You don’t usually hear someone talk about peptide serums, CAC and customer lifetime value in the same breath.
But that’s a normal day for Alexa Raff, CMO of goop, the wellness and lifestyle brand co-founded and led by Gwyneth Paltrow.
Raff, who joined goop last April after stints as SVP of digital at Hailey Bieber’s beauty brand rhode and CMO of apparel brand Jenni Kayne, anchors her team at goop to three core numbers: LTV, customer acquisition cost and new customer ROAS.
Rather than treating brand and performance as opposing forces, she leans on those metrics to keep everyone honest and aware of what marketing is actually doing for the business, she says on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
“Finance is key,” Raff says. “Let’s look at our ad spend at an order level by vertical and see where our spend is healthy [because] I want to know how that’s working for the bottom line as well.”
In practice, that means keeping a close eye on both blended and channel-level numbers, all the way down to CAC by vertical, whether that’s for goop Beauty, for example, or GWYN, goop’s in-house luxury clothing line. Raff and her team also use those metrics as a sanity check on the often too-good-to-be-true ROAS numbers that show up in platform dashboards.
Platform attribution will happily hand the win to a single channel, but Raff is less interested in who gets credit than in what’s actually happening with customer behavior.
A really high ROAS on paid search might look great, for instance, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. In fact, paid search usually gets way too much credit, she says.
“Someone at a high level on a different team will be, like, ‘Oh my god, paid search has a 30x ROAS, why aren’t we spending there?’” she says. “But no, that’s a function of the work we’re doing on organic and paid, because then people are Googling ‘goop’ and clicking on the first [link].”
Also in this episode: Using AI-powered tech to reduce pressure on goop’s creative team, what it’s like marketing celebrity-led brands, balancing brand growth with customer retention and why Raff drinks bone broth first thing in the morning (even before her coffee!).
