Est. reading time: 6 minutes

The Situation

Amanda Earnest is an early Seint Beauty artist (formerly Maskcara), running color-matched foundation sales as a solo operator inside the brand’s direct sales ecosystem. Every lead expects a personalized product recommendation based on skin tone, undertone, and finish preference. The work does not scale the way standard ecommerce does. Each match is a custom response, not a checkout flow.

When we started in early 2020, Amanda was hand-writing every color match email. Capacity capped at maybe twenty or thirty leads a day before quality started slipping. Past that, lead volume stopped being an asset and became a backlog.

The ceiling was not traffic. It was throughput on the back end.

The Primary Challenge

The personalization that won Amanda’s customers was the same thing that capped her capacity, and the obvious growth move would have made the problem worse. Adding paid social to a back end that maxed out at thirty leads a day would not have grown the business. It would have buried it. The channel had to wait until the infrastructure could absorb what it produced.

Key Outcomes

• 42,000+ Typeform leads generated from early 2020 through the end of 2024
• Daily lead handling capacity expanded from 20 to 30 per day to hundreds, with the same personalized response on every match
• Blended cost per lead of roughly $0.90 across Meta and TikTok, down from roughly $3 when Meta carried the volume alone

Our Approach

Email automation came first because it removed the throughput ceiling. Paid social came second because it finally had something to feed into. TikTok came third because the channel mix needed diversification once Meta cost per lead started climbing.

Each layer was built ahead of what the next one would produce. Amanda’s business never had to slow down to wait for the system, because the system was already in place before the volume arrived.

Execution Highlights

Email Automation Built for Personalization at Volume

The first system we built was a Mailchimp automation that let Amanda select attributes from a drop-down menu and auto-populate a fully personalized color match email. What used to take ten minutes of writing dropped to thirty seconds of selection. Daily capacity went from dozens to hundreds, and the recommendation on the other end stayed just as specific as the hand-written version.

The system did not stay static. Products changed. Pricing changed. Matching logic changed. Every time Amanda’s catalog expanded, the automation had to be rebuilt to match. Over the course of the engagement we expanded the setup repeatedly to keep pace with growth that was already happening. The infrastructure was never finished. It was a road being paved under a car that was already moving.

UGC and How-To Creative Built for the Platform

With email infrastructure in place, we opened the funnel. The creative strategy skipped polished brand spots and lifestyle stock entirely and leaned on UGC and how-to content instead. Amanda demonstrating the product, walking through application techniques, showing real results on real faces. The content looked like what people were already searching for, which is why it converted.

Meta as the Foundation Channel

Meta ads ran from early 2020 onward, driving Typeform leads at an average cost per lead around $3. The channel gave the operation a consistent lead source the moment the back end could handle it.

One UGC ad from this period produced 89 leads on just $299 in spend. That is what founder-led creative does on a direct sales budget, and it became the template every ad after it followed.

TikTok as the Scale Multiplier

In August 2022, we added TikTok. The creative approach carried over but was tightened for the platform. Cuts got shorter, pacing got punchier, and text got burned in. TikTok scaled aggressively and pulled the blended cost per lead down to roughly $0.90, volume Meta alone could not have reached at that price.

Results

The results compounded over five years rather than spiking and fading. Lead volume grew steadily as the channel mix expanded, and cost per lead trended down as TikTok delivered scale Meta could not produce on its own.

Every one of the 42,000+ leads was a completed color match request, the same high-intent action on both channels. TikTok did not lower the blended number by feeding the funnel cheap clicks. It lowered it by producing the same action at a fraction of the cost.

The back end held the entire time. Capacity that started at twenty or thirty hand-written emails per day finished at hundreds of personalized matches, and at peak the system supported a business generating over $100,000 in monthly revenue.

In Amanda’s Words

“Nick has been so great to work with! When you run your own brand there are a hundred little things pulling at you, and he took the whole marketing side off my plate. My emails, ads, and landing pages finally feel like they’re working together. I’m an artist, so I care that my marketing looks good, but Nick made sure it also brought in real sales. That was the part I could never quite crack on my own.”

– Amanda Earnest, Beauty by Amanda Earnest

Constraints We Navigated

• Solo operator structure, meaning every system had to work without additional headcount
• Direct sales ecosystem rules and product structure, which limited some standard ecommerce mechanics
• Constantly changing product catalog, pricing, and matching logic, requiring ongoing infrastructure rebuilds
• A personalization expectation on every lead, meaning automation could not feel automated
• Live lead flow throughout, so infrastructure work happened with the engine running

Strategic Takeaway

Most direct sales artists run on the lifestyle content and templated marketing their brand provides, which caps performance at whatever those templates were designed to produce. The artists who break past that ceiling operate like real DTC businesses. Founder-led UGC built for the platforms it runs on. Paid social structured for efficiency rather than reach. Back-end infrastructure that can absorb the volume the front end generates.

The compounding here came from running all three together. UGC gave the ads something authentic to convert against. Channel diversification kept cost per lead moving in the right direction as Meta efficiency naturally compressed. Email automation absorbed everything the funnel produced without losing the personal touch that won the customer in the first place. None of those pieces wins on its own.