Inside Back Pocket's outreach engine for school partnerships

Back Pocket built a workshop program that teaches middle and high school students practical coping skills, and needed schools across the country to know it existed. HubXpert built a cold email program that turned outreach to principals, counselors, and district leaders into booked conversations.

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24.5K+

Emails sent to schools

75%

Cold email open rate

Meetings booked

Company BACK POCKET

Location WISCONSIN, USA

Industry EDUCATION

Services

COLD EMAIL

Live preview Website Link

Summarize this case study with

A EDUCATION practice

About Back Pocket

Back Pocket helps middle and high schools deliver practical mental health and coping skills programs that students can apply immediately. Its workshop-based curriculum covers stress management, emotional regulation, and confidence building through lessons built for educators to run inside an existing school schedule.  

As demand for student mental health solutions grew, Back Pocket wanted school districts, counselors, and student services leaders across the country to know its program existed. Reaching those people meant proactively introducing the brand to schools that had never heard of it, inside a buying process that runs through several stakeholders before a decision gets made.

What You Will Learn:

1 How to reach a buying committee of principals, counselors, and district administrators instead of a single decision maker
2 How to introduce a new program to schools with no prior awareness of the brand
3 How to keep outreach consistent across hundreds of institutions without losing personalization

1
Decision making ran through several people at once.

Educational purchases typically involve principals, counselors, district administrators, and student support teams, which made outreach more complex than reaching a single buyer.
2
Awareness had to be built from nothing.

The company needed a proactive strategy to introduce its programs to schools that did not already know the Back Pocket name.
3
Buying cycles ran long.

School purchasing decisions often required multiple conversations, several rounds of approval, and budget considerations before anything moved forward.
4
There was no infrastructure to reach hundreds of schools.

The organization needed a repeatable process capable of engaging institutions at that scale consistently.
5
The goal was qualified partnerships, not just replies.

Back Pocket needed to connect specifically with schools already investing in wellness, SEL, and mental health initiatives, not simply generate volume.

1
Prospect research built for education.

Built targeted lists of principals, counselors, district leaders, and SEL decision makers, rather than a generic list of school contacts.
2
Messaging built around school challenges.

Wrote outreach tailored to the problems schools actually face around student mental health, engagement, and wellness outcomes.
3
Deliverability optimized for education inboxes

Implemented best practices to maximize inbox placement and engagement specifically across educational institutions.
4
Multi-touch follow-up that kept the door open.

Built structured follow-up sequences that nurtured awareness over time instead of relying on a single email to land.
5
Ongoing optimization on real engagement data.

Refined messaging, targeting, and campaign structure based on how schools were actually responding.

Phase 1

Cold Email Strategy

Defined the outreach approach for reaching multiple stakeholders inside each school district.

Phase 2

Prospect Research

Built lists of principals, counselors, district leaders, and student support coordinators.

Phase 3

Audience Segmentation

Grouped contacts by role so messaging could speak to what each stakeholder actually cares about.

Phase 4

Email  Copywriting

Wrote messaging tailored to student mental health, engagement, and wellness challenges.

Phase 5

Outbound  Campaign

Launched and managed campaigns, adjusting for deliverability and engagement across institutions.

Phase 6

Opportunity  Generation

Converted engaged school contacts into booked discovery calls.

24.5K+

Emails sent to schools

75%

Cold email open rate

Meetings booked

Reached thousands of education decision makers. Introduced Back Pocket's program to a large base of targeted education professionals who had not encountered the brand before.

Generated qualified school conversations. Produced meaningful discussions with schools actively exploring wellness and SEL initiatives.

Booked 10 meetings. That is 10 discovery calls with qualified educational stakeholders, produced consistently across the engagement rather than in one burst.

Achieved above-average engagement across the board. A 75% open rate, 5.8% click rate, and 4.4% reply rate, all ahead of what generic outreach typically produces in education.

Built a repeatable partnership pipeline. Established a process that can scale to future district and school acquisition, not just this one campaign.

Before

Manual

No proactive strategy for reaching unfamiliar schools
Outreach could not account for multiple decision makers
No repeatable process for engaging institutions at volume
Long buying cycles with no structured follow-up
No way to filter for schools investing in wellness or SEL

After

Automatic

24,500+ emails sent across targeted school contacts
75% open rate, 5.8% click rate, 4.4% reply rate
10 meetings booked with qualified stakeholders
Multi-touch sequences keeping awareness alive over time
A repeatable outreach process for future acquisition

By building lists and messaging around each role separately, principals, counselors, district leaders, and student support coordinators, instead of treating a school as a single contact.
Over a 4-month engagement, multi-touch follow-up sequences produced 10 booked meetings, most of them with schools that had no prior awareness of Back Pocket.
Deliverability optimization built specifically for educational institutions, combined with messaging tailored to problems schools already recognize around student mental health and wellness.
No. Segmentation targeted schools actively investing in wellness and SEL initiatives, but outreach also built awareness among schools that were not yet looking.
No. Segmentation targeted schools actively investing in wellness and SEL initiatives, but outreach also built awareness among schools that were not yet looking.
Roughly a year from first engagement to the numbers referenced in this case study, staged in phases from discovery through handover rather than delivered as a single release.

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Inside Back Pocket's outreach engine for school partnerships