They kept pushing a £350 product to people who had never heard of them. We changed the entry point.
Product strategy | Paid social | Funnel strategy | LTV
Entry product acquisition vs. direct hero-product acquisition
Entry-product buyers purchased the hero product within 60 days
Hero product revenue YoY
New entry-product cohort vs. cold hero-product acquisitions
The Client
A DTC home appliances brand with a premium hero product that solved a clear customer problem and had strong reviews to prove it. The product performed well organically and with warm audiences. But cold paid acquisition consistently failed to reach viable economics.
The Challenge
The hero product sat at a price point that required trust before purchase. Cold audiences consistently failed to convert at a viable rate. CAC on direct acquisition was running at 3 to 4x the viable threshold. The team had already tested new creative, landing pages, and audience strategies. None of it solved the fundamental problem: asking a cold prospect to spend £350 with an unfamiliar brand created too much friction.
Meanwhile, a complementary product with broader appeal and a much lower price point was being almost entirely ignored in paid acquisition. It converted well organically. Nobody had tested it as the entry point into the brand.
Objective
Break through the CAC ceiling on the hero product without touching its margins or positioning. Find a lower-friction, economically viable way to acquire cold customers into the brand.
What we did
Mapped the full product range against two questions: which products remove friction, and which products build LTV? The entry product clearly solved the first problem: lower price point, immediate utility, strong organic conversion, and significantly less purchase friction. Rebuilt the paid acquisition strategy around it as the brand's front door. Built a post-purchase sequence that introduced the hero product within the first 30 days, not through discounting, but as the natural next step once the customer had experienced the brand. Evaluated entry-product acquisition against downstream hero-product purchases and cohort LTV, rather than judging it only on first-order revenue.
The outcome
- CAC was 58% lower when acquiring customers through the entry product vs. direct hero-product acquisition
- 31% of entry-product buyers purchased the hero product within 60 days
- Hero product revenue grew 64% year-on-year without a single additional pound of direct spend on it
- LTV across the entry-product acquisition cohort was 41% higher than customers acquired directly through the hero product
"We'd been trying to convince strangers to spend £350 with us after one ad. Of course it wasn't working. The smaller product was the handshake we never thought to use." Head of Growth, home appliances brand
Different products in the portfolio can serve different growth functions. The mistake is expecting every SKU to acquire customers, maximize first-order revenue, and build LTV equally well. Brands break through growth ceilings when they stop evaluating every product in isolation and start thinking about the role each SKU plays across the customer journey.
