Bonny Snowdon Academy, a UK-based brand specializing in colored pencil art, faced the challenge of welcoming more members to their academy while ensuring their continued membership.
Scaling Davids stepped in to implement a cross-channel campaign structure, create a comprehensive creative strategy, and balance the ad budget.

This comes down to paying attention to several elements:
A- Remember the ROI formula.
When it comes to a lead magnet strategy, two elements will mainly influence the success of the launch:
- How many leads you collect over a certain period of time/amount of money spent (Cost per Lead)
- How many of these leads will buy your offer (Conversion Rate)
ROI is made by the combination of these two elements, and the relationship between the two is key to analyzing.
B- CPL is important but can be misleading.
As a rule of thumb, if you run ads for Lead Generation, you will see a significant discrepancy in CPL depending on the lead magnet you use.
Take, for example, the situation of the Academy, after 11,427 leads were generated over a month.
CPL Wailist |
£2.45 |
CPL Challenge |
£0.38 |
CPL Live Event #1 |
£1.19 |
It might be easy to think that the Challenge is the most effective variant, as it has the lowest CPL.
The truth is that without having the Conversion Rate metric for each cohort, we can’t really know.
C- The Conversion Rate of a lead magnet is proportional to the Hype generated and Value Upfront generated.
A lead magnet will convert more, the more these two elements are present in the overall strategy and communication in the time span between the capture of the lead and the launch of the product.
- The hype generated. Think of it as how “cool” you are perceived by the new user during this period of time. Social Proof, engagement with the community, and direct touch points with your content, all of these elements contribute to creating hype around the upcoming launch.
- The value generated upfront. There’s a reason why a webinar usually converts more than a free checklist. Think of the amount of information you receive from both. Think of the commitment that you, as a user, need to put in to consume the information in both cases. Last but not least, how much value do you give away for free, without asking for anything in return?
The results of the academy:
Here you can see a full breakdown of the launch we performed.
The main takeaways:
- In this case, we found out that the challenge lead magnet was overall the best performing one.
A very low CPL was due to the very appealing value proposition promoted through the ads.
Also, the overall conversion rate was solid due to the high attendance and value provided during the challenge.
- The second best alternative was the live event, which had the greatest conversion rate registered.
- The waitlist funnel turned out to be the least convenient overall.
The next steps to perform on the next launch to optimize for ROI and volumes:
- Exclude the waitlist from the lead magnet list, to focus all the efforts on Challenges and live events.
- Due to the very convenient costs, we will focus the Paid Ads activities on the Challenge funnel.
We will promote the Live events organically and to the existing email lists, with the goal to reduce the overall CPL of that specific magnet. Given the high conversion rate, if the CPL would drop sensitively, the results would be potentially better than the challenge.
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