The Challenge
Thrive Academy has been helping healers, coaches, and therapists build and scale their businesses online for over 20 years. Founded by Sharon and Jesse, the academy had successfully transitioned from offline to online and had run multiple challenge funnels before approaching Scale For Impact. They knew the model worked. Their problem was efficiency.
Cost per lead was running between $21 and $25. For a funnel designed to fill a challenge that feeds into a live summit — which in turn sells a $5,000+ coaching package — that cost per lead was making it difficult to scale advertising profitably. The landing page was converting at 22% on cold traffic, leaving the majority of visitors unconverted.
Thrive Academy came in with a strong conviction that their existing advertising angle was the right one. The Scale For Impact team’s first move was to challenge that assumption.
The Strategy
The fundamental principle the team applied here is one that holds across every funnel they work on: never assume the current angle is the best angle. It may be working. But working and optimal are rarely the same thing.
Rather than making incremental adjustments to what Thrive Academy already had, Scale For Impact started with a clean slate on the headline. The headline is the single highest-leverage element of a landing page — it determines whether a visitor reads anything else at all. Everything else on the page can be perfectly executed, but a weak headline renders it invisible.
The team ran structured headline testing across seven variations over two to three challenge cycles, testing each against cold traffic and measuring landing page conversion rate as the primary metric.
The Execution
Scale For Impact rebuilt the landing page using proven layouts from across their client portfolio — layouts that had already been validated across multiple niches and audiences. Testimonials were added strategically to increase trust at the point of decision.
The headline testing process was rigorous and sequential. Each variation was tested against the same audience and traffic source to isolate the headline as the variable. The winning headline — found after approximately seven tests — moved landing page conversion from 22% to 35%.
Critically, the headline improvement wasn’t just a landing page win. It fed back into the advertising creative. When you discover which emotional angle resonates most strongly with your audience at the point of conversion, that angle becomes the foundation for your ads as well. The headline and the ad creative became aligned around the same core message, reinforcing each other across the funnel.
The result was a cost per lead that dropped from $21 to $10 — a 52% reduction — while simultaneously delivering higher quality leads, because both the ad and the landing page were now speaking more precisely to the right person.
The Results
Cost per lead reduced from $21 to $10. Landing page conversion increased from 22% to 35%. The improvement in lead quality meant the challenge was better positioned to fill the summit pipeline and generate enrolments into Thrive Academy’s $5,000+ coaching programme.
Key Learnings
Never assume your current angle is optimal. Thrive Academy had conviction in their existing approach — and it was good. But seven headline variations later, a significantly better angle emerged. Assumptions are the enemy of conversion rate optimisation.
The headline is the highest-leverage test you can run. Nothing on a landing page changes conversion more than the headline. Before testing anything else — design, images, CTAs — test the headline exhaustively.
Ad creative and landing page must speak the same language. When the winning headline was found, it became the foundation for the advertising creative. The coherence between ad and page is what drives efficiency at scale.
Cost per lead is a quality signal, not just a cost metric. Halving the cost per lead while improving the quality of those leads is what makes a funnel truly scalable. Lower cost alone is meaningless if the leads don’t convert downstream.
