New client acquisition strategy - thoughts?

brandvoice

We run a small agency doing A/B testing just for Shopify stores. Last year was our best - nearly hit the 200k mark thanks to a partnership with a growth group, but we ended that relationship last month because it was hurting the business in ways I won't get into.

Client acquisition has always been our weakest point. Once someone gets into a meeting with us, we close 60-75% of them, and when the fit is right they stay for at least a year. So the offer isn't the problem.

We're swamped with client work, so we hired a cold email agency to handle outreach. Two weeks in, three positive replies, two calls - but no clients yet. The stores were perfect fits, so cold email isn't dead for our niche.

Right now I'm handling all client fulfilment while my business partner tries to push the agency forward. He's still helping with delivery while I learn the ropes, which I need to improve.

We're looking for another acquisition channel and agreed on this approach: gather a small list of maybe 20-30 perfect-fit stores that have active LinkedIn accounts. Then contact them via email and LinkedIn with a recorded Loom video analysing their store's main conversion problems.

We'll keep reaching out until we get a clear no. Meanwhile, we'll chop that Loom into short-form content for Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn - building organic inbound. Once we get the final "not interested," we can upload the full video to YouTube.

What do you think? Is this solid or are we missing something?

tiktokguru

🎯 Targeted outreach was our turning point too. Not volume. we run a dev agency and had the same brutal issue - close rate on calls was great, but actually getting on those calls was a nightmare. 📹 The Loom idea is clever.

What really killed us was poor data quality - bounces everywhere, domain reputation tanked. 📧 Switched to Prospeo for data enrichment and our emails started landing again. They also offer mobile numbers if you want to add calling into the mix. Clean, verified data just made everything else click.

dusting

Loom audits have become the new 'let me pick your brain' request - every inbox is flooded with them, especially in ecom. The macro trend is clear: people are overwhelmed with free advice they didn't ask for. So I started treating outreach like a proof of work, not a pitch.

Instead of recording a video, I give prospects something they can actually test. Drop their current product photo into a tool I use, it spits out half a dozen high-end variations in new settings. Attach those to the email with a simple line: 'Here are five new angles for your next A/B test.'

For an A/B testing agency, that's not just a demo - it's a delivered result. Reply rate changed completely once I stopped asking for time and started offering something immediately useful.

24fire

You're describing that classic chasm between strong interest and actual commitment. It's a sign your product resonates, but the bridge between "this looks good" and "let's move forward" needs some structural work.

Rather than just refining headline copy or CTAs, I'd suggest stepping back and looking at the micro-behaviours of those warm leads. Are they engaging with specific content before ghosting? The real leverage often lies in timing and context - when someone's already signalling intent through LinkedIn activity or website visits, a cold email lands completely differently.

I shifted away from scattergun sequencing and started using a tool that picks up real-time LinkedIn signals. It let me focus my outreach on people who were already showing signs of being in-market. The result wasn't more replies - it was better conversations, and those converted at a much higher rate. That's the kind of targeting that turns polite nods into signed contracts.

analyticsjunkie

"Evaluate our current position"? You planning to call in a tactical strike on the competition, or did you just mean 'situation'?

growthgeek

Read your breakdown-it's spot on in one way, but you're still thinking like a service provider, not a growth operator.

The bird's-eye view you're describing is real. The old funnel of "free PDF → call → proposal" is dead because AI collapsed the information gap. Someone can now prompt a model to audit their site for CRO leaks, pull competitor ad copy, even generate a full landing page-all for a $20 sub. That kills the entry-level agency playbook.

But here's where I'd push back: you frame this as a threat to client acquisition. I see it as the death of lazy positioning. If your only value was "I know CRO tactics," you're already f*cked. The real challenge now is owning execution that AI can't replicate-decision risk, channel-specific nuance, or proprietary data loops.

The market isn't slower. It's just punishing anyone who sold information asymmetry. If you're still pitching audits as your lead gen, yeah, it's dead. But if you're selling outcomes tied to actual spend or revenue share? That's where the smart money moves.

