---
title: Raising AOV by leading cold traffic with a bundle ("sell a system")
slug: aov-flagship-bundle-offer
summary: Smart Marketer's Boom case — switching paid traffic from a best-converting single lipstick back to a $79 three-stick trio via pre-sell articles roughly doubled new-customer AOV ($38→$78) while new customers grew 33%, without touching the site; why picking offers on conversion rate alone misleads.
domain: marketing
tags: [aov, bundles, offers, ecommerce, pre-sell, paid-social, meta-ads]
related: [homepage-above-the-fold-optimization, web2app-upsells-and-downsells, cac-payback-and-30-day-cash, ltv-to-cac-by-human-touchpoints, list-offer-copy-hierarchy, persona-landing-pages-and-listicles, aov-and-upsells-on-meta-cac, price-testing-dtc-offers]
sources: [yt:zt2p-pxQeAs, yt:O3ylG4lt03c, yt:FQe6eOTMhU4]
updated: 2026-10-24
---

# Raising AOV by leading cold traffic with a bundle ("sell a system")

## TL;DR
- Pick the cold-traffic offer on the **whole picture** (AOV, CPC trend or offer fatigue, new-customer volume), not on the best product-page conversion rate.
- **Sell a system, not a product.** Boom put **~90% of budget** behind a $79 three-stick trio. Other products are pushed later via retargeting and email.
- Send top-of-funnel traffic to **pre-sell articles** ("5 makeup tips for older women") that feature the bundle and other kits, not straight to a product page.
- Result reported by Smart Marketer: new-customer AOV **~$38 → ~$78** (about $82 on the trio itself), new customers **+33%** a month, CPC stable. No site changes, only ads, messaging, targeting and offer.
- When creating new products, ask what **complements what you already sell** so it can join a higher-AOV system.

## Details
**The trap.** Boom (Ezra Firestone's pro-age makeup brand) had moved its paid traffic to a single lipstick. That stick had the best e-commerce conversion rate in isolation, so it looked like the obvious winner. But it fatigued fast: CPC rose month after month despite creative refreshes. AOV stuck at about $40, and buyers of one stick rarely came back for the full routine.[^1][^2] John Grimshaw says the brand grew on the trio as its core offer, and the single-stick focus worked against that positioning.[^3]

**The fix.** When Smart Marketer took back the account on 1 March, it moved back to pre-sell articles and straight-to-product-page ads, both promoting the trio. CPC stayed flat and conversion rate dropped slightly. Trio AOV held around $82 for five months, and blended new-customer AOV went from about $38 in February to about $78 by April, with new customers up 33% a month.[^3][^4] His lesson: optimise for conversion rate alone, or AOV alone, and you'll likely pick wrong.[^5]

**Molly Pittman's three moves.**[^6][^7][^8]
1. **Bundle for top-of-funnel.** The $79 trio is a "sweet spot" and nearly equals the new AOV. About 90% of spend goes to it, and à-la-carte products are sold via retargeting and email ("you have the trio, you'd love BoomSilk"). A flagship system simplifies the journey and scales because people understand the three products work together.
2. **Pre-sell articles over product pages.** Content like "5 makeup tips for older women" reaches women who aren't shopping that day. It still pushes the $79 trio, and it carries other bundles, which is how some carts reach $200. The messaging went back to storytelling about ageing (going grey, how skin changes), not product features or anti-ageing.
3. **Rebuild the avatar targeting.** Target women 50+ by the books, brands and hobbies they love, not generic "makeup" interests. The media buyer (Dominique) uses value optimisation, minimum-ROAS and cost-cap bidding to protect AOV.[^11]

Her takeaways: simplify the offer to one set or kit (or make it a deliberate shopping experience), and niche to one or more avatars rather than going fully broad. She estimates going broad can leave around 50% of potential scale untapped.[^9]

**Budget frame.** Grimshaw's agency measures total ad spend as a share of revenue and commits 30–40% of incoming revenue to growth, instead of over-correcting on platform metrics.[^5]

**Offer ideas.** Grimshaw warns against outsourcing offer ideas to AI. The owner's intuition about their audience is the unique input.[^10]

## Disagreements / caveats
- The two sources describe the same Boom result differently. Pittman says "+$11–12 AOV" (nearly doubled), and Grimshaw shows a $38→$78 chart for new customers. The baseline and metric probably differ.[^12] Treat it as a big, unaudited in-house win with no control group.
- Physical-product DTC case. For digital or info products the same idea becomes a bundle or "system" front-end offer, or post-purchase upsells; see [[web2app-upsells-and-downsells]] for the app version.
- **Stefan Georgi (June 2026) argues the opposite for bumps and upsells on Meta.** In his members' funnels, doubling front-end AOV roughly doubled CAC, because the algorithm hunts the scarcer high-value buyers. He'd keep a scaling single-product page untouched and move AOV tactics to the back end.[^13] A bundle *as the main offer* (as here) may behave differently from add-ons. See [[aov-and-upsells-on-meta-cac]].

## See also
- [[homepage-above-the-fold-optimization]] — the "optimise the site" lever, from the same talk
- [[cac-payback-and-30-day-cash]] — higher first-order AOV pulls payback forward

[^1]: yt:O3ylG4lt03c @ 14:16 — John Grimshaw
[^2]: yt:O3ylG4lt03c @ 15:05 — John Grimshaw
[^3]: yt:O3ylG4lt03c @ 16:04 — John Grimshaw
[^4]: yt:O3ylG4lt03c @ 13:06 — John Grimshaw
[^5]: yt:O3ylG4lt03c @ 17:39 — John Grimshaw
[^6]: yt:zt2p-pxQeAs @ 01:33 — Molly Pittman
[^7]: yt:zt2p-pxQeAs @ 03:09 — Molly Pittman
[^8]: yt:zt2p-pxQeAs @ 04:00 — Molly Pittman
[^9]: yt:zt2p-pxQeAs @ 09:26 — Molly Pittman
[^10]: yt:O3ylG4lt03c @ 11:46 — John Grimshaw
[^11]: yt:zt2p-pxQeAs @ 05:31 — Molly Pittman
[^12]: yt:zt2p-pxQeAs @ 00:00 — Molly Pittman
[^13]: yt:FQe6eOTMhU4 @ 1:14:44 — Stefan Georgi