Whisky Loot: Subscription Box Scaled from $300 to $10K+ a Month at Target CPA

The challenge

Whisky Loot’s model depends on two things. It has to keep acquiring subscribers at scale, and it needs one-off gift purchases whose cash flow pays for that acquisition. The brand had to scale subscription campaigns at a profitable CPA and build a cold-traffic funnel for gift boxes.

The ad account worked against both goals. The pixel had been trained badly, nothing was labelled, and it was impossible to tell what had already been tested.

What we did

Clean data from day one. We dropped the old pixel, even though it had about 3M impressions behind it, and created three new ones: subscription boxes, gift boxes and the online store. Each serves a different buyer, so this kept their audiences separate and made the lookalikes more relevant.

A labelling system. Every campaign was tagged by product (subscription or gift), funnel stage (TOF/MOF/BOF), budget type (CBO or non-CBO) and optimisation (traffic, conversions, DPA). Management got faster, and the client could read their own account.

Testing audiences quickly. We segmented customer data by product, AOV and LTV, and used page engagement and video-view audiences as seeds. A CBO test of 16 ad sets of 1% lookalikes, with 9 ads each (144 ads), cut weak audiences fast. In week one the subscription test spent $463.88 and returned $677 (1.46x) on the first purchase alone, with most subscribers expected to stay at least two more months.

Scaling a time-sensitive gift promo. We put the winning audiences behind an existing Father’s Day post. It hit 6.4x ROAS in week one. In week two we raised the budget from $50 to $533 a day and held 5.42x, beating the client’s target of 50 sales in two weeks.

Scaling subscriptions on LTV. A subscriber’s lifetime value is $200–$400 over 3–6 months, so we accepted a lower first-purchase ROAS in exchange for volume. August closed with 84 subscriptions at 1.97x. By mid-September the account had 254 sales at 1.12x on $12,400 spend, and the weekly budget had grown from $600 to $4,300 in five weeks. From September, seasonal promotions (Whisky Advent Calendar, Black Friday, Christmas gifts) kept cash flowing while subscriptions scaled.

Results

• Ad spend scaled from $300 to over $10K a month, within the $50 target CPA
• +610% weekly budget in five weeks
• 6.4x peak ROAS on the gift promo, and 5.42x while scaling it more than tenfold
• Recurring subscription revenue took the client past 7 figures for December
• The growth and CPA numbers helped the client close another funding round