You get what I mean?

metricsmadness

It's a strange paradox, isn't it? On the surface you'd assume there's a sea of ecom stores ready to be signed. But dig a little deeper and the pool of truly ideal clients is surprisingly shallow. And every agency with a pulse is casting the same net. The result? Those few prime catches are drowning in proposals, referrals, and cold outreach. They're not short on options-they're short on trust. So they default to the devil they know, even if that devil charges more or delivers less. It's the classic winner's curse of a thin market.

copycat

Your positioning already feels solid. I've found A/B testing for Shopify stores is one of those rare things that's easy to explain, directly measurable, and clearly tied to revenue - which explains your close rate and retention being that strong. The Loom plus multi-channel approach also clicks because you're effectively turning one outbound asset into both outbound and inbound content at the same time, instead of treating them as separate workflows.

I sit more on the marketing and outbound side myself. Been working with intent-based leads for US business owners across SaaS, agencies, roofing, home services, real estate, and local shops. Happy to chat if that's useful, no pressure either way.

ctrjunkie

That close rate is seriously impressive - way above what most people see. so honestly, that's not where you're broken. The leak is at the very top: getting qualified meetings in the first place. Once they're in the room, you're golden.

For a Shopify A/B testing agency, the patterns I've seen actually move the needle:

Teardown content. pick public Shopify stores doing between one and ten million a year, post short threads or carousels - "here are five tests this store should run, with predicted lift." Sometimes the store owner finds you. always the people who work with those store owners find you.
DM the store owners you just roasted. something along the lines of "hey, did a teardown of your site - would love your take on whether I'm right about the cart page." Because you've already done the work, reply rates are solid.
Partner with Shopify agencies that don't do CRO. They'll refer the testing work to you, you send back any platform-level stuff. much stickier than mastermind groups, and no revenue split drama.

A cold email agency to run outbound for you? usually ends in tears. ecom owners are hammered with cold outreach, and the agency won't know the Shopify world well enough to qualify leads. At your stage you probably want to own the top-of-funnel story yourself.

The manual cost of writing fifty personal-feeling DMs is what kills the teardown approach more than anything else. I've seen folk use tools to draft in their own voice from whatever's on screen, but I'm curious how other agency owners here handle that personalisation-at-volume trade-off without losing the human touch?

funnelhacker

Ran this exact playbook at my last place. Personalised Loom + repurposed content straight into a targeted list delivered a 4x lift in reply rates within the first 30 days. The compounding effect is real - each outreach clip gets recycled into ad creative, which feeds retargeting sequences, which then fuels lookalike models. If you're not stacking those channels end-to-end, you're leaving acquisition velocity on the table.

coopplayer

if LI and email are drowning your ICP, cold calling is your lifeline. That raw, one-to-one energy can't be ignored.

neonlights

So what's the actual numbers behind those "main conversion problems"? if the store owner has sat through three consultant pitches already and it's the same boilerplate about abandoned carts and slow load times, you need to bring something they haven't seen. Genuinely new - not repackaged. Are you surfacing a leak in their activation funnel they're blind to, or just recycling generic CRO advice? Real growth comes from finding the metric nobody's tracking

buggedout

the cold email is clearly working if you're getting positive replies and calls in week 2 - that's a solid start. most campaigns don't really hit their stride until week 3-4 once you've tested a few angles and the data starts telling you what messaging lands

the loom video approach is interesting but honestly that's a lot of manual work for 20-30 contacts. it works as a complement to cold email but i wouldn't rely on it as a main channel because you'll burn out fast doing custom recordings for every prospect. and recycling rejection looms as content is creative but the conversion on that is gonna be slow

if i were you i'd double down on the cold email side since it's already proving out and layer the loom stuff on top for your top 10 dream prospects only. not every store on your list deserves a custom video - save that energy for the ones that would actually move the needle

the linkedin play makes sense too but same thing, don't spread yourself across 5 channels when one is already booking calls

anyone running an agency and trying to figure out which acquisition channel to actually commit to, i'm on telegram @ deokotev if you wanna talk it through

chatbox

You've already got proof cold email works for your niche - three positive replies and two calls in two weeks is a solid signal. That tells me the channel isn't the problem. The Loom video idea sounds decent on paper, but when you're only hitting 20-30 stores at a time, that's a lot of effort per lead. What's actually happening on those calls that's stopping them from closing? I'd want to know what objections they raise after the call - even a simple GTM event tracking the outcome of each call could reveal the pattern.

brandvoice

Yes that's what I meant, can't edit it anymore :/

neonlights

question on your teardown strat: are you just critiquing what you find on screen? where does the depth come from that makes the store owner say, "oh that matters to me?".

working on a tool that does deep dives on stores (headless scraping) and then runs verification using a browser subagent to visually confirm initial findings and really liked the idea.