How I helped a Jiu-Jitsu Influencer gain thousands of email sign-ups, hundreds of new platform subscribers, and launch a best-selling course…

...with just 9 Instagram posts and an automated email sequence.

As well as running his personal brand, 15X World Jiu-Jitsu Champion Andre Galvao has two main businesses: his online platform, Atos BJJ On Demand, as well as his two physical gyms Atos HQ and Atos Beaumont.

I work as Andre’s copy strategist and fractional CMO, overlooking the marketing for his personal brand, as well as for his physical gyms and his online platform. We work together closely on email strategy, ad strategy and offer creation.

This case study is specific to Atos BJJ On Demand, an online education company for Jiu-Jitsu with two specific types of offers: a subscription (monthly or annual), as well as individual masterclass courses.

After working together with Andre for some time, I had identified two major problems within our online business model:

1. Many people were unaware of the fact that we sold high-quality individual courses (Atos BJJ On Demand was mostly known as a subscription platform)
2. We had no consistent method (or system) of list-building.

Other aspects of our business were strong. Our retention marketing strategy was good and Andre’s email list was very responsive. But ultimately, what was slowing down growth was inconsistent customer acquisition, low customer LTV, as well as some software limitations.

At the time of this Bootcamp, the second in our “5-Day Challenge” series, we were about to launch Andre’s new masterclass course, Mastering Judo for Jiu-Jitsu Domination.?

We wanted to test a new funnel that would address these two pain points for our business, i.e. lack of course buyers and inconsistent email acquisition.?

ManyChat

A few months before the Bootcamp, we had introduced ManyChat as a list-building tool. I had seen many businesses having success with social media automation, and I suggested to Andre that we test it out. It helped that – at that time – virtually no other brands within the Jiu-Jitsu niche were using ManyChat. In that way, we were ahead of the market.

We began by setting up ManyChat for the Atos BJJ On Demand Instagram page (which had quite a small following at the time of ~30,000 followers). We tentatively ran a trial 5-Day Challenge in November, with modest results. Within a week, we had captured 418 new mailing list subscribers.

After the trial run, I was confident that the system could be improved on with a few strategic tweaks. It was also clear to me that we could completely change the game by using Andre’s personal Instagram account, as well as his other business accounts.

A New ManyChat Strategy for the Second Challenge

Andre’s Instagram account is much larger than the Atos BJJ On Demand account. As a highly-respected personality within the Jiu-Jitsu scene, he has a large social media following (~700,000 on Instagram.)

However, this time around, the posting strategy had to be a little different. For the first challenge, we had been creating carousel posts on the Atos BJJ On Demand Instagram account. These were helpful, educational posts. However, after testing one at the beginning of the Bootcamp promotion, we decided that they felt a little “off-brand” on Andre’s personal account.?

In addition, Andre is careful not to “oversell” on social media, as he does not want to isolate all of his followers.

He is, fortunately, very confident in front of a camera. However, he only wanted to make the minimum possible posts to promote the Bootcamp, so as not to appear “too salesy”. In the end, we created five posts for his personal account and four posts for the Atos BJJ On Demand page.

Result #1: List-Building?

In total, with just 5 posts on Andre’s personal account (and 4 on his other business accounts), we had collected 1,168 new email subscribers.

We have since set created a fully-automated version of this challenge and it continues to consistently generate leads and course sales.

What's more, we're planning to reach out to other newsletters in the Jiu-Jitsu niche to see would they be willing to promote our Takedown Bootcamp. This would essentially be a "list-swap", as we plan on reciprocating by promoting one of their offers/lead magnets to our list.

Although the initial number was 1,168 subscribers, I expect that the challenge to have generated at least 5,000 new subscribers before the end of the year, especially if we run some strategic list-swaps.

Result #2: Mastering Judo for Jiu-Jitsu Dominance

The second problem this addressed was masterclass course sales (and knowledge about courses for sale on out platform.)

After the Bootcamp, we ran a pre-sale for Andre’s new course, Mastering Judo for Jiu-Jitsu Dominance.

Previously, sales of courses on Atos BJJ On Demand have been very inconsistent.?

However, within a few days of launching the course, Mastering Judo for Jiu-Jitsu Dominance had already become one of the best-selling courses on the platform.

This campaign also created hundreds of new platform subscribers. Once people had seen the value of the content we were creating for the Jiu-Jitsu community, many people who bought the new course were quite easily upsold to the subscription. This helped us drive up customer LTV.

Within the first few months of launching the Bootcamp, it had generated tens of thousands of extra dollars for the business (including course sales and platform subscriptions.)

In addition, we had added more than 1,000 email subscribers to our mailing list (and had a new method of adding consistent warm leads to the list.)

Aftermath/Conclusion

Running these 5-Day Challenges has become a consistent, inexpensive list-building exercise that helps us share real value, while finding and converting new customers to our platform.

We have repeated this list-building exercise since, to very similar results (we ran a Mindset Challenge in April.)

Our next challenge will take place in September, our "White Belt Survival Guide".

We expect this to be our most successful challenge yet, as we can apply all the lessons from the three previous challenges. We also plan on making tweaks to the funnel to encourage participants to sign up directly for our yearly subscription offer.