Restarting the engine
After a year-long lending pause, qualified leads tripled from pre-pandemic levels within six months.
The problem
In 2020 borders closed, and a lender for international students stopped lending. A year later MPOWER was ready to reopen, with a short runway and no senior marketing leader left to plan the comeback.
I was the most senior marketer in the building, so the plan was mine to make and mine to run.
The spell
- A demand forecast first, so the company agreed on what "back" looked like before anyone spent a dollar.
- An agency we already trusted, rehired for speed instead of starting a long search.
- Paid media, SEO, and referral changes, launched together rather than one at a time. The referral program became double-sided, and the reward moved earlier in the funnel, which shrank the gap between doing the thing and getting thanked for it.
- One email to everyone who had been waiting for us. I wrote it, and it's still the best-performing email I can remember us sending.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, I hired Sagar Somani. He's now my Rarecraft co-founder, so that decision worked out too.
What happened
Within six months, qualified leads were three times their pre-pandemic level. Referrals grew into one of the main ways new borrowers found MPOWER.
Built with MPOWER's small post-pandemic team, our agency partner, and the referral, operations, and technology teams.