The situation
Kavrayış Akademi sells online education in professional development. Course prices range from 3,900₺ to 14,000₺.
They had been running Meta ads for three years. The ad went straight to the course sales page, where there was a “Enrol now” button. Over the past year cost per lead had climbed to 186₺ and was still rising.
The problem
The offer didn’t match the stage of the relationship. You are asking someone seeing you for the first time to enrol in a 9,000₺ course. That isn’t a level of trust you can build at first contact.
A single-step structure only caught people who were ready. Only a small part of any market is “ready to buy right now”. The advertising could only sell to that slice; the rest was lost.
The ad copy described the course, not the outcome. “12 modules, 40 hours of video, certified.” Those are product features. Nothing said what would change in the participant’s life.
There were no audience lists. Thousands of people who browsed the site without buying were being collected nowhere.
What we did
Weeks 1-2 — We put a step in between. Instead of selling the course directly, we built a free live session: 60 minutes, focused on one topic, genuinely useful. The ad’s job was no longer to sell a course but to collect registrations for that session.
Week 2 — We simplified the registration page. The menu was removed, one action was left, and the form was cut to three fields (name, email, phone). The page was made to load in 1.6 seconds on mobile.
Weeks 3-5 — We split the campaign three ways. A session invitation for the cold audience, a reminder for people who registered but didn’t attend, and a course offer for people who attended but didn’t buy. Each stage got its own message.
Weeks 4-8 — We changed the creative. Short videos were produced with the instructor talking to camera. The hooks came from the questions participants ask most often — things like “can you start this after 35?”.
Weeks 8-12 — We scaled. As the cost per registration fell, the budget was raised gradually, in increases of no more than 20% every three days.
The result
Cost per lead fell from 186₺ to 92₺. Monthly leads rose from 192 to 438.
More importantly, lead quality rose: people reaching a sales conversation now knew the instructor, knew what the content was, and weren’t surprised by the price. The lead-to-sale rate rose from 4.1% to 6.8%.
The budget rose only 11%.
What we learned
On high-priced products, the job of advertising is not to sell but to clear the way for a sale.
Adding a step looks at first like lengthening the journey. In practice the opposite happens: if you ask people for something they’re ready to give (an hour of their time), asking for the thing they aren’t yet ready to give (their money) becomes easier.