This is something Kelsey Rostad, Marketing Manager at the design and marketing studio Banan, knew would be important for her client, Love Child Organics. Kelsey loved working with this organic baby food brand so much that she sometimes thought of them as a fast-growing child of her own.

Love Child Organics is a personal favorite client of mine. I love them so much because they’re super wholesome. Their brand is just so well developed … it’s a lot of fun to do their marketing.

So when Kelsey found out Love Child Organics was interested in selling some of their baby food products online, she knew what they had to do: start building a stronger email marketing list.

Over the course of about a year, Kelsey used Unbounce-built landing pages and social ads on Facebook and Instagram to grow Love Child Organic’s email marketing list from 2,000 to more than 16,000 subscribers. (Oh, baby!) You can watch the video below to hear from Kelsey herself about how they did it, or keep reading to get the full scoop.

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The Challenge: How Do You Turn Instagram Followers Into Email Subscribers?

When Kelsey started working with Love Child Organics, the brand was already kinda Insta-Famous, with an impressive 25,000 Instagram followers. But despite their strong presence on social media, only 2,000 parents had signed up to be email subscribers. To Kelsey, this was a sign of a disconnect.

The client saw a lot of value in social media, which is great. But I knew that to get directly into a consumer’s inbox would be so much more important and so much more valuable.

But why not just market to the parents who were already following them on Instagram? Kelsey knew this would be part of their growth strategy, but that they couldn’t rely solely on social media to drive sales.

A lot of marketers are having issues with organic reach when it comes to social media. So even if you have 25,000 followers, you might only be reaching 2,000 of them per post. And are they even looking at it?

With their social media channels, Kelsey could never be totally in control of what her audience would see. (Plus, maybe all the moms would switch over to TikTok next week, who knows?) If they were going to launch as an ecommerce brand in the future, Love Child Organics needed a direct line of communication that they could rely on for years to come.

Whenever we launch a new product or a new campaign, we need to be able to go directly to the customer. It wouldn’t cost us any extra money once we got those emails.

The Solution: The Lookalike Strategy That Created a Baby Food Email Boom

To start collecting email addresses from interested parents, Kelsey knew she would have to create a compelling offer. And using landing pages would be the best way for her to put a spotlight on that offer.

Really, it comes down to telling the brand story in the best way possible. Unbounce helps us build landing pages that do that—while also guiding the eye towards the conversion.

Kelsey used Unbounce to quickly create an on-brand landing page that would help sell her idea: a free, printable coupon. In exchange for an email address, parents would be able to claim this exclusive offer.

To drive traffic to this page, Kelsey set up a series of ads on Facebook and Instagram that would specifically target new parents in Canada with children of a certain age. They also set up ads that would retarget their current social audience, past website visitors who weren’t already on the newsletter list, and a lookalike audience of current newsletter subscribers.

The campaign used social ads that linked to an Unbounce landing page. We focused on Facebook and Instagram for our ad strategy, because we knew that that’s where millennial moms were.

But while the campaign performed well, Kelsey knew that a free coupon wasn’t the most financially sustainable way to acquire new email addresses. That’s when she decided to create a piece of content marketing that new parents wouldn’t be able to resist.

We were getting a lot of questions on social media. ‘How do I introduce this food to my child? What should I make for them?’ So we created a comprehensive guide, all about introducing solid food to kids.

Kelsey whipped up a new, on-brand landing page to highlight this offer using Unbounce, and started pointing social ads towards this gated resource. To help make sure she was targeting the right parents, Kelsey created a lookalike audience in Facebook based on the people who had already downloaded the PDF.

We found that once we got enough downloads of the solids guide PDF, that we had enough data from Facebook to create lookalike audiences of people that were actually downloading the PDF. And that really lowered our cost per acquisition because we were targeting essentially the exact same type of people who had already converted.

The Results: 16,000+ Email Subscribers and Counting

Both campaigns performed above and beyond Kelsey’s—and the client’s—expectations. In less than a year, Love Child Organics went from having around 2,000 email subscribers to over 16,000.

Even better, Kelsey says they were able to use A/B Testing in Unbounce and refined ad targeting to help lower their cost-per-email-acquisition. The coupon landing page started with a conversion rate of 43% and an average CPA of $2.00, but eight months later ended up converting at 69% with a CPA of $1.30—that’s a 60% increase in conversion rate!

We tested a lot of images. So should the baby be sitting in a high chair? Should they be with their mom? What age should they be? We actually found that photos of toddlers performed better than photos of babies, which was really surprising for us.

Using similar tactics, Kelsey was able to bring down the CPA for the Solid Foods Guide landing page from $3.00 CPA to $2.00 CPA over a four-month period. This was a big win for the client, since they no longer had to give away free coupons to get those email subscribers in the door.

And as Love Child Organics looks towards launching as an ecommerce brand in the future, Kelsey says Unbounce will help them create landing pages that put their products in the best possible spotlight.

We are definitely anticipating using landing pages to communicate any new products. They’re a great way to talk about the different ingredients, the benefits, the nutritional value … I find that plain old product pages aren’t the best way to introduce a new product like that.

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