I started an email marketing strategy. It brought in 389 leads and a 19.7% average click-through rate over 4 months.

Here’s how.

I joined Datavault as a naïve apprentice on Halloween of 2022. The business was still young, but so was I. Like most young people, I thought I knew everything.

Fast forward to the beginning of 2025, and I received a promotion to marketing manager. I've gained enough experience to know that the more you know, the more you understand how little you know. That's a mouthful.

With my new responsibilities, I wanted to put my stamp on the company’s marketing.

I learned one key thing about marketing: social media followers don’t matter much. You need to turn them into email subscribers. This shows the difference between rented media and owned media.

We were doing that at Datavault. There were 72 free white papers on the website, and people were downloading them.

Revamping an email marketing system

Prospects would download a digital product, then disappear. We failed to nurture our relationship with them.

No follow-up. No email flow. No newsletter.

They were freezing to death on our mailing list.

I knew I had to do something to take control of our weak, chaotic email marketing efforts. I created a simple system to fix it. I used our email marketing platform, Mailchimp, and our website hosting platform, WordPress.

Due to the high download volume, this email marketing system needed to be simple and easy to repeat.

Here are the steps:

Embedded Mailchimp Forms

I created custom signup forms for every white paper on Mailchimp (so we knew where each lead came from).

This project aimed to turn the leads from Datavault into actual contacts in the CRM. So, please ignore the old copy.

screenshot of an embedded form and text that describes a white paper

Email Automation Flow

Once the forms were ready for the website, I created a template email sequence. The skeleton looks like this:

An instant email with a link to the download.
A condition to remind the user about their download (if they hadn’t engaged) or continue them in the email sequence.
A 2-day delay before an email with more resources relevant to the download.
A 1-week delay before an email addressing some common pain points relevant to the download.
A 1-week delay before outlining our services.

Tagging for Future Reference

I added another layer of identifying warm leads by tagging those who engaged with the email sequence. This made it even clearer for the sales team to know who to talk to first.

A New, Repeatable Email Marketing System

Here are the results 4 months since launch:

→ 389 new leads generated

→ 4.64% monthly subscriber growth

→ 37.6% landing page conversion rate

→ 19.6% click-through rate on CTAs in the email sequence

Now, Datavault has a clear way to turn one-off downloads into warm, engaged leads (and sales finally know who to talk to).

See the full story in my portfolio here.

This system is not perfect and is still a work in progress. But it’s miles better than a non-existent email marketing system that ignored thousands of warm leads. There’s so much that excites me about this project, and it’s just the beginning.

A B2B Email Marketing System That Generates 97 Leads Per Month