The Breakthrough Coach grew its audience 25% using popup forms

The Breakthrough Coach has spent 25 years teaching school administrators a hard lesson: you don't have to do everything yourself. Running the company's own marketing, it turned out, called for the same realization.

The closely-held business delivers professional development for the people who keep schools running—principals, district leaders, teachers, and faculty. Through its 2-Day Foundations Course, follow-up webinar series, and personal coaching program, The Breakthrough Coach reaches school administrators across the United States and beyond.

When Hannah Pancoast came on as marketing director in early 2025, she inherited an outreach operation with no marketing team behind it and an email platform that was past its prime. Their old software gave the company little visibility into what was landing, no way to capture new contacts from its website, and not enough flexibility to build campaigns worth sending.

Meanwhile, their global audience was growing and The Breakthrough Coach lacked the tools to keep up.

But by turning to Intuit Mailchimp, Hannah was able to pull the operation together into a marketing engine lean enough for a small team to run and strong enough to scale registrations toward an ambitious annual revenue target.

The challenge: Turning a global audience into a reliable pipeline

The Breakthrough Coach needed to grow course registrations across an audience scattered around the world, and its setup wasn't built for it. Administrators were finding the website, reading about the programs, and leaving, often without the team ever knowing they'd come by. With a small staff and revenue targets to hit, the company couldn't keep letting that traffic disappear.

The old platform wasn't helping. It reported little more than basic open and click rates, offered no guidance on what to improve, and gave Hannah few ways to design something that stood out. The website itself was also a gap.

"We didn't have any forms connected to our email marketing software to help increase our audience," Hannah says. Nothing was set up to collect contact information, so visitors came and went as strangers, with no dependable path from interested browser to registered participant.

And the audience raises another layer of difficulty. Because The Breakthrough Coach supports educators across the US and abroad, its messaging has to land differently depending on the geographic region.

The tools: Popup forms, SMS marketing, and marketing automation flows

The first solution was making sure The Breakthrough Coach understood who was visiting their website. Hannah built popup forms with messaging tailored to specific problems educators face, rather than pushing a specific program to buy off the bat.

"We made it about the pain points that our work addresses," Hannah says. "That's what resonates with people quickly and keeps them engaged. We want our potential customers thinking, ‘oh yeah, I do struggle with that,' rather than, 'here's our product; buy it now!’”

Framing the forms that way turned otherwise passive browsers into contacts who had raised their hand, so to speak. Visitors who recognized their own struggle were ready to share an email address, a phone number, or both.

From there, marketing automation flows took over the follow-up. Once a lead came in, Mailchimp automatically sent content built around those same pain points: blog posts, case studies, and customer success stories that the team publishes each week. Instead of a generic welcome, new contacts received something tied to the problem that caught their attention in the first place.

SMS marketing gave the company a second, more direct line to its highest-intent leads. Many of the people who fill out a form also opt in to texts. Hannah found that those contacts are the most likely to register for a course. A phone number is a strong signal of interest, and a channel that reaches administrators on the device they keep within reach all day.

And to make sense of their global contact base, Hannah leverages Mailchimp's analytics and audience tools. Tags and segments organize contacts by role and region, so a message meant for principals in one country doesn't reach guidance counselors in another. The reporting also shows which course-location links draw the most clicks, giving the registration team a read on where demand is strongest before they plan the next push.

Mailchimp’s platform was so intuitive, it didn’t require a marketing degree to understand. Hannah’s finance background created a strong foundation, and a dedicated Mailchimp Customer Success Manager met with her monthly to get her up to speed.

"I feel very confident in my ability to drive the tool now," Hannah says. "Mailchimp made the learning curve much easier."

The results: A rapidly growing and engaged audience

Popup forms delivered growth the old platform wasn’t capable of. After putting them in place, The Breakthrough Coach increased its audience 25%, pulling high-intent leads straight from the website traffic that used to disappear unidentified. In January 2026 alone, the forms brought in 69 new SMS subscribers.

Those forms now feed a meaningful share of the business. "About 25 to 50% of all of our registrations come from the popup form," Hannah says.

SMS turned into the fastest-growing channel of all. Between June 2025 and March 2026, the company's mobile audience grew more than 8 times over. Since the people who hand over a phone number tend to be the most engaged, that growth added a concentrated pool of the leads most likely to convert.

The capture-and-nurture system also made demand more predictable. The Breakthrough Coach now sees a steady flow of 20 to 30 webinar registrations every week, a dependable baseline it can build on as it works toward a $1.5 million annual revenue target.

Hannah figures she's only getting started, and SMS is the obvious place to push next. She still uses it sparingly, wary of sending too many texts and wearing out her welcome, but her Customer Success Manager keeps encouraging her to do more with the channel. She's planning to, with more messages sent with more intent.

Whatever comes next, the method won't change. Hannah lets the numbers point the way. "Your data is everything," Hannah says. "You want as much data as possible to make informed decisions about what to do next, and Mailchimp definitely gives you what you need."