Online design education / Webinar funnel + paid acquisition
SETKA
Cheap registrations were not the bottleneck. Attendance was.
Scale the funnel, not just its cheapest metric
January–October 2024 · Project-owner operating record
01 / The assignment
Project facts
- Engagement
- January–October 2024
- Retainer
- ~$1,160 / month
- Client media
- ~$1,900 initially; ~$6,900 on larger launches
- Workload
- 10–14 hours / week
- Product
- Four-month UX/UI course · $580
- Channels
- VK Ads, Yandex Direct, Telegram Ads, email, Instagram
Starting point & challenge
Instagram had approximately 1,800 legacy followers. The 2,400-contact email database was barely used. There was no systematic paid acquisition, and most sales came through referrals.
The first webinar attracted only 12% of registrants live. There were no structured reminders. A cheaper registration would not fix the loss between registration and attendance.
02 / Responsibility
Owned, delegated, client-side
Project owner
Acquisition strategy, funnel architecture, analytics, webinar structure and scripts.
Mark
Paid traffic management.
Kira
Approximately 30–40 creative variants per month.
Client team
Nastya owned methodology. Two sales managers handled qualification and closing.
03 / Work log
How the work unfolded
Early engagement · 2024
Fix the gap after registration
The first webinar’s 12% attendance exposed an absent reminder system. Three mandatory touches were introduced: 24 hours before, one hour before, and a post-event recording email. Live attendance stabilized around 34–36%. The recording email supported follow-up; it could not affect attendance at an event that had already ended.
This funnel correction mattered more commercially than a marginal reduction in registration cost.
April 2024
Establish a measurable control launch
$3,880 in media spend generated 1,847 registrations: $2.10 per registration. There were 628 live attendees, or 34.0% of registrants.
Thirty-six sales at $580 produced $20,880 in revenue. The reported live-to-purchase conversion was 5.7%. This became the control funnel for scaling, not a claim that revenue equalled profit.
Summer/fall 2024 · larger cohort
Scale without losing the downstream conversion
$6,900 in media spend produced 2,940 registrations at $2.35 each. Approximately 36% attended live; reported webinar conversion was around 7%. Total cohort sales were 74, generating $42,920.
Roughly 19% of sales could not be reliably tied to an acquisition source. Approximately 60 sales had sufficiently reliable paid attribution, putting media-only paid CAC at about $115. All 74 sales were not used as the paid-CAC denominator.
During the engagement · channel test
Stop an economically weaker path
Three design-focused Telegram influencer placements cost $1,400 and generated four tracked sales: $350 CAC. That was roughly three times the primary funnel’s confirmed paid CAC.
The course sold better when prospects saw the teaching method demonstrated in a webinar than through a creator recommendation alone. The test was stopped rather than presented as a channel that merely needed more spend.
04 / Operating infrastructure
What made the work repeatable
Reminder sequence
24-hour reminder, one-hour reminder and post-event recording email.
Control funnel
Targets for registrations, live attendance and sales rather than CPL alone.
Creative workflow
Approximately 30–40 monthly variants produced by Kira, with paid traffic managed by Mark.
Attribution
UTMs, promotional codes, checkout source survey and sales records.
05 / The difficult part
Failures, constraints & corrections
Registrations without attendance
Only 12% attended the first webinar. Structured reminders were missing; the process was corrected before treating lead volume as success.
Influencer economics did not justify continuation
$1,400 produced four tracked sales at $350 CAC. The experiment was stopped.
Not every sale had a reliable source
About 19% of sales lacked sufficiently reliable channel attribution and were excluded from paid-performance claims.
06 / Reported outcomes
Before & after
Webinar attendance
12%
34–36%
Registration CPL · measured launches
$2.10
$2.35 at larger scale
Total cohort sales
36 · April control
74 · larger cohort
Instagram followers
~1,800
9,700
Telegram subscribers
Not established
2,600
Email database
2,400
9,800
“The first cohort felt like we were assembling everything manually and hoping it worked. The second ran on a schedule, with targets for every stage.”
From this record to your scope
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