HARBOR
Rebuilding subscription acquisition after a plateau
A DACH subscription commerce brand where paid growth had flattened for three quarters while spend kept rising.
Challenge
Blended CAC had drifted up quarter after quarter. The account was running a handful of proven creatives long past their useful life, and every attempt to refresh them lost to the incumbent within days.
Strategy
We separated the account into a scale block and a permanent testing block with a fixed budget share, so new angles could accumulate evidence without competing against a mature winner for delivery.
Execution
Angle research from support tickets and cancellation reasons, a variant taxonomy across hook, proof and ending, and a monthly production cadence. Landing pages were rebuilt to match each angle rather than pointing all traffic at one generic page.
Result
Tracked as blended CAC, first-order contribution margin and 90-day retained revenue, reported monthly against the agreed baseline.
Learnings
The winning creative was not the bottleneck — the shared landing page was. Message match recovered more margin than any bidding change made that quarter.