Spanishland
After struggling to find the right tools to help him practice his ever-improving language skills, Nate Alger was inspired. With...
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After struggling to find the right tools to help him practice his ever-improving language skills, Nate Alger was inspired. With the help of his wife, Nate went on to found his very own company, Spanishland School. Spanishland’s mission is to help students around the world improve their Spanish skills, and with the help of key features in both ActiveCampaign and Postmark, Nate has built exceptional automated journeys for all his students to experience.
While practicing his Spanish on a popular language website, Nate met a native Colombian woman working on perfecting her English skills. What started out as friendship and conversation quickly developed into much more and the 2 later married after years speaking together online and then in-person. After becoming life partners, it became apparent they also had the unique opportunity to become business partners. “One thing I noticed was there wasn’t anything in the intermediate Spanish market that was specifically only in Spanish,” Alger says. So, 6 years ago, they started a conversational podcast that would eventually grow into the thriving business they run today. The pair aims to fill the market gap for intermediate and advanced Spanish learning content and help all their students advance their language skills.
Alger spent 12 long years devoting his work hours to accounting and his personal time to growing the Spanishland brand and subscriber base. “And as I saw it, my wife is a natural teacher. I saw her talent for teaching and thought, okay, we can probably make this into an actual program. Create a course to teach more people because, at the time, she was just teaching 1-on-1 as an individual Spanish tutor.” So, together they designed a subscription program that allowed their students to take formal courses of their choosing and have full control over their learning journey.
Growing an Audience with ActiveCampaign
Staying grounded and focused on steady, sustainable growth has helped the Spanishland brand grow to over 20,000 listeners per episode and to see considerable growth in their customer base during the pandemic after offering free trials. “With ActiveCampaign, Spanishland has grown 30% in the last year, and the year before that we grew 50%.” Spanishland’s founder attributes this growth to their team’s adoption of automations and audience segmentation, allowing them to deliver customized content relevant to every student at scale.
Finding the Right Tools
Like many small business owners, Nate sought out simple tools to help him build his business from the ground up. Really focused on scalability and ease of use, he was drawn to platforms that didn’t require him to have knowledge of coding. “I just use WordPress, and then we use Thrive Themes, which essentially allows us to customize a webpage without actually having to do any coding work.” When the team joined the marketing automation world, they first jumped into MailChimp, but quickly realized key features they needed for their business were missing. “At the time, I was just using it for broadcasts. It didn’t have all the automation items or engagement site tracking you can do with ActiveCampaign. So I think that’s what stood out to me; ActiveCampaign had all those features and came in at a great affordable price.”
Still looking for a powerful but simple solution, Nate started researching different tools on the market. After hearing about ActiveCampaign on a business podcast and always seeing the platform rated for its simplicity and power, Nate was ready to try it out for himself. “ActiveCampaign fulfilled our needs: all these awesome powerful features, without all the complexity, so anyone on my team can run it. For us, it’s that perfect medium.
The ActiveCampaign Difference
The team saw an immediate impact after starting on the platform. ActiveCampaign helped keep customers engaged from their first interaction with the Spanishland brand and helps them deliver high-value content to all their contacts, no matter where they are in the customer journey. Nate attributes Spanishland’s open rate of 42% to engagement tracking and the understanding that in the game of email marketing the quality of your content and customers are far more important than quantity. “It’s great to have a lot of email subscribers, but if the majority of them aren’t opening the emails, it’s going to hurt you in the long run.”
Postmark and ActiveCampaign Combine to Grow High-Value Audiences
A few years ago, Spanishland added Postmark to their tech stack to automate the transactional emails that are critical to their lead generation efforts. “A large share of our new leads are generated through lead magnets like free transcripts or worksheets, and we rely on transactional emails to deliver that content.”
Since Postmark delivers transactional emails at blazing speed, Nate knew prospects would find content freebies in their inbox just moments after they fill out a form on Spanishland’s website. At the same time, new leads get added to Spanishland’s nurture streams in ActiveCampaign. With Postmark integrated into their website for fast and reliable content delivery and ActiveCampaign’s powerful automation features, Nate has created a robust ecosystem that converts prospects into paying students. Plus, everyone on the small team can use, maintain, and adjust automations as needed, enabling them to focus their time on the work that really matters to them: creating and delivering the best possible learning experience for their students.
No End in Sight: Scaling Growth Goals with ActiveCampaign and Postmark
Even with the impressive growth Spanishland is experiencing, they have ambitious goals for their future. “Our goal this year is to grow to 1,000 members. Right now, we have almost 800.” The key to that growth, Nate says, is engaging with prospective students across all their content channels, including their podcast, YouTube channel, and email marketing with ActiveCampaign.
“I don’t know how we would function without ActiveCampaign; it truly is the backbone of how we get people to take action and communicate with them on a daily basis. It’s been our greatest conversion point by far in getting people to join our program.”
If you want to learn more about the platform that Spanishland uses to grow and nurture their customer base day in and day out, try ActiveCampaign for free starting today.
