The Ad Buying Math Most Subscription Brands Get Wrong
Subscription Prescription | Weekly Doses to Boost Ecommerce RevenueShow Notes
Most subscription brands are setting a ROAS target and calling it a strategy. Trevor Crump, co-founder of Bestie Media, breaks down why that's leaving serious growth on the table - and what to do instead. What we cover: Why ROAS constraints strangle your Meta spend before you ever hit your ceiling How to calculate what a subscriber is actually worth - and use that to make buying decisions Lead vs. lag metrics: what ad buyers track vs. what actually moves the business The cash flow math founders miss when modeling customer acquisition Why discount-based offers produce lower-value customers (and what to do instead) How creative has become one of the most important targeting tools on Meta Guest: Trevor Crump, Co-Founder & CEO of Bestie Media LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trevorcrump/ Website: [https://www.bestiemedia.co/ Podcast: The Unstoppable Marketer
Subscribe to our newsletter for weekly doses just like this one: https://newsletter.thesubscriptiondoc.com
More from Subscription Prescription | Weekly Doses to Boost Ecommerce Revenue
Everyone chasing a 3:1 LTV to CAC ratio is chasing a number that came out of the pandemic ecom boom, and most brands could not survive it if LTV is measured in revenue dollars over 12 months. Until you define the margin and the time window, that ratio tells you almost nothing about the health of your business.
I hate aggressive discounting when you are trying to get someone in the door. But when a subscriber clicks cancel, increasing the discount is usually the right call, and the math is simple: most of those people are gone next month anyway, so one more profitable order is a win.
Most brands leave the post-purchase page empty, or they fill it with random add-ons nobody asked for. Meanwhile, merchants offering a monthly-to-quarterly subscription upgrade on that same screen are converting 20 to 30% of buyers in a single click.
Your subscribers are your most profitable customers. Run a 50% off sitewide sale for Black Friday and a lot of them will cancel just to grab it. That is the BFCM trap I see every year, and the fix is not to skip the sale. It is to layer your offers so subscribing stays the best deal on the site.
If you have to launch a hundred new ad creatives every week just to keep spend flowing, the problem is not your ads. It is your positioning.