A 2024 vs. 2025 Digital Marketing Case Study
About Roastmasters
Roastmasters is a boutique green coffee importer built around the practice of cupping, the professional tasting process used to evaluate and distinguish coffees by origin, estate, and lot.
Where most retailers carry a handful of offerings and move on, Roastmasters sources small lots from individual estates and auction lots across the world’s top growing regions, giving customers access to variety and specificity that most buyers never encounter. A single origin like Kenya AA might yield several distinct lots, each with its own flavor profile. Roastmasters brings them all in.
As Barry Levine, the company’s founder, puts it: “Usually, in any given cupping of a particular origin, we find several coffees that we love, and we can secure small lots of many different coffees, be it three or four auction lots of Kenya AA or various Guatemala Antigua estates. We can offer our Roastmasters.com customers more choices and the opportunity to experience the wonderful array of flavors each particular coffee offers.”
That customer profile matters for understanding the marketing. Roastmasters’ buyers skew toward enthusiasts and home roasters who know what they want and are willing to pay for it. They buy on product, provenance, and the promise of something worth trying, not discounts or promotions.
3PRIME has been the digital marketing partner behind Roastmasters since 2022, managing Google Ads, Meta advertising, email marketing, and SEO guidance across that period.
Email Marketing
In 2024, Roastmasters was sending two emails a month to a list of around 7,000 subscribers. The results were solid: healthy attributed revenue, a strong click rate, and a list that was engaged. There wasn’t an obvious problem to solve.
But in July 2025, 3PRIME made one change: weekly sends.
The impact was immediate. In the six months between July and the end of 2025, Roastmasters generated more email-attributed revenue than the entire previous year. By year’s end, total email revenue had grown 145% year over year.
What Changed
The switch from bi-weekly to weekly was the primary driver. Roastmasters doesn’t run promotions or discounts on coffee. There were no big sale events, no coupon codes, no manufactured urgency. Just more frequent exposure to products people already wanted.
The email format also expanded in July. Where previous emails highlighted two new coffees and a single accessory, the updated format featured two new coffees, three regularly available coffees, a featured roaster, and three accessories. More products per email meant more chances to connect a customer with something they needed. The biggest purchases consistently came from new arrivals, particularly the rarer and more expensive coffees, but the regularly available inventory contributed steadily throughout the year.
Weekly sends were regularly driving thousands of dollars in revenue each week within months of the switch.
The list got more valuable, not just bigger
At the start of 2025, the list sat at around 7,000 subscribers. By year’s end it had grown to 10,000, a 43% increase. But list growth alone doesn’t explain a 145% revenue jump. Revenue per send grew 55% year over year, which shows a more engaged list responding more consistently, not just a bigger one receiving more mail.
Average order value also ticked up year over year, reflecting customers spending more per transaction as their buying habit strengthened.
A note on open rates
The 2024 full-year open rate and the 2025 full-year rate are not comparable as written. Mailchimp introduced bot filtering that removes Apple MPP opens, and the 2024 data is only partially filtered. The cleanest apples-to-apples comparison available is July through year-end: 16.16% in 2024 versus a full-year 2025 average of 15.74%. Engagement held essentially flat while frequency doubled and revenue nearly tripled.
Click rates dropped slightly year over year. With 58% more sends and nearly triple the revenue, that’s expected. Not every subscriber needs to click through every week.
Holiday
The holiday season drives Roastmasters’ biggest email revenue of the year. Both years used the same seven-send structure: a pre-Thanksgiving email, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and weekly sends through the shipping cutoff. Black Friday focuses on coffee and accessories. Cyber Monday focuses on roasters, grinders, and accessories, and it’s the one time each year that any promotions run.
In 2025, that same seven-send structure produced 92% more revenue than 2024. The weekly cadence built throughout the year had primed the list heading into the holidays, and customers were already in the habit of opening and buying.
Search Ads
3PRIME has managed Roastmasters’ Google Ads account since 2021. Over that time, the strategy has evolved through consistent testing, regular input from the Roastmasters team and Google Ads reps, and a willingness to question what was working.
For most of 2024, the account leaned heavily on Performance Max campaigns. The results looked fine on paper: high click volume, strong conversion rates. But something wasn’t adding up. The Roastmasters team flagged that they remembered better performance from Shopping campaigns years earlier, before 3PRIME came on. When the team looked back at the historical account data, the difference was clear.
