How We Acquired 3600 International Clients and 177,000$ in a Week. [CallPage CASE STUDY]

How to introduce your product to the international market? We want to share a case study with you, in which we describe how we managed to acquire 3,600 foreign clients and earn 177,000$ in one week.

In CallPage, we help you get more phone leads from the website and generate instant contact with potential customers in 28 seconds. Two years ago, we launched our product in the Polish market, which reacted very positively to our tool and in the first quarter of 2017 CallPage became a leader among similar solutions in Poland.

I realize that it sounds quite straightforward, but this is the truth, and this case made us think about the further global expansion and transformation from a local to an international player in the technology market.

Nowadays, there is an idea that if you want to build a successful business, you must think globally. As the saying goes: Go global or go home.

Despite using the classical marketing expansion, i.e., employing people from the local markets, inbound and outbound marketing, we decided to use growth hacking methods. This helped us to achieve the aimed results in a short period of time, whereas other companies sometimes spend years to overcome their goals.

In this article, I will share our CallPage experience and show, step by step, what we’ve done in practice.

Campaigns on Product Hunt

Product Hunt is a platform for introducing new products, projects, and start-ups. The community has enormous power as it evaluates and votes for selected products/companies.

Here is the list of other Polish start-ups that had a PH campaign: UXPin, Estimote, Brand24, LiveChat.

From the very beginning of launching the English version of CallPage, we did two campaigns on Product Hunt.

For the first and second versions of the product, we collected more than 300 votes (upvotes) each time as well as much valuable feedback from international customers.

It led us to believe that there is a demand for our product on the global market too
After those campaigns, we tried to

Campaign on Appsumo.com

AppSumo.com is where you can find great discounts for various technological products, which appear twice a week.

This is something like Groupon for offers from technology companies.

We couldn’t find an example of a Polish company, which did a campaign in AppSumo.

From the world players, it’s worth mentioning: Shopify, Piktochart or KISSinsights.

We decided to try joining their group

That’s how CallPage campaign on AppSumo looked like.

What were the results of a campaign?

• More than 36000 CallPage packages were sold, amounting to 177,000$.
  

CallPage account on AppSumo website.

• 4400 registered accounts in the system by users from USA, UK and Australia.
• Over 800 reviews and comments.

Users’ comments during the campaign.

• One of the TOP 15 best-selling tools on the website at all times.
• Notifications from 6 different investors from US and Europe who found us through AppSumo. 

We were very pleased with the results.

Companies from the industry started to ask us how we did it.

That was also one of the driving forces to decide to share this experience and to describe it in the form of tips and answers to questions.

What do you need to know about the process of campaign preparation?

How long did it take to prepare campaign for the AppSumo?

The process of preparation lasted for 1.5 months. It took approximately 40 working hours.

What do you need to do in order to appear on AppSumo?

To submit a product, simply complete the application available on their website: http://www.appsumo.com/business/

TIP#1: 

You should remember that the process of reviewing can take up to several months.

Therefore, after some time since submitting the application, it is worth contacting someone from AppSumo directly via LinkedIn or e-mail.

We managed to contact the person, who had previously introduced the product on AppSumo.com and who sent an e-mail introducing our product.

How the process of negotiating looked like after establishing the contact?

All the negotiations and arrangements were conducted via Skype.

It depended mostly on those conversations whether the product will appear on the platform and under what conditions.

That is why you should pay a lot of attention and prepare well for these conversations.

What are the requirements for the product on AppSumo?

They pay most of their attention to what the company can offer to the AppSumo users and what level of support it can provide (to make sure that you can withstand the inflow of customers, who will be redirected from their website).

TIP #2

During the conversations, try to explain clearly: what is your product/service all about, what is your offer and how it differs from the usual offer.

Please also describe your plan for user support, e.g. how many people will be working in the support team.

Does AppSumo charge a commission from sales?

The commission that will be charged is a matter of negotiating during the conversations.

Consider that commission is pretty high, but you can try to negotiate it.

What is the next step after conversations?

After determining all the conditions, you will receive an email with a summary from the AppSumo representative.

Preparation for the launch

The main goal of our campaign was to quickly increase the number of widgets installed by foreign clients.

Firstly, we wanted to get „market proof” from particular markets such as: USA, UK, Austlalia and Ireland.

Secondly, our product is spreading virally. Our main channel for acquiring customers is the transition to the page from the “Powered by CallPage” links, which are located on each widget installed by the client.

The more widgets installed, the more links to our landing pages and more new registrations.  

We wanted people not only to buy our product but to install it and start using it actively.

That is the reason why we organized two educational webinars, which were held during the campaign specifically for the users of AppSumo.

We also prepared short educational videos that were available on the application panel immediately after registration.

Strengthening of Support and technical preparation

Before the launch of campaign, we also had to strengthen the Support department. For the duration of the campaign, we hired few extra marketing and sales people to reply to the inquiries 24/7.

When it comes to the technical preparations – IT department added several Amazon servers and tested the entire concept so that the service will handle the flow of users.

Course of campaign

The day the campaign was launched did not bring significant results – it’s called pre-launch, when the product is already on the platform, but it is not promoted yet.

The most interesting part starts at 6am on Monday, when the AppSumo mailing database sends out first emails to almost 1 million addresses.

Tip #3

You should be well prepared as 24 hours after mailing you will get a lot of inquiries, comments, which you have to answer on a regular basis.

After the first mailing we received over 200 inquiries on Intercom.

What is more, there were emails, questions on the fan page, queries and comments on the AppSumo website.

I can surely admit that the team was tired and even unlimited coffee, cookies and energy drinks in the office couldn’t manage it all.

In addition, a large number of queries are received the day before the end of the auction, when the second mail was sent out.

Few important remarks relating to the course of campaign:

• Respond to every comment and every tag, do not leave anything without attention.
• Try to respond quickly. We have been responding from one account in order to keep the response rate and the consistency high. When one person started to respond to the question, he/she informed other people about it in order to avoid mess.
• If someone submitted a question via e-mail or Intercom and the problem was solved, ask him to leave his opinion on the AppSumo. Public feedback from other users, who have already used the product, affects the conversion rate and people’s purchasing initiative.

Example of the request to leave a comment.

• In comments add the link to the landing page, where people can sign up for educational webinars.
   

Example of a comment.
 

• Enable remarketing, who visited your website during the campaign to increase the number of registrations.

After the campaign:

Money raised during campaign are paid out within 60 days.

If you prepare the campaign well and do everything correctly, the number of registrations and clients will tend to increase even after campaign was carried out.

Considering our experience, the number of organic registrations from English-speaking markets in June was 260%.

We achieved these results due to the transitional links from new widgets and the positive PR gained during the entire campaign.

Conclusion

It is crucial to continue the conversation with the new group of clients acquired, because it is easy to turn them into loyal and committed customers.

For example, we offered our clients the opportunity to participate in the partnership program and some of them have now became partners, who recommend and resell our product.

If you have any questions – I encourage you to leave a comment.

We will try to answer all the questions. I’ll keep my fingers crossed for all of you, who decide to do their campaign at AppSumo ?