SSubida Skills

Esc to close · results from all notes, skills and people

Marketing›Funnels & offers

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

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.

Updated 2026-10-24·3 sources·aovbundlesoffersecommercepre-sellpaid-socialmeta-ads

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.12 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.34 His lesson: optimise for conversion rate alone, or AOV alone, and you’ll likely pick wrong.5

Molly Pittman’s three moves.678

  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.9

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.10

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.11

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 Upsells and downsells in web2app checkout 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 Do order bumps and upsells still pay on Meta? (AOV up, CAC up).

See also

Footnotes

  1. The Optimization & Offer Strategy that Doubled AOV @ 14:16 — John Grimshaw ↩

  2. The Optimization & Offer Strategy that Doubled AOV @ 15:05 — John Grimshaw ↩

  3. The Optimization & Offer Strategy that Doubled AOV @ 16:04 — John Grimshaw ↩ ↩2

  4. The Optimization & Offer Strategy that Doubled AOV @ 13:06 — John Grimshaw ↩

  5. The Optimization & Offer Strategy that Doubled AOV @ 17:39 — John Grimshaw ↩ ↩2

  6. How We Boosted AOV Without Touching the Website @ 01:33 — Molly Pittman ↩

  7. How We Boosted AOV Without Touching the Website @ 03:09 — Molly Pittman ↩

  8. How We Boosted AOV Without Touching the Website @ 04:00 — Molly Pittman ↩

  9. How We Boosted AOV Without Touching the Website @ 05:31 — Molly Pittman ↩

  10. How We Boosted AOV Without Touching the Website @ 09:26 — Molly Pittman ↩

  11. The Optimization & Offer Strategy that Doubled AOV @ 11:46 — John Grimshaw ↩

  12. How We Boosted AOV Without Touching the Website @ 00:00 — Molly Pittman ↩

  13. Live Copy & Funnel Workshop: Supplements, Subscription Apps, High Ticket and More (Replay) @ 1:14:44 — Stefan Georgi ↩