Case

How EasyTranslate tripled leads using a product-led strategy

Anna Laugesen

5 Jul, 2023

5 min

The SaaS company EasyTranslate faced a scaling challenge at the end of 2021. They were looking for a new strategy that would allow them to grow without simultaneously increasing costs for marketing and sales staff.

Who is EasyTranslate?

EasyTranslate offers a SaaS product for creating and automating localized content. Users of the EasyTranslate platform can use artificial intelligence (AI) to create content based on specific keywords or prompts, as well as gain access to a team of professional translators. EasyTranslate is one of the first companies in Northern Europe to offer AI-generated content for a wide range of uses, from product descriptions to blog plots and articles.

Challenge: What does a customer really cost?

EasyTransIate's challenges were two-fold:

They were bootstrapped, and financially dependent on personal investment and reinvestment of profits, which strained growth.
Their CAC (customer acquisition cost) showed that a new customer was too expensive compared to the value it would bring to their business.

EasyTranslate were looking for a more product-oriented sales strategy. In other words: Enabling their product to carry a greater part of the sales.

Solution: From sales-led to product-led growth

Together with Helion B2B, EasyTranslate set about identifying the best solution, which ended with us implementing a freemium product as the primary conversion point.

In the months leading up to the release of the freemium product, we automated many of their manual sales and marketing processes while optimizing EasyTranslate's website, which included new product pages and use cases.

Together, we set a goal to transition to a fully product-led inbound strategy, mapping out a four-step process:

Freemium product: EasyTranslate launched a freemium version of their product as the primary step towards a Product-Led Growth (PLG) strategy.
Automation: Lead nurturing, rotation and management processes were mapped and automated with HubSpot. The freemium product was integrated with a number of trigger points that notified the sales team, for example when a user had a certain number of words translated or used a certain number of translators.
Personalized content: We focused EasyTranslate's content production around contextual email flows and ad campaigns.
Website optimization: easytranslate.com was optimized with a focus on driving traffic towards the freemium product.

With the help of the new Hubspot setup, EasyTranslate can now monitor how the freemium tool is used and how much freemium license capacity users have left.

This means that EasyTranslate’s team knows when the customer is ready for the next step in the sales process. Their Freemium model is built to be fully product-led, which means that the customer can upgrade their subscription themselves in-app, and that only enterprise customers come into contact with sales for more complex setups and needs.

At the same time, the setup allows detailed reporting on key metrics such as Cost per Lead, Cost per Opportunity, Cost per Customer, and Customer Lifetime Value.

Sales-Led vs. Product-Led Growth

With a Sales-Led strategy, the company is dependent on a larger team of sales and support employees:

Growth is driven by sales presentations and customer meetings
The customer is guided manually through the process of product introduction

This results in a high CAC while it does not allow the customer to learn how to navigate the process themselves.

With a Product-Led Growth strategy, a company is only dependent on the quality of their product

Growth is propelled by the product experience itself
The customer is motivated to explore the product themselves

This results in a lower CAC, as the customers test the product themselves and are not dependent on a sales or support interaction. In addition, the strategy allows the company to focus more on the product and scale without increasing the company's marketing spend.

Results: Integrated sales and marketing

During 2022, we fine-tuned the strategy, while continuously streamlining the automation setup in HubSpot. Through this, we managed to triple the number of leads in just one year for the same ad spend, which means that EasyTranslate received more than 1,500 freemium signups during 2022. Additionally, EasyTranslate has achieved a 142% growth in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) in 2023 compared to 2022.

"Helion B2B is certainly not afraid to challenge us, and their specialist knowledge in SaaS and HubSpot has helped us optimize our lead management and move more customers through our sales process, increasing our conversions month by month in 2022."

Frederik R. Pedersen

CEO at EasyTranslate

By implementing a PLG strategy, EasyTranslate can now market and sell their services through the product itself with an automated sales process without human interaction.

This means that Easy Translate is no longer dependent on a large sales team, but can focus both energy and resources on optimizing their product and strategy instead.

EasyTranslate received a large investment in 2023, which will be used to continue the direction of their strategy, ensure organic growth and further development of AI-capabilities.

Interested in building your own product-driven growth strategy?

If you want to hear more about product-driven growth strategies and how you can increase your conversions, reach out to us.