Site conversion
0.97%→2.73%
§ THE CLIENT
A luxury skincare company founded in 1948, now sold across North America, the UK, Germany, and Asia. Three generations of family leadership, a proprietary ingredient with a genuine origin story, and a name built over decades on live TV shopping — where the founder herself became a beloved on-air personality.
By early 2025 the brand faced a challenge common to legacy DTC: a strong product and a loyal older customer base, but a digital operation that hadn't kept pace.
Industry
DTC premium skincare
Revenue
~$20M
Founded
1948 · heritage brand
Engagement
90-day intervention
§ THE CHALLENGE
A diagnostic review surfaced a cascade of interconnected problems. None were catastrophic in isolation. Together they were quietly draining budget, eroding trust, and blocking the brand from its next stage of growth. The e-commerce site was converting paid traffic at just 0.97% — roughly a third of the Shopify average.
◉
Inflated, opaque reporting. The agency claimed 11.7× ROAS on Meta. Cross-referenced against Shopify sales, the numbers didn't reconcile — one "winning" campaign had generated $918 in net sales against $600 in spend.
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Zero audience segmentation. 27,000–39,000 email subscribers, no demographic data captured. A 60-year-old loyalist and a 37-year-old first-timer got the identical newsletter, offer, and messaging.
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A friction-filled store. ~100 SKUs with no hierarchy; 80%-off ads landing on generic pages; a popup firing on top of the promo; a $99 free-shipping threshold that surprised buyers at checkout.
◉
Underleveraged automation. Klaviyo used as a basic email sender, not the lightweight CDP it could be — indoctrination, cross-sell, browse-abandonment, post-purchase, VIP and win-back flows missing or switched off.
§ THE APPROACH
Rather than overhaul everything at once, we ran a focused 90-day intervention on the highest-leverage constraints first — diagnostic-then-prescribe: fix what's leaking before adding more water to the bucket.
01
Agency audit & transition
A forensic review flagged fraudulent like-purchasing suppressing organic reach and campaigns optimized for clicks instead of purchases. Brought ad management in-house with structured coaching.
02
Klaviyo flow architecture
Rebuilt the automation strategy — welcome, indoctrination, abandoned-cart and checkout, win-back (moved to 90 days, founder voice), cross-sell, browse-abandonment, post-purchase and VIP — with a framework for ongoing subject-line testing.
03
Segmentation & data strategy
Captured birth-year data via an incentive campaign, enabling age-cohort targeting so a 37-year-old prospect sees different creative than a 55-year-old loyalist. Synced Klaviyo segments to Meta for exclusions and lookalikes.
04
Creative diversification
A structured approach — multiple hooks across multiple angles, clear naming conventions and UTM tracking — replacing a handful of untested creatives with inconsistent attribution.
05
Founder-led storytelling
Coached the charismatic third-generation leader on short-form storytelling for TikTok, Reels and Shorts. A three-generation family narrative no competitor can replicate — and cost-effective to produce.
06
Ambassador program design
An opt-in structure to activate the brand's most passionate customers as nano-influencers through affiliate links — no upfront payment, authentic peer-to-peer content segmented by age.
§ THE RESULTS
| Metric | Before | After | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Site conversion rate | 0.97% | 2.73% | +181% |
| Meta ads ROAS | 5× | 11–14× | +140–180% |
| Sessions (YoY) | Baseline | +79% | +79% |
| Ad management | External agency | In-house w/ coaching | Full control |
| Audience segmentation | None | Age-cohort targeting | Activated |
| Klaviyo utilization | Basic ESP | Flows + segmentation | Expanded |
The conversion jump from 0.97% to 2.73% moved the brand from well below the Shopify average into the range benchmarks consider strong for established DTC beauty — roughly 2.8× more orders from the same ad spend. On paid media, returns went from ~5× to a consistent 11–14× on the same budget. Combined with 79% more sessions, the brand is now compounding growth across every stage of the funnel.
“Before your guidance we were seeing around 5× on every dollar of ad spend. After what you showed us, we started to see 11, 12, even 14×. It was an amazing experience.”
— Digital Lead, 77-year skincare brand
On the record
The first deliverable was the truth about the numbers. Before optimizing a single flow, we reconciled the agency's reported 11.7× ROAS against actual Shopify sales — and it didn't hold. You can't fix what you're mismeasuring. This case is anonymized at the client's request; the figures are real and independently reconciled.
§ THE TAKEAWAY
This brand had something most DTC companies spend millions trying to manufacture: a 77-year heritage, a genuine origin story, and a family leader with the charisma to carry it forward. The work wasn't reinvention — it was removing the friction between what the brand already was and the customers waiting to discover it.
That's almost always where the hidden revenue lives: not in more spend, but in the leaks between the traffic you're already paying for and the sale.
How much of your ad spend is leaking before the sale?
A Two-Day Teardown finds where the money is actually stuck — starting with whether your numbers are even real — and names the one to three moves that unstick it. You keep the map either way.