Earnest is a financial services company specializing in debt refinancing for students receiving a professional designation upon graduation from college. While Earnest generates a great deal of its business from its first-class reputation, engaging brand, and disruptive business model, a key component of its expansion plan was to launch a robust digital customer acquisition program across paid channels.

Over the course of five years, Thrive digital has been able to build and sustain an advanced growth marketing program, reach aggressive acquisition targets, and ultimately support multiple financing rounds as well as an acquisition.

Goals

Channel Exploration

Conduct channel exploration across numerous digital marketing platforms in order to identify opportunities for large-scale customer acquisition.

Converting Leads

Establish a customer acquisition funnel focused on building brand visibility, engaging new potential customers, and converting new opportunities into funded loans.

Sustainable Growth

Aggressively build and scale as many online acquisition channels as possible while simultaneously meeting and exceeding Earnest’s cost per funded loan acquisition cost goals, and number of customers acquired objectives.

Tracking and Analytics

Thrive Digital worked with the development team at Earnest to develop an understanding around how to track complex down-funnel actions, and integrate these into a performance marketing strategy.

Strategic Leadership

Lead and coordinate performance marketing strategy among internal client teams, work with internal stakeholders in order to provide solutions to marketing technology obstacles such as down-funnel lead tracking, work with external strategic partners in order to align campaigns with shared goals.

Solution

Omni-Channel Strategy

Thrive Digital developed an omni-channel strategy spanning major platforms such as Facebook, Google AdWords, Twitter, YouTube, and other social networks. We worked in tandem with the Earnest team and an outside creative agency to develop effective positioning and audience segments on each platform.

Optimization

Optimization targets changed rapidly throughout the first year of the project. Thrive Digital worked as a thought leader in determining how goals were developed, and then optimized campaigns towards these goals.

Channel Expansion

Prior to starting with Thrive Digital, Earnest was active on two major advertising platforms with fundamental pieces in place. Over the course of a year, over seven major platforms were integrated with complex strategies being deployed in each.

Data Analytics

Thrive Digital worked with the development team at Earnest to develop an understanding around how to track complex down-funnel actions, and integrate these into a performance marketing strategy.