website to provide ROI to the client with their marketing budget.
The Solution
We really needed to understand the customer better than competition and also understand what made Japanese students choose Japan Switch in the first place. We surveyed potential customers and existing customers to really understand the pain points of learning Japanese and living in Japan. The students gave us some very unique insights into what they were pleased with the current service, how they found the service, and why they chose the survey in such a crowded market.
We really needed to understand the customer better than competition and also understand what made Japanese students choose Japan Switch in the first place. We surveyed potential customers and existing customers to really understand the pain points of learning Japanese and living in Japan. The students gave us some very unique insights into what they were pleased with the current service, how they found the service, and why they chose the survey in such a crowded market.
The research also guided the website revision and helped us communicate the unique strengths Japan Switch has but also their weaknesses and be transparent about it. There were several other insights that lead to achieving a very high sign-up rate of 80%.
The Results
- Grew email newsletter to 12,000 subscribers
- High trial lesson signup rate for adults of 80% plus
- Grew SEO from 0 > 20,000 monthly visitors from SEO (Ranked on page 1 of Google for 69 keywords)
- Replaced paid ad acquisition 100% with organic inbound customers
- Increase website conversion rate from a .2% to .5
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Meet Your Next Marketing Team
Experienced Business Founder and Advisor
Tyson Batino
Tyson has run marketing, recruitment, HR, and operations for several businesses he has founded. Currently, he is assisting more than 20 companies in Japan to scale their companies. Tyson is the founder of One Coin English, Japan Switch, BFF Tokyo, and now Scaling Your Company. Mentor at Founder Institute Japan.
Content Marketer, SEO Specialist and Designer
Chris D. Chow
Christopher is a content marketer, designer and SEO specialist whose work with Japan Switch and BFF Tokyo has led to exponential growth in web traffic, brand awareness, engagement, and overall conversions.
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