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When Segments engaged, CAC was climbing quarter on quarter with no clear line of sight into why. The business was generating revenue but operating without the visibility or systems needed to scale it profitably and predictably. Paid, owned channels and the store were each doing a job in isolation. None of them was feeding the others a clean signal.
Meta campaigns lacked structure and creative was being recycled without a proper testing framework. Google Ads had never been properly built out as a channel. UGC production was inconsistent and reactive, so creative fatigue was a constant drag on performance. In a premium category, tired creative does not only lift CAC. It also trains the algorithm on the wrong idea of who the customer is.
Without a repeatable process for hooks, formats, copy angles and audience segments, the team could not tell a winning idea from a lucky week. Diversifying into search was overdue, but standing up Google Ads on top of a messy Meta account would only have added another channel to babysit.
Klaviyo had never been fully implemented. There were no welcome flows, abandoned cart sequences, post-purchase nurture or win-back strategy. Retention was largely left to chance despite a customer base with strong LTV potential. For a brand whose buyer is 35 and above and already loyal, that is a structural miss. The second, third and fourth purchase should have been a system, not a hope.
The Shopify store had never been through structured user testing. Landing pages were not optimised for conversion, the purchase journey had friction points that were silently killing performance, and there was no data-driven process for identifying and fixing them. Paid traffic was being sent into an experience that had never been interrogated with real user behaviour.
Madame Korner is a premium Australian skincare brand built for women 35 and above who want science-backed, results-driven skincare. The brand had earned strong organic word of mouth and a loyal repeat customer base, but growth had plateaued. The product was ready to scale. The infrastructure was not.
They needed a partner who could build a full growth engine across paid acquisition, creative production, owned-channel automation and on-site conversion, without compromising the premium brand equity they had spent years building. Segments came on board as that partner, owning paid media, UGC creative, Klaviyo, marketing automation and Shopify CRO from day one.
The existing customer already understood the brand. She had bought, she had stayed, and she was the reason word of mouth worked. What the business lacked was a system for welcoming her properly, bringing her back after a first order, and talking to her in a way that matched a premium ritual rather than a discount treadmill.
The new buyer had a different journey. She discovered the brand through paid social or search, landed on Shopify, and decided in a few seconds whether the page felt like the product. If creative was tired, if the landing page leaked, or if email never followed up, she left. Scaling meant serving both journeys at once: acquisition that did not wreck brand, and retention that did not leave lifetime value to chance.
Madame Korner grew Shopify revenue by 302% year on year over 12 months. That is the commercial headline, measured on Shopify against the same 12 month year-on-year window used on the homepage, not a 24 month period and not a longer window restated as a faster story. Twelve months is the published clock. 302% is the published lift.
Acquisition was measured on CAC and blended ROAS across paid channels, with the first quarter as the window for the CAC reduction. A 34% reduction in CAC in that first quarter, while blended ROAS sat at 4.2x and was held above 4x, is the published paid read. Email was measured as a revenue channel inside 90 days: whether it was the highest ROAS channel in the business, and what share of monthly revenue it carried. It was. It carried 38% of total monthly revenue within those 90 days. Shopify revenue was measured year on year over 12 months, at 302%. Together those reads showed the engine was not only spending more efficiently. It was also compounding through owned channels.
No other percentage is claimed. The clocks are part of the result. CAC is a first-quarter read. Email is a 90 day read. Shopify revenue is a 12 month year-on-year read. Mixing those windows, or stretching Shopify to 24 months, would be a different claim. This case study uses the published windows only.
Commercially, a 34% CAC reduction in the first quarter while holding ROAS above 4x meant Madame Korner could put more budget into a mix that was no longer eating itself. Paid was no longer climbing in cost with no line of sight. Blended ROAS at 4.2x across paid channels is the efficiency that sits beside that CAC reduction. Email contributing 38% of monthly revenue within 90 days, as the highest ROAS channel in the business, meant growth was no longer solely rented from ads. The 302% Shopify revenue lift over 12 months is what those operating changes added up to on the store.
The engine is the point as much as the numbers. Creative testing became a repeatable process. Klaviyo became a lifecycle. The store stopped silently taxing acquisition. Retention was no longer left to chance for a customer base that already had strong loyalty. Those are qualitative changes with a published commercial read: 302% Shopify year on year over 12 months, 34% CAC down in the first quarter, 4.2x blended ROAS, email as the highest ROAS channel within 90 days, and 38% of monthly revenue from email in that same 90 day window.
Segments cut our CAC by 34% in the first quarter while holding ROAS above 4x. They rebuilt our creative testing framework from scratch and finally gave us a repeatable process for beating ad fatigue. LTV-focused segmentation changed how we think about retention entirely.
Dave Evans, Founder, Madame Korner
The founder quote is the same one already on this case study. It is kept because it is the published client read of the first-quarter CAC reduction, the ROAS hold, and the creative testing framework. No other people are quoted. The commercial story is the 12 month Shopify number, the first-quarter CAC number, the blended ROAS, and the 90 day email numbers, sitting on top of a growth engine that paid, creative, Klaviyo and Shopify now share.
Segments came on board as a full growth partner, owning paid media, UGC creative, Klaviyo, marketing automation and Shopify CRO from day one. The work was built as a single engine. Creative fed paid. Paid landed on pages that had been tested. Email caught the people who did not buy, and looked after the people who did. Reporting tied CAC, ROAS and Shopify revenue together so the team could see what was actually compounding, rather than reconciling three different stories at the end of the month.
