CASE STUDY

How Japan Switch reduced customer acquisition cost by 70% through email marketing and organic traffic

Increased website conversion rate from a .2% to .5%

Replaced paid ad acquisition with 100% organic inbound customers

Grew SEO from 0 > 20,000 monthly visitors from SEO (Ranked on Page 1 of Google for 69 keywords)

High trial lesson signup rate for adults of over 80% 

Grew email newsletter to 12,000 subscribers

CS - Phone 3

01.

Meet the Client

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.

02.

The Goal

Increase organic traffic

Increase website conversion rate

Grow 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.

03.

The Challenge

Starting from Scratch

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.

03.

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.

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%.

04.

The Result

Result 1:

SEO Growth: 0 to 60,000 Monthly Visitors

Increased organic traffic from zero to 20,000 monthly visitors, ranking on page 1 of Google for more than 69 competitive keywords.

Result 2:

100% Organic Inbound Customer Acquisition

Successfully replaced all paid ads with organic inbound traffic, significantly reducing acquisition costs while maintaining customer flow.

Result 3:

Website Conversion Rate Boost: 0.2% to 0.5%

More than doubled the website conversion rate, turning visitors into paying customers with improved site performance and user experience.

Result 4:

80%+ Trial Lesson Signup Rate

Achieved an impressive trial lesson signup rate for adult learners, converting over 80% of inquiries into regular students. 

Result 5:

Grew Email Newsletter to 30,000+ Subscribers

Built an engaged email list with solid open and clickthrough rates, expanding reach and driving consistent communication with potential customers.

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