In 2025, 3PRIME shifted spend away from Performance Max and into traditional Shopping campaigns, while also adding dedicated search campaigns for green coffee and Behmor roasters. Shopping campaigns allow targeting by product and margin in a way Performance Max doesn’t. Performance Max was driving plenty of conversions, but disproportionately for lower-priced coffee. Redirecting that budget toward Shopping put more spend behind higher-margin roasting machines, where the real revenue lived.
The numbers reflect the shift. Year over year, total conversion value grew 80%, while spend increased 136%. ROAS came in at 8.34x. Impressions grew 160%, clicks jumped 262%, and average cost per click dropped 34%. The conversion rate fell year over year, which looks like a step backward until you understand why. Performance Max was inflating conversion counts with cheaper, easier purchases. Shopping prioritized value over volume.
The holiday season showed this most clearly. From November through December 2025, search ads generated 210% more conversion value than the same period in 2024, while cost per conversion dropped 40%.
One note worth acknowledging: Miva continues to obscure revenue tracking back to specific channels, and that issue remains unresolved. The conversion values in this case study come from Google Ads’ own attribution.
Paid Social (Meta)
3PRIME reduced Roastmasters’ total Meta ad spend by nearly 30% while generating nearly the same number of purchases. Cost per acquisition dropped roughly 27%, cost per click fell 23%, and cost per thousand impressions dropped by more than half. Reach increased 35%. Across both years, campaigns generated over 82,000 website clicks and more than 5.7 million impressions.
Building a real funnel
The biggest structural change was adding a dedicated green coffee campaign. Previously, paid social had been weighted toward retargeting, going after people who had already shown interest in high-ticket roasting equipment. That’s a valuable audience, but a narrow one. The green coffee campaign opened a wider top-of-funnel entry point by targeting users interested in green coffee beans rather than just roasters.
The green coffee campaign delivered the highest click-through rate and the lowest cost per acquisition in the account, making it significantly cheaper to bring a new customer into the Roastmasters ecosystem than any other campaign running at the time.
As that top-of-funnel audience grew, retargeting improved alongside it. Retargeting CPA dropped roughly 30% year over year, with consistent conversion volume despite a 55% reduction in retargeting spend. A larger, more engaged audience flowing into retargeting campaigns meant those campaigns had to work less hard to close.
Because Miva doesn’t integrate with Meta, paid social carries no direct revenue attribution for Roastmasters. The performance story here runs through efficiency metrics rather than attributed revenue.
Organic Search
3PRIME doesn’t manage SEO as a standalone retainer for Roastmasters, but the paid search work and organic performance are closely connected. Understanding which keywords convert in Google Ads creates a practical priority list for organic placement, and in several cases the team acted on that directly.
Two terms stood out. “Home coffee roaster” and “green coffee beans” were both proven converters in paid search, which made their organic rankings a real business concern. 3PRIME supported URL updates, title tag revisions, content improvements, and helped implement live customer reviews through ShopperApproved. Roastmasters earned the number one organic ranking for the home coffee roaster category and reached page one for green coffee beans.
The broader organic numbers reflect a site that’s building real momentum. Organic sessions grew 27% year over year, from 1,586,882 to 2,019,215. Organic revenue grew 62% year over year. Engaged sessions from organic traffic were up 37%, and organic key events grew 64%.
Total site revenue across all traffic sources grew 38% year over year.
What the Numbers Add Up To
2025 was not a frictionless year for Roastmasters. Tariff pressure on green coffee imports created real cost volatility, and the team responded with transparency rather than silence, publishing a dedicated tariff page on the website and linking to it in emails during the peak of the uncertainty.
Against that backdrop, total site revenue grew 38%. The channel results didn’t come from a single big campaign or a surge in budget. They came from a year of decisions that built on each other: a more active email program that conditioned the list before the holidays, a paid search restructure that prioritized margin over volume, a Meta funnel that got cheaper to run as the top-of-funnel audience matured, and organic rankings that captured demand the paid channels had already proven was there.
For a boutique ecommerce business in a niche category, that kind of year-over-year progress reflects what consistent, well-reasoned marketing management actually produces.
Case study prepared by 3PRIME Web Solutions | 3-prime.com