How a Wellington Digital Product Company Built a Full-Funnel Growth Engine.

The Challenge

This Wellington company had done the hard work of building three marketing channels — paid, organic, and email. The problem was that they operated as three separate efforts with no shared logic. Paid had its own campaigns. Organic was publishing sporadically. Email sent the same newsletter to everyone. No channel was informing or amplifying the others. The result: CAC was rising as paid channels audience-saturated in the relatively small New Zealand and Australian market, and the organic channel was generating no audiences for retargeting because it barely existed.

Our Approach

The first priority was shared attribution. We built a unified UTM framework that made every channel's contribution to the funnel measurable. Only then could we make informed decisions about where to invest and where to cut.

The strategic architecture: SEO content builds top-of-funnel awareness and creates warm audiences for retargeting. Paid channels shift from cold acquisition (expensive in a small market) to retargeting organic visitors (cheaper and higher-intent). Email handles nurture and retention — lifecycle-triggered, not broadcast. CRO on the trial activation flow meant every improvement to conversion multiplied the return from all upstream channels simultaneously.

Trial activation CRO identified that new trial users were reaching a specific setup step — team invitation — and abandoning. An in-app guided onboarding experience reduced abandonment at that step dramatically, lifting trial-to-paid conversion from 18% to 31%.

Results

Five months in: ARR doubled. Blended CAC fell 40% as paid shifted to retargeting and organic audiences provided cheaper, higher-intent traffic. Trial-to-paid conversion reached 31%. Organic traffic grew from near-zero to 5,000+ monthly visits. Email revenue share grew from 5% to 22% as lifecycle flows replaced generic newsletters.