This brand’s 6-step playbook for staying top of mind and making high-ticket sales
When you sell high-ticket B2B services, conversions don’t happen on the first click. Buyers need to trust that you’re the right partner before they’re ready to buy.
Founder of China research and digital transformation company ChoZan, Ashley Dudarenok, builds this trust with content. She has a strong social presence, publishes in-depth lead magnets, and has a deep dive newsletter that helps her prime leads to buy the brand’s products, including $12,000+ China innovation tours.
“We’ve always done content marketing. We produce high-quality content and people follow us online. They know to come to us when they need to buy.”
We sat down with Ashley to learn more about her strategy. We then broke it down into this 6-step email playbook that you can use in your business.
ChoZan: Bringing knowledge of China to multinationals
ChoZan transforms how multinational organizations from the U.S. understand China. They do this through learning expeditions, innovation research, keynote speeches, and boardroom briefings.
The company’s founder has a large social following as a China digital expert. The brand also has an email newsletter, run with MailerLite, that dives deep into China business topics and helps them connect with potential clients.
ChoZan uses multiple MailerLite features to support this strategy—from capturing leads to analyzing performance. These are the highlights.
ChoZan uses forms and pop-ups to collect email addresses on its website.
ChoZan automates welcome messages, lead magnet delivery, and re-engagement emails.
ChoZan sends a newsletter with the latest business and tech happenings in China.
ChoZan uses the MCP server to analyze campaigns and get insights to improve.
ChoZan gets more eyes on its emails by resending to people who didn’t open the first send.
1. Start with a social presence
Ashley Dudarenok built her audience to hundreds of thousands of followers on various social platforms.
Her expertise on China is valuable, unique and interesting. It’s a great topic for social reach.
But social media has its issues. The brand doesn’t own the relationship it has with its followers, and it doesn’t get much data about how people interact with its content.
The problem with social media is that you don’t own the relationship with the subscribers. Email marketing helps us maintain the relationship.
Email solves this by letting the brand contact people in their inbox. Plus, it provides more data about who is reading the emails and what they interact with.
When you post on social media, you just hope it hits the right people. But with email, you get the opportunity to send to specific people and then see who interacts and how they interact.
The key is to turn the people who follow you into email subscribers, which ChoZan does using lead magnets.
2. Create lead magnets that go the extra mile
ChoZan creates high-quality research reports on China’s innovation that it uses as lead magnets to get people onto its list.
While many lead magnets aim to be quick and lightweight, ChoZan goes the opposite way. Its 2025 China report is a 690-page book that’s packed with expert insight and insightful charts.
They use a landing page to promote the report. This has a MailerLite pop-up that triggers when someone has been on the page for a certain amount of time, as well as when they click the “Download report” button.
The pop-up allows ChoZan to collect essential details like the lead’s name, email and industry, so it can send targeted content later on.
ChoZan promotes these lead magnets through its social platforms. Anyone who clicks on the founder's link-in-bio page can see the offer.
Another way the brand gets subscribers is by allowing people to opt in when they fill out the contact form. They use a MailerLite form with a checkbox to collect this information.
3. Nurture new subscribers with automations
ChoZan has several email automations set up to nurture new subscribers: One for each of their lead magnets, as well as a general welcome email for newsletter subscribers. These automations provide relevant content and information when the subscriber is most engaged.
Each automation begins by providing access to the requested lead magnet and teasing the content, ensuring that people who open the email click through.
These messages also provide information about the products ChoZan offers, such as its learning expeditions. This boosts their visibility, which is useful even if the brand doesn’t expect people to make a purchase immediately.
4. Stay top of mind with the newsletter
ChoZan’s China deep-dive newsletter goes out twice a month with the goal of keeping its target audience engaged with the brand.
We use the newsletter to stay top of mind so that when the subscriber needs one of our products, they will contact us. We want to be the first company that comes to mind.
Since the newsletter is long-form, it allows the brand to go much deeper than its social content, making it an effective way to build the brand’s expertise.
ChoZan also promotes its products in the newsletter. Since the brand regularly gets a 60%+ open rate, which is impressive and far higher than our benchmark email open rate of 43.46%, a lot of people are seeing its offers.
The company further boosts the number of people who see its content with our autoresend feature. This automatically sends the email to people who didn’t open the original email. It’s a quick way for the brand to get maximum visibility on its newsletter.
Autoresend is a big timesaver as it makes it easy to send to people who didn’t see the first campaign.
5. Moving from data to insights with MCP
ChoZan uses our email marketing analytics features to discover what topics, offers and content-types work and then doubles down on these ideas.
The brand starts with our reporting dashboard, where it can see essential metrics like opens, clicks, and conversions.
But it goes further with our MCP server. This connects MailerLite data with AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT. Once set up, the ChoZan team can analyze all the data in the brand’s account with natural language prompts.
We can see exactly how people interact with automations and newsletters and then compare within both the same newsletter and automation and with other ones.
The benefit of this is that the tool goes beyond simply reflecting metrics and instead offers tailored advice and action steps that are specific to ChoZan’s business and audience. And since the tool uses natural language, the data and takeaways are super easy to understand.
You’re able to easily get a lot of data and it’s clearly presented. This lets us see what resources are being clicked and what leads to higher engagement.
6. Keep your list sparkly clean
ChoZan uses a re-engagement sequence to identify inactive subscribers, encourage them to respond, and then remove the ones who don’t from their list.
This is essential, as it’s better to have a smaller list that engages with your content than a large one that ignores your messages.
You’ll save on your email marketing bill, and inbox providers like Gmail and Yahoo will see the high engagement and be more likely to prioritize your emails in the inbox.
People like big databases. But I believe that if someone hasn’t interacted with you in 6 months, you need to start a re-engagement sequence. And if they still don’t interact, you should remove them. It’s better to have an active database of 8,000 people than a not-so-active one of 35,000 people.
Follow these steps to build trust with content
With their social media presence and in-depth content, ChoZan is able to build trust and stay top of mind so that clients know exactly who to contact when they need their service.
Follow the steps above to create a similar strategy for your own brand. We recommend starting with a lead magnet if you already have a social media presence or website traffic.
Find out more about ChoZan by heading to its website or by following the founder, Ashley, on LinkedIn. Or check out our guide for more about B2B email marketing.
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