May 1-7, 2023
Heyo 👋
Welcome to my weekly write-up on startups that raised the largest Series B funding of the previous week. Every week, I pick one startup headquartered in the US to review its performance.
I get data on investors and investments from Crunchbase but the channel breakdown is my own research.
In this weekly snapshot, you’ll get:
A short overview of the startup & lead investors
A breakdown of their marketing channels
3 actionable insights to implement today
Let’s dive in!
Series B of the week: Inbox Health Raises $22.5 Million
Company name: Inbox Health
HQ: New Haven, CT
Industry: Healthcare tech
Funded: April 2014
Series A: $15M, April 2021, lead investor: Commerce Ventures
Series B announced date: May 4, 2023
Money Raised: $22.5M
Investors: Ten Coves Capital, Commerce Ventures, CT Innovations, Vertical Venture Partners, Healthy Ventures and Fairview Capital.
Inbox Health wants to improve patient billing experience with their platform that:
Simplifies billing statements
Offers payment flexibility (credit cards, ACH, phone payments, digital wallet payments and paper checks)
Enables better customer support through email/chat/text messages and smart bots
The growth model relies on sales-led growth. There are no free trials, freemiums, or other offerings that require users to experience the product before committing to it. The website's main call-to-action is the standard "contact us" form, indicating that they depend on attracting high-quality leads that the sales team can convert into paying customers.
Lead investor snapshot: Ten Coves Capital
Ten Coves Capital is a private equity firm with a focus on investments in high-growth FinTech companies. The firm was founded in 2020 by Daniel Kittredge and Steven Piaker.
The firm is most actively investing in software, financial services, and analytics.
Number of investments: 14 (10 lead investments)
Exits: 2 (Sentieo, Roostify)
Funding rounds: predominately Series B (7/14)
Inbox Health’s path to Series B: Marketing channel breakdown
Inbound content strategy
Looking at the snapshot from Ahrefs we can see that their inbound channel has been in decline for almost a year now. At the peak of their organic performance, their website ranked for 74 keywords on the first page of Google. Today, it ranks for 26.
The top organic pages are not very exciting, as the most popular one is the Patient Billing page. The top 10 organic pages include the homepage, contact page, product pages, and the core team page.
Despite regularly publishing useful blog posts, most of them are not optimized for SEO or targeted towards buyers, instead of being focused on the end user.
Inbox Health's website has a strong backlink profile due to the PR received for both funding rounds.
This overview highlights two things:
They do not have an ongoing SEO and ICP-optimized content strategy and inbound engine, which means they are missing out on a huge opportunity for high-quality leads.
Their current success can be attributed, to a large extent, to their core team of A-players, as web visitors are interested in knowing who they are.
Paid Channels
Paid search
Inbox Health is running paid search ads on its homepage with keywords:
Free medical billing software
Medical billing
Inbox Health (branded keyword)
It doesn’t look like their team is running ads to any other pages.
Paid LinkedIn Campaigns
Despite their vast library of resources (guides and webinars), there only seem to be 3 ads for the same webinar (6 Steps to Prepare for Deductible Season).
There are currency no Facebook ads.
The 2 biggest takeaways from paid channels are:
LinkedIn Ads are used to convert new leads on their webinar pages. This is great, but since most of the webinars are on-demand, they could be scaling the ads.
Paid search is also very basic without product-page-specific ads for different value propositions.
Other Channels
Organic social media posts
On their LinkedIn profile, with 3,529 followers, you can find posts about their blogs, ebooks, webinars and recent announcements. The same content is also shared on Twitter (599 followers) and Facebook (318 followers).
Events
Inbox Health attends large conferences in their field with a solid strategy to make the most out of them:
Before the event, they invite visitors to book some time with their team.
They promote the event on their social media by offering visitors a book or other materials as a reason to stop by.
Conversion points on their website
The first thing I noticed on their website were dynamic pop-ups trying to convert visitors into subscribers or to schedule a demo call.
The website features a lot of lead generation content such as webinars and ebooks, but there is a lack of clear calls-to-action (CTAs) for accessing that content, unless a visitor goes directly to the relevant subpage.
Rather than creating new gated content, they should focus on building out customer journeys with conversion points on various pages of the website.
Top 3 takeaways and recommendations
Stop producing more content.
Content can fuel your growth, but you need to be smart about it. Rather than creating more content such as blogs, ebooks, and webinars, try to make the most out of what you already have. When devising a content strategy, examine all of the published blog posts and determine how to repurpose and rewrite them to target specific long-tail keywords.
Make it easy to convert
Include relevant CTAs wherever possible. Each blog post should have one, and every page should feature your primary CTA (in this case, a demo). Based on the stage of the funnel, visitors should book a demo, watch a webinar, download an ebook, or subscribe to your newsletter. For each page, ask yourself what the next step a visitor should take is and add that CTA.
Scale your paid channels
Concentrate on what works and repeat it until it no longer works. Instead of running one campaign here and there, identify the channel that converts the best and the content/messaging that it needs to feature. In B2B, LinkedIn is typically the focus for new, high-quality leads, while Google display ads work best for retargeting. However, it is dependent on your ICP - you must scale the channel where they convert the best.
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