One Campaign for a Two-Month Replenishment Cycle
A direct-to-consumer skincare brand sells a $54 moisturizer with a 60-day replenishment cycle. Blended return on ad spend is 1.9, new-customer cost per acquisition is $41 against a $30 target, and 90-day repeat purchase rate is 38%. The entire paid program is a single always-on prospecting campaign with 40 rotating creatives, all leading with a 20% first-order discount. There are no audience exclusions, so customers who bought last week are still being served acquisition ads. The email list holds 120,000 addresses with a 22% open rate, and lifecycle flows exist but are generic. Leadership wants to scale paid spend 30% next quarter while improving new-customer efficiency, and the growth lead has proposed simply adding 20 more creatives to the existing campaign to find winners.
1. Map this customer journey and propose how budget and messaging should differ by stage.
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The core error is treating a replenishable product as a one-time purchase. The journey has five stages, each with a different job:
- Unaware or problem-aware (prospecting): education on the skin concern, not a discount. Discount-led acquisition attracts deal-seekers with low repeat intent, which helps explain 38% repeat.
- Consideration (retargeting): reviews, ingredient proof, before-and-after or trial-size offers for people who engaged but did not buy.
- First purchase: keep a welcome offer, but test value framing (free shipping, gift with purchase, routine bundle) against 20% off.
- Onboarding (days 0 to 14): usage tips and expectation setting, mostly owned channels, with a small paid retargeting layer only if email is not converting.
- Replenishment and loyalty (days 45 to 70): the natural paid moment. Serve subscribe-and-save or bundle messaging to recent buyers near the depletion window.
A defensible split for this size of program is roughly 55 to 65% prospecting, 10 to 15% consideration retargeting, and 20 to 30% retention including replenishment. The judgment point is that paying acquisition prices to reacquire a customer who bought 20 days ago destroys margin and inflates reported new-customer cost.
2. How would you implement suppression and separate the measurement by stage?
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Suppression is mechanical but must be sequenced.
- Create a purchasers audience from the platform pixel or CRM and a separate 180-day customer list. Exclude all purchasers from prospecting for 45 to 55 days, then release them into a replenishment campaign with distinct creative and bidding.
- Exclude subscribers from replenishment offers entirely; they are already on a schedule.
- Keep a small retargeting pool of cart and product-view users who did not buy, with a shorter window, since skincare consideration is quick.
Measurement must stop being blended. Report new-customer CAC in the prospecting campaign, cost per repeat order in replenishment, and 90-day repeat rate by acquisition cohort as the north-star quality metric. Blended ROAS of 1.9 hides whether growth is coming from high-value first orders or from re-buying existing customers at full media cost.
Validate with a holdout: suppress a randomized 10% of recent buyers from replenishment ads for one cycle and compare repeat rate. That tells you whether the retention spend is incremental or just harvesting customers who would have returned anyway.
3. Evaluate the growth lead's proposal to add 20 creatives to the existing campaign.
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More creative in a structurally broken campaign accelerates the wrong thing. The proposal treats a targeting and journey problem as a creative volume problem, and it will produce more discount-led impressions to recent buyers.
That said, creative variety matters, so redirect the effort rather than reject it. Build a creative matrix by stage and message: problem-education, ingredient proof, review or social proof, offer variants, and replenishment or bundle. Test roughly three messages against three formats within each stage, which yields a far more informative set than 20 undifferentiated discount ads.
Establish a read rule before launch: a creative must reach a minimum impression and conversion threshold, and be judged on new-customer CAC and downstream repeat rate, not CTR alone. Discount-led ads often win on click-through and lose on lifetime value, which is exactly the trap this brand is already in.
Sequence the work: fix exclusions and stage structure first, then let creative testing run inside clean campaigns. Otherwise attribution between old and new creative is confounded and the test cannot answer the question leadership actually asked.