Most paid search programs capture existing demand: they reach people already searching and send them to checkout. That model breaks down for a new B2B product, because buyers do not search for something they do not yet understand. The largest contracts come from institutions, but the people who influence those purchases are individual users who need to try the product first.
Lubble’s founder led this program for AJE (American Journal Experts) and its Digital Editing product, with two objectives: sell individual subscriptions and build a pipeline of institutional buyers for the B2B sales team. The rest-of-world campaigns that fed the free trial cost $11,098 over six months, 3.7% of a $300,000 annual budget.
Why Demand Generation Instead of Cold Outreach
Outbound sales (cold email, cold calls and purchased contact lists) starts conversations quickly, but much of the sales team’s time goes to prospects who are not ready to buy or are not a fit. Demand generation reverses the direction: paid media and content educate the market until qualified buyers contact sales. It takes longer to produce the first leads, and those leads arrive informed and already engaged. In this program, enterprise demand came from product adoption, not outbound.
| Cold outreach | Demand generation | |
|---|---|---|
| Who starts the conversation | The sales team | The buyer |
| Time to first leads | Shorter | Longer |
| Effort to launch | Lower: a contact list and an email sequence | Higher: content, a free trial, email journeys and lead scoring |
| Lead quality | Mixed: many prospects are not ready or not a fit | Higher: buyers arrive informed and already engaged |
| Sales time spent on poor-fit leads | High | Low |
The Challenge: Selling a New Product to Institutions
Academic editing has traditionally been a human service. Professional editors refine manuscripts for researchers, many of whom write in English as a second language. The service is high quality, but it is expensive and difficult to scale.
AJE Digital Editing offered a different model. It ran on a large language model trained on more than 800,000 expert-edited manuscripts across 2,000 areas of study, built for the discipline-specific language and citation standards that general-purpose AI tools often miss. AJE had used the technology in its own operations since 2018, four years before ChatGPT’s public release. It scored a manuscript’s English in seconds and returned a fully edited paper in under 10 minutes.
During this program, it was sold in two ways:
- An $80,000 annual institutional license for universities and research groups (B2B)
- A $130 individual subscription for researchers (B2C)
The institutional license was the larger opportunity. Consider a university whose 400 researchers publish 1,000 English-language papers a year, 800 of which need English editing. At an average of $400 per paper, an $80,000 budget covers 200 papers and leaves 600 without support. The same $80,000 gives every researcher unlimited Digital Editing, at $200 per researcher per year.
The core business set a high bar. In Google Ads, professional editing returned 23.66x ROAS: 5.58K purchases worth $2.02 million, at $15.28 per conversion. Shifting those buyers to a lower-priced product would carry a real cost.
Leadership needed answers to three questions:
- Would researchers trust AI editing with scholarly work?
- Would it erode the higher-margin professional services?
- Could it scale beyond individual researchers into institutions?
How Digital Editing Launched
Digital Editing launched in March 2021 under a new sub-brand, AJE Digital, on a dedicated microsite at digital.aje.com. That was 20 months before OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022, so most researchers had no frame of reference for an AI editor. The sub-brand drew on the trust AJE had built since 2004, and it gave the team room to test pricing and messaging without changing the core site.
Because AJE’s core channels were mature and profitable, the first wave of activity was limited to Brazil:
- A 50% introductory discount to test price sensitivity. Digital Editing dropped from $90 to $45 per submission, and Digital Translation from $150 to $75.
- House display ads on partner publishing sites, shown only to visitors in Brazil.
- Paid search in Portuguese and English against Grammarly and Writefull, on a starting budget of $1,500 a month.
- Emails to lapsed customers and leads in Brazil.
- Invitations for lapsed institutional groups to start a 30-day trial, with account managers setting up trials and following up.
A discount can drive trial, but it cannot show whether a lower-cost AI product will displace a premium human service. Answering that question started with an analysis of AJE’s existing buyers.
Understanding the Buyers
Professional editing served two core buyer groups:
- Principal investigators and professors (B2B). Repeat buyers who ordered about once a quarter through their institutions, on long research and publication cycles.
- PhD candidates and thesis writers (B2C). Mostly one-time buyers with short decision cycles, driven by deadlines.
AJE’s B2B sales deck profiled the institutional buyer as a principal investigator: a lab head who publishes often, mentors earlier-career researchers and looks for editing and communication resources that can help students.
Both groups purchased with urgency. Over three months, professional services recorded 22,523 conversions outside China, worth $8.41 million, and 45.49% of them converted on the same day the buyer first engaged.
Search was built to capture that urgency. A new category of product, sold to institutions, needed a different approach.
Testing for Cannibalization
Before scaling spend, the team tested whether buyers would substitute $130 Digital Editing for $400 professional editing.
We ran a controlled A/B test on branded Google Ads traffic for the keyword “AJE.” Each group landed on a different entry page, and both completed checkout in the same cart. The primary success metric was total orders.
| Version | Landing page | Price |
|---|---|---|
| A | Digital Editing, LLM-powered academic editing | $130 subscription |
| B | Professional Editing, human-led academic editing | Up to $1,000 per manuscript |
Even with an AI option priced up to 90% lower, 68.6% of branded search buyers chose human-led editing and 30.4% chose Digital Editing. Among translation buyers, 21.7% chose Digital Translation.
The results pointed to product segmentation rather than cannibalization. Digital Editing served a different buyer, and it needed its own route to market.
Building Demand Instead of Capturing It
The program combined paid media, owned sites and email to introduce the product before asking for a purchase.
