Halving Customer Acquisition Cost for a SaaS News Subscription Service

Client Overview

A subscription-based news platform had built a loyal readership and a growing subscriber base, but the cost of acquiring each new subscriber was climbing. With acquisition spend spread across search, social, and app install campaigns, inefficiencies compounded: targeting was broad, creative was not tested systematically, and budget was not concentrated where subscribers were cheapest to win.

Challenge

Subscription businesses live or die by the maths between acquisition cost and lifetime value, and the platform's CAC was trending in the wrong direction. Growth was possible, but not at a cost that made each new subscriber profitable.

The client approached us with a single clear objective:

Reduce Customer Acquisition Cost
Bring down the cost of each new subscription across every acquisition channel, without slowing subscriber growth.

Solution

Sharper Targeting Across Channels

We rebuilt targeting across paid search and paid social to concentrate budget on the audiences most likely to subscribe:

High-Intent Keyword Targeting
We focused search budget on high-intent keywords and applied extensive negative keyword management to eliminate spend on queries that generated clicks but not subscribers.

Audience-Specific Paid Social
On Meta, we created tightly structured campaigns with audience-specific messaging, supported by lookalike audiences built from existing subscribers.

Systematic Creative Testing

We implemented a structured creative testing program across channels, testing messaging angles and formats against subscription outcomes rather than clicks, and scaling the variants that produced subscribers at the lowest cost.

Google App Campaigns

With the app a key subscription channel, we launched Google App campaigns across Android and iOS to drive installs. Subscriptions were purchased in-app, so we sent in-app purchase events back to the campaigns as conversions, allowing bidding to optimise towards subscribers rather than installs.

Results

Within three months, the combined program transformed acquisition efficiency:

Customer Acquisition Cost Reduced by 50%
Tighter targeting, systematic creative testing, and conversion-optimised app campaigns halved the cost of acquiring each new subscriber in three months, restoring healthy margins on every new subscription.