Owned marketing for a boutique studio through a full platform migration: 40% more membership purchases and 65% revenue growth.
By the time I left, the studio had migrated from Mindbody to MarianaTek, adopted Xplor Growth for automation, launched a new website, and run a paid social program that produced a 40% increase in membership purchases and 65% overall revenue growth.
The studio had no marketing department and ran on Mindbody, a dated platform the team had outgrown, with a contact database that did not speak to modern marketing tooling. The migration was the thing blocking everything downstream: a real email program, an automation lifecycle, and a paid funnel that could land somewhere coherent.
I scoped and shipped the MarianaTek migration solo, mapping records across two schemas and training all 22 staff on schedule — because the migration was the unlock for everything that followed. Without it, there was no real email program, no automation lifecycle, and no paid funnel that could land somewhere coherent.
Twelve automations went live in Xplor Growth, designed from a blank page against the actual customer journey of a boutique studio. The lead-nurture flow converted at 90.4% across more than 1,000 leads and is still running today. A weekly broadcast program to 4,800 contacts cleared 30 to 47% open rates across 23 sends.
The paid Meta program ran a structured three-segment audience test, identified the winning demographic, and evolved to a dual-objective split between engagement and traffic campaigns by October. Every piece reinforced the next: ad creative matched the rebuilt site, landing pages repeated the offer word for word, post-click emails opened in the same voice. The funnel held at every seam. Membership purchases rose 40%. Overall revenue grew 65%.
A weekly broadcast program in Xplor Growth to roughly 4,800 deliverable contacts: schedule changes, special events, holiday promotions, studio updates. Twenty-three sends averaged a 31% open rate against the 25% fitness-industry benchmark, and the top three all cleared 42%. The pattern that emerged across seven months: information the membership genuinely needed outperformed pure promotion every time. Schedule-change announcements beat sales pushes. Class updates outran offers. The best send of the window — a spring schedule change — reached a 47.1% open rate. The subject line was six words. The body was four paragraphs. The opening line: "A few things are shifting for summer — new class times, a new instructor you're going to love, and one small change to the Friday morning lineup. Here's everything you need to know before June." Nothing in it was clever. Everything in it was useful. And when the studio flooded in December, the same list trusted the comms enough to put 134 clicks on a pop-up class invite — the highest single-send click count of the entire seven-month window.
After the MarianaTek migration shipped, the automation layer was built from a blank page in Xplor Growth: lead capture to first class, intro-offer upsell, win-backs, credit saves, birthday and milestone plays. The marquee flow, New Lead - MarianaTek Profile, has processed 1,014 leads at a 90.4% conversion rate and is still running today, weeks after my departure. Even the win-back flows, the hardest flows to convert in any lifecycle program, landed between 10 and 16% against single-digit industry norms.
Meta ads on Facebook and Instagram, tuned to the studio's actual buyer: women in their thirties and forties within six miles, with mindfulness and fitness affinities. The campaign architecture evolved deliberately — a three-segment audience test in February to identify the buyer, a consolidation in March to the winning segment, and by October a dual-objective split between an engagement campaign for cold audiences and a traffic campaign for warm retargeting. Roughly 290K campaign-reported impressions and 3,400+ clicks produced 280+ trial starts at about $11 each, and membership purchases rose 40% while the program ran. The funnel held at every seam by design. The ad creative used the same photography as the rebuilt website. The landing page repeated the offer in the ad, word for word, in the same visual register. The post-click email — automated through Xplor Growth — opened in the same voice as the ad copy. A prospect who moved from impression to site visit to email nurture to membership purchase experienced one consistent studio throughout. That coherence is not accidental. It is the thing most small-studio paid programs get wrong: the ad does one thing, the landing page does another, and the email sounds like a third person wrote it. At Elements, the seams were closed.
The migration was the unlock; everything else was downstream of it shipping. The crisis-comms work during the December flood is the piece I am proudest of: four sends, each calibrated for the moment, each producing the action the moment required. The automations still run today.
