How a $4M e-commerce business found $400K of hidden profit by re-pricing CAC across channels

SITUATION

Ukrainian home-products e-commerce. 18 SKUs. 65% repeat purchases. Blended marketing CAC = $42, LTV = $180. Owner: «We're stable but profit isn't growing, how do we get to 18% margin?»

What we found

The first two weeks: a CAC and LTV breakdown not by blended numbers but by acquisition channel and customer cohort.

Google Ads	CAC $28, LTV $220, 7.9×
Meta (FB+IG)	CAC $87, LTV $95, 1.1×
Email automation	CAC $4, LTV $310, 78×
Influencer placements	CAC $61, LTV $130, 2.1×
Direct / SEO	CAC $9, LTV $290, 32×

33% of the marketing budget went to Meta, a channel running at LTV/CAC 1.1×. Every dollar into Meta brand campaigns came back inside statistical noise. Email automation, the best channel in the business, got $4K/month against $14K on Meta. For comparison, according to State of Email 2025, 35% of marketers get $10 to $36 back per dollar spent on email, and another 30% get $36 to $50.

What we did

• Killed Meta brand campaigns (kept retargeting on warm list only)
• Tripled the email automation budget: 4 new sequences, SKU segmentation
• Doubled Google Ads spend on search-intent
• Kept influencer placements only on tier-A creators (LTV/CAC > 5×)

Result after 8 months

Marketing spend	−14% (from $42K to $36K/mo)
Revenue	+22% (from $4.0M to $4.9M run-rate)
Net margin	from 12% to 18%
Hidden profit (annualised)	$400K

Not cuts. Reallocation.

No cost line was cut radically. No new initiative was started from scratch. All that changed is where the existing budget goes. Numbers that used to be hidden inside blended averages.

And this is only one of three levels of analysis we do in the first 60 days of work. Cohort analysis and pricing recalculation are separate stories.

Details and amounts have been changed for client confidentiality; the essence and scale of the result are conveyed accurately.