How We Turned Final Strike Martial Arts' Free Trial Into a $2.50 Offer and Cut Cost Per Lead 40%

A Murrieta martial arts studio was paying $52 a lead to give away two free weeks. Charging pocket change for three weeks cut that to $31 and produced the best lead month of the year.

Client Overview

Final Strike Martial Arts is a family studio in Murrieta, California, run by Michael Robles. Programs run from preschool through adults, and the front door is a trial offer: come in, try a class, see if your kid takes to it.

The setup

• Meta and Google Ads, roughly $2,500 a month on Meta and $1,200 on Google

• Lead capture, booking and follow-up all on GoHighLevel

• Studio software is Spark, which does not talk to GoHighLevel natively

The audience

Parents in and around Murrieta with kids from four to teens. They're not comparing dojos on price. They're deciding whether their kid needs something structured, and most of them have already tried a sport that didn't stick.

The goal

Fifteen new enrollments a month, at a cost per enrolled student between $200 and $250. Michael set that ceiling himself, and it's the number we've measured against ever since.

The Challenge

The free trial was expensive

A free two-week trial sounds like the lowest-friction offer you can run. It was pulling leads at $52.10 on Meta, which for a local studio at $2,500 a month is not a business. Worse, free attracts people who never intended to show up.

Follow-up was leaking

Lead-to-contacted sat at 17% against a healthy range of 30 to 50%. A2P text registration took nearly three months and one rejection before it cleared, so for the first stretch nothing automated was reaching anyone. When texts finally did fire, the reminders went out with the appointment date blank, sometimes twice.

The cause turned out to be one wrong token. The messages used {{appointment.date_time}}, which is not a valid GoHighLevel merge field, so it rendered as nothing at all. Copy-pasted from a template, then inherited by every workflow built after it.

The calendar overbooked itself

Michael's team caught this before we did. Five four-to-six-year-olds got booked into the same Wednesday class because the calendar cap was set to six per day, a placeholder from setup that nobody expected to hit. Then show rate settled around 50%, which is normal for a free-trial offer and still means half the studio's prepared slots sat empty.

Our Approach

Charge something. Michael brought the idea himself: a three-week trial at $2.50 with a free uniform, capped at the first 25 families, themed around the country's 250th anniversary. We built it, moved every ad to it, and retired the old free-trial funnel. $2.50 is not revenue. It's a filter.

Keep the payment off the form. We deliberately left the lead form free with no payment wall and collected the $2.50 by phone after the lead came in. Friction where it filters, not where it blocks.

Fix the token, then everything downstream of it. We swapped every appointment reference to the valid {{appointment.start_time}}, audited all three live workflows for the same paste, confirmed the location timezone, and dropped the daily booking cap from six to three so no instructor walks into five Little Dragons again.

Stop feeding video that wasn't working. Michael films his own content and three of the four videos were running at $54 to $86 a lead. We shifted weight to statics, which came in at $31.46 blended.

Build the reminder pressure. A 72-hour confirm-or-drop check to free the calendar, plus a "your welcome packet is ready" message before the appointment. Small nudges, aimed squarely at that 50%.

The Results

Meta, before and after the July 6 offer change:

Cost per lead fell 40%. Click-through rose 25%. Cost per click dropped 22%.

July produced 78 leads, the best month in the account, on the same budget that had produced 44 in June.

Across the full run, March 1 to August 23: $12,288.85 spent, 288 leads, $42.67 blended.

The Number That Matters

Leads are not enrollments. Michael's ceiling was $250 per enrolled student.

• Target: $250

• May, 30-day actual: $244

• The $2.50 promo: $146

That last figure is 42% under target, though it rests on three enrolled students, so treat it as a direction rather than a rate.

Then in August the studio ran a back-to-school split test: a free two-week trial against a paid offer at $49 for the first month with a uniform and $25 donated to the child's school. Meta was set to move budget toward whichever produced volume at the lower cost. The paid offer took 13 leads at $28.53. The free one took zero.

Twice now, on two different offers, charging beat free.

Top-Performing Creative

Statics ran at $31.46 a lead. Video ran at $50.51.

• Video 4: 71 leads · $32.28 per lead · $2,292 spent

• Video 1: 58 leads · $54.11 per lead · $3,138 spent

• Static 2 (July): 35 leads · $29.09 per lead · $1,018 spent

• Video 3: 22 leads · $72.57 per lead · $1,597 spent

• Static 2 (June): 18 leads · $26.00 per lead · $468 spent

Video 4 is the interesting one. It's the highest-volume ad in the account and the only video that held a static-like cost. One of four landed, which is roughly the hit rate you should expect, and it's why you test four.

Google Ads

Google carried steady volume the whole way: 124 conversions on about $6,036 across the weeks we can account for, blending to $48.68. Performance Max and non-brand Search traded the top spot week to week, with conversion rates running 3 to 13%.

Two gaps are worth naming. The account was suspended for a week at the start of June and we appealed it back. And one week in July reported no conversion data at all.

What We're Working On Now

Show rate is the open problem, not lead cost. Around half of booked intros walk through the door, and at $146 an enrollment the cheapest way to more students is no longer cheaper leads. It's the families who already said yes.

Michael's read on the $2.50 leads was that 10 to 20% converted, and his staff wanted to aim upmarket. So the current test is positioning toward PTA parents at $49 rather than volume at $2.50. We're running both and letting the enrollment number settle the argument.

The Bottom Line

Free is not the lowest-friction offer. It's the offer that attracts people with nothing at stake, and a studio pays for that twice: once in the lead, again in the empty mat time.

Two dollars and fifty cents cut Final Strike's cost per lead by 40% and their cost per enrolled student to $146. The price was never the point. Asking for anything at all was.