First-party audience modeling cut CAC below $50 for a leading meal delivery service

The challenge

A leading meal delivery service was ready to scale subscriber acquisition, but needed a clearer picture of which channels were actually driving profitable growth.

The brand had set CAC targets between $100 and $150. Hitting them consistently meant looking past last-touch attribution to understand which audiences and channels were producing the strongest customers across the full marketing mix.

The solution

We built a more data-driven acquisition strategy around the brand's highest-value customers.

Our team cross-referenced the brand's existing customer database with Fluent's first-party consumer data to build a Most Valuable Customer profile, surfacing the characteristics and behaviors shared by its strongest customers.

From there, we modeled against that profile and activated those audiences across email, paid social, display, and more than 30 additional channels. As performance data came in, we could see which combinations of audience and channel were driving the most efficient subscriber growth, and shift investment accordingly.

Why it worked

Audience modeling gave the brand a stronger starting point than channel-level targeting alone. Cross-channel activation opened up more opportunities to reach high-value prospects, while performance data showed exactly where those audiences converted most efficiently.

Rather than relying on a single attribution signal, the team could continuously tune the marketing mix around the channels and audiences actually driving profitable growth.

The result

CAC fell below $50, less than half the low end of the brand's $100 to $150 target range. Email emerged as the strongest conversion channel, delivering nearly twice the conversions of the next-highest channel. With more than 3.5 million qualified first-party profiles behind the strategy, the brand walked away with a repeatable way to find high-value audiences, activate them across channels, and keep acquisition costs in check as it grows.