How Focusing on CAC Increased Monthly Revenue by 40% in Two Years

In the world of marketing, it's easy to get caught up in vanity metrics. However, this client success story shows the power of focusing on what metrics really matter, such as Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), and Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). Our client, a nationwide business providing localised services to homeowners, faced a significant challenge: increasing results without increasing their marketing budget. What made this client unique was their commitment to their staff's well-being. They prided themselves on offering a good work-life balance and wanted to enhance what they could offer their employees, not just focus on maximising sales at any cost.

Refining Targeting for Nationwide Impact

Instead of maintaining a broad nationwide focus, we hyper-focused on specific areas. This gave us greater control over the budget allocation, allowing us to concentrate resources on high-performing areas while developing targeted strategies for underperforming regions.

Optimising Paid Campaigns for Better Performance

We then turned our attention to improving our current campaigns. Our approach included:

• Testing ad creatives: Trying out different images, videos, and messaging to see what grabbed attention and converted best.

• Optimising landing pages: Making sure landing pages loaded quickly and made it easy for visitors to take action, reduced friction and made forms simpler.

• Retargeting interested users: Focusing on people who had already visited the site or interacted with content, as they were more likely to convert.

Beyond Surface-Level Metrics: Examining the Entire Sales Funnel

But our approach went beyond just working on performance campaigns where vanity metrics come into play. Thanks to our understanding of the full sales funnel, we looked at the whole sales process, asking ourselves: What was the experience like for leads once they'd converted?

Balancing Human Touch with Cost-Effective Automation

One crucial insight uncovered was that leads who we got on the phone were more likely to convert. Realising that leads were likely submitting more than one enquiry, we had to make contact with leads as early as possible to keep ourselves front of mind. To address this, the client internally increased the number of sales executives and improved incentives for calls and sales.

However, this approach presented a challenge. The business prides itself on providing a good work-life balance, and staff can't be available 24 hours a day. Simply increasing the team's workload would have gone against the company's values and potentially led to burnout.

Instead, we took a more balanced approach. We looked at automating more of the post-conversion experience, which allowed us to improve response times and personalisation without significantly increasing costs or compromising the staff's work-life balance.

We started giving leads a taste of the service by sending personalised communications by area so leads could learn more about the expert in their area who would be helping them. This included sharing relevant case studies and customer testimonials and clear steps on what would happen next: ie a call within 24 hours (48 if it was the weekend), a prepared quote and setting the expectation that they could expect the finished product in two weeks.

Impressive Results: CAC Reduction and Revenue Growth

The results of this were impressive:

• 64.40% reduction in CAC from September 2020 to August 2023

• 289.6 additional customers gained with the same budget

• 8.52 more customers per month

• £6,388.24 increase in monthly revenue

• ROAS improved to 19.55 (for every £1 spent, £19.55 in revenue)

The Power of a Non-Siloed Approach

These results underscore the importance of focusing on metrics like CAC; while clicks and impressions can be vanity metrics, by concentrating on critical indicators like CAC, ROAS, and CLV and optimising the entire customer journey, you can generate more revenue for your business—and that's the stat that matters most.

It’s probably important to note that these results were achieved through a comprehensive, non-siloed approach. By working with someone who understands and can work on the full sales funnel, you won’t be led by on one channel or metric. This holistic view allows us to see and optimise the entire customer journey, from first click to final sale and beyond.