How Lowering Our AOV Dropped Our CAC By 30%
How lowering our AOV helped us grow new customer volume 100% MoM, slash CAC by 30% and hit a record month.
Let me first preface this by saying that this strategy and idea is not for everyone. If you run an ecommerce business that requires first order profitability, or if you don’t have any real 3, 6 or 12 month LTV, then this might not be for you.
But if you do have wiggle room on the amount of dollars you can make today in exchange for more dollars tomorrow, then this could be for you. Especially if you are in some sort of consumable category like beauty, food, health etc.
We had been spending just around $400,000 per month on Meta for the last 6 months - some months we were able to spend more, some less. But on average, $400,000 per month.
We had become drunk off of the “Raise Your AOV Juice” to win on Meta. We drank way too much of it. We were convinced that we could eventually spend even more and acquire more customers if we just got them to pay us more on their first order.
And man…looking back…how wrong were we. No one tells you that your CAC will generally follow your AOV up and to the right. That is exactly what happened to us, the more we pushed AOV, the higher our CAC went.
Customer volume continued to go down and 6-12 month LTV volume (actual $) went down with it. And CAC just continued climbing and ultimately hurt LTV numbers, since it is the primary driver of LTV (think about what your LTV would be if you didn’t have a CAC in there…). The price at which you acquire a customer massively matters to your CAC:LTV equation.
We started to really feel the pain and it took about 6 months for us to realize we were digging in the wrong direction. So, it became time to make a big change in the business.
In this, I’ll walk you through why we decided to go with a lower AOV, how we did it and I’ll briefly cover some of the impacts (good and bad) of it, though that will be a separate post.
Meta is a Volume Platform, Not an Efficiency Platform
Read the header again.
Meta is the place you go to acquire TONS of customers. Not the place you go to acquire the most profitable customers.
It is likely the biggest platform in the world for you where a large percentage of your TAM spends your time and you are able to reach them easily. There is no other place in the world where such a big chunk of your TAM is hanging out on a daily basis.