Competitor keywords routed to a free trial
We targeted high-intent competitor keywords, including Grammarly, Editage, Enago and Papertrue, to reach researchers already comparing editing tools. These clicks went to free trial and educational landing pages rather than checkout. Some ads led to whitepapers and webinars, such as a guide to five ways AI impacts libraries, without a trial offer.
Display for earlier awareness
Lookalike audiences built from AJE.com visitors and competitor site traffic introduced Digital Editing earlier in the decision cycle. A second campaign targeted audiences similar to AJE’s Gold customers, as well as active professors, the faculty who often buy through their institutions. An animated display ad offering a free manuscript edit earned a 7.12% click-through rate.
Popups on owned sites
OptinMonster popups on AJE.com and JournalGuide.com offered researchers 30 days of free editing in exchange for a name and email address, reaching researchers who were already on those sites.
Optimizing bids for registrations
In February 2023, the campaigns switched their optimization target from purchases to registrations, so Google bid for free trial sign-ups rather than first-visit checkouts. A new site launched in March.
A 30-day email journey in Salesforce
Each free trial sign-up entered a subscription journey in Salesforce that moved users from interest to commitment in three steps:
- Start the free trial.
- Follow up with a 30-day email journey.
- Close with a time-limited discount.
The journey went through several versions, and a 50/50 random split tested a variation against the main path.
From Free Trial to Enterprise Pipeline
The free trial also served as the top of the B2B pipeline. Institutional buyers entered the same funnel after repeated exposure, a free trial and educational content, then identified themselves through a group registration form.
Lead scoring
Marketing qualified leads were large universities and research institutions rather than individual consumers. Each lead was scored on three criteria:
- Job title, for decision-making authority and purchasing influence
- Institution, for organizational scale, budget and fit
- Number of engagements, for depth of interest across touchpoints, not a single action
Sales handoff
Leads that met the threshold became marketing qualified leads and passed to business development reps, who qualified them into sales qualified leads for the B2B sales team. Marketing and sales worked from a shared MQL definition, which kept the handoff consistent.
Sales enablement
Account executives pitched institutions with a deck built around a problem universities understand: authors in non-native English-speaking countries lose research time to language editing and cannot afford human editing for every paper. Pricing per researcher per year made Digital Editing easy for an institution to budget for.
The Results
Over six months, lead scoring generated 1 to 2 MQLs a week, and BDRs qualified about 23 of them into sales qualified leads at $483 each. In several cases, including universities in Taiwan and Uzbekistan, a single lead became an institution-wide $80,000 subscription. Within one year, the program generated $360,000 in B2B SaaS contracts.
The free trial engine behind the pipeline
The B2C funnel improved quickly. Before the change, the share of free trial users who converted to a paid subscription within 30 days ranged from 1.82% to 5.26% a month. From March through June 2023, after the move to a registrations target and the new site, it held between 7.69% and 8.85%.
On average, 5.5% of free trial users converted to a paid subscription. A sample week in the new funnel:
| Stage | Weekly result |
|---|---|
| Google display and paid search ads | 7.12% click-through rate on the free trial display ad |
| Product page | 9,753 clicks, 9.6% email capture |
| Salesforce free trial journey | 941 free trials |
| Paid subscription (B2C) | About 47 subscriptions at $9.80 cost per order |
| Enterprise form fill (B2B) | 1 to 2 marketing qualified leads |
| BDR qualification (B2B) | About 1 sales qualified lead at $483 (23 over six months) |
Over six months, the rest-of-world campaigns and popups generated 6,017 free trial sign-ups on $11,098 in total spend. Popups on owned sites and prospecting display delivered the largest share.
| Source | Sign-ups | Spend | Cost per sign-up |
|---|---|---|---|
| OptinMonster popups (AJE.com, JournalGuide.com) | 2,352 | $822.00 | $0.35 |
| Prospecting display | 1,796 | $1,241.67 | $0.69 |
| Professor display | 873 | $832.70 | $0.95 |
| Competitor keyword search | 823 | $7,512.49 | $9.13 |
| Brand awareness display (five months) | 173 | $689.33 | $3.98 |
| Total | 6,017 | $11,098.19 | $1.84 |
Competitor search cost the most per sign-up, yet most paid subscriptions traced back to free trials started from Google Search.
Cost per order for B2C subscriptions fell 93%, from $154 to $9.80, and the program generated 180 new subscriptions a month. The improvement came from funnel design rather than bid adjustments alone: the funnel turned awareness into product usage before asking for payment.
Why It Worked
The A/B test gave the business the confidence to invest in the product. Once the data showed that Digital Editing added buyers rather than displacing them, spend increased and the product received its own funnel. Free trials and a 30-day email journey brought individual researchers into the product, and lead scoring turned the right institutions into sales conversations. Professional services retained their buyers, and Digital Editing became a second revenue stream with its own enterprise sales channel.
Key Takeaways for B2B SaaS Teams
The program did not depend on a large budget. The campaigns feeding the free trial averaged about $1,850 a month, and the results came from a funnel that educated buyers before asking them to commit.
For a new B2B product, a free trial can do more than convert individual users. With lead scoring and a clear handoff, it becomes a reliable source of qualified pipeline for the sales team.
Check the days-to-conversion report in Google Ads. If most conversions happen on day zero, your campaigns are built to capture existing demand. That works for a product people already want. A new product, particularly one sold to institutions, needs a path that educates first.
Lubble builds programs like this through our paid search and lifecycle email services, and we connect every trial and lead to revenue with GA4 and CRM integrations. Every engagement starts with a free audit.
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