Madame Korner did not need another specialist for ads, another for email, and a separate opinion on the store. A premium skincare brand selling to women 35 and above cannot afford a growth stack that argues with itself. Paid that ignores the page will raise CAC. Email that ignores the first purchase will leave lifetime value on the table. Creative that does not look like the brand will train the algorithm on the wrong customer. The engagement was designed so those jobs sat in one operating rhythm.
The first phase was diagnosis: where CAC was leaking, which creative was exhausted, what the Shopify journey was doing to conversion, and how little of the customer lifecycle sat in Klaviyo. Diagnosis was not a long report. It was the input to a build. The second phase was foundation: campaign architecture on Meta, a proper Google Ads build, a UGC production cadence, and Klaviyo implemented end to end so welcome, abandoned cart, post-purchase and win-back actually existed. The third phase was conversion: user testing on key landing pages and the core purchase path, then redesign based on behaviour rather than opinion.
From there the work moved into a weekly operating rhythm. Creative was tested, not recycled. Flows were watched as a revenue channel, not a newsletter. Paid was judged on blended ROAS and CAC, not on a single ad's good day. The first quarter was the window used to read CAC. Ninety days was the window used to read whether email had become a commercial channel. Twelve months was the window used to read Shopify revenue year on year. Those clocks were chosen because they match how this kind of engine actually compounds. CAC can move in a quarter if the mix and the page are fixed. Email becomes a revenue channel inside 90 days if the lifecycle is built. Shopify revenue is a twelve-month year-on-year read, not a longer window dressed up as a faster story.
We rebuilt the Meta and Google Ads infrastructure with a structured campaign architecture and testing frameworks across hooks, formats, copy angles and audience segments. A consistent UGC production pipeline kept creative fresh without compromising the brand's premium aesthetic. Google Ads was built out as a full acquisition channel, diversifying the paid mix so Madame Korner was not only interruptible on social. Search gave the mix a second door for buyers who were already looking.
The testing framework is what the founder later pointed to as the missing piece. Ad fatigue is not a mystery in ecommerce. It is what happens when you do not have a process for replacing winners before they die. UGC gave the account a supply of real-product creative that still looked like Madame Korner. Recycled creative had been training paid on tired ideas. A production cadence, with tests across hooks, formats and copy, is how that stopped. Premium brand equity was treated as a constraint, not an excuse to avoid testing. The creative had to look like the product. It also had to be replaced on a schedule the algorithms could live with.
Campaign architecture mattered as much as the ads. Without structure, tests cannot be read. Audience segments, formats and angles were set up so a winning idea could be scaled and a failing idea could be killed without collapsing the account. Google was not bolted on as a side experiment. It was built as a full acquisition channel so blended ROAS and CAC could be read across paid, not only across Meta.
Klaviyo was implemented end to end, covering welcome flows, abandoned cart sequences, post-purchase nurture, cross-sell and upsell automations, win-back campaigns and full lifecycle sequencing. Email stopped being an afterthought. It became the system that greeted a new subscriber, recovered a cart, looked after a first purchase, and brought a quiet customer back. For a brand whose buyer is 35 and above and already loyal, that is not a nice-to-have. The second, third and fourth purchase should be a system.
Lifecycle sequencing mattered because Madame Korner's buyer does not treat skincare as a one-click novelty. A welcome flow, a post-purchase path, and a win-back are different conversations. Building them as one lifecycle, rather than a stack of disconnected campaigns, is what allowed email to be read as a revenue channel within 90 days. Flows were designed to match a premium ritual: useful, timed, and commercially serious, without turning the brand into a discount treadmill. Abandoned cart recovered demand paid had already paid for. Post-purchase looked after the first order so retention was not left to chance. Win-back gave a quiet customer a reason to return. Cross-sell and upsell sat inside that lifecycle rather than as random extra sends.
Owned-channel work was judged on the same commercial clocks as paid. Within 90 days the question was whether email was the highest ROAS channel in the business, and what share of monthly revenue it carried. Those are the published reads. They only become possible when Klaviyo is implemented as a lifecycle and watched as a revenue channel, not as a newsletter.
User testing was conducted across key landing pages and the core purchase journey. Landing pages were redesigned based on real user behaviour, so paid traffic landed in a stronger conversion environment. Friction that had been silent — the kind that does not show up in an ad account, only in a dropped session — was identified and worked through rather than guessed at. CRO was treated as part of acquisition, not a separate website project. If CAC is climbing, some of the answer is always on the page the click lands on.
Testing the journey, then rebuilding the pages that paid and email both depend on, is how the store stopped taxing every other channel. Paid and Klaviyo cannot outrun a purchase path that leaks. Madame Korner's store had never been through structured user testing. That was the gap. User evidence, then redesign, is how it was closed. The page and the path became part of the growth engine rather than a silent tax on CAC and on email conversion.
Day to day, the brand stopped running growth as a set of disconnected jobs. Creative had a production cadence. Paid had a testing calendar. Klaviyo had a lifecycle, not a send list. Shopify changes were made against user evidence. The team could look at CAC in the first quarter, blended ROAS across paid, email's share of monthly revenue inside 90 days, and Shopify revenue across 12 months, without reconciling three different stories. That operating change is the solution. The published numbers are what it produced.
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