Dose 214: The 90-Day LTV KPI We Use to Align Growth and Retention Team

This week’s dose is also a full podcast episode about how to approach growth. Tune in on your favorite platform:

Matt here with your weekly Subscription Prescription 💊

This week I want to talk about a problem that hides inside almost every established subscription brand I work with: growth and retention are quietly working against each other, and nobody has noticed.

Two weeks ago I covered where a starter brand should focus. Today is for the other end. You've got a team, headcount, resources, and at least 10,000 subscribers. You're past the scrappy stage.

And that's exactly where the org chart starts costing you money.

Here's the pattern. Growth runs the ads, the CRO tests, the landing pages, all of it, to pour subscribers into the program. Then retention gets handed that group and told to squeeze out as much value as possible.

Two teams. Two scoreboards. No shared language. It feels productive because everyone's busy, but the two halves never actually talk to each other.

So let's break down how to fix that, and the one KPI I use to force both sides to pull in the same direction.

1. Subscriptions can't live inside the retention silo

The first mistake happens at the org level, before a single flow gets built. Who actually owns subscriptions in your company?

If the answer is "the retention team," you've already capped your upside. Subscriptions touch acquisition, onboarding, offers, and churn all at once. They can't sit under someone who only sees the back end.

The program needs to report to someone who sits across both growth and retention. A VP of ecom, a head of growth, someone who has both teams at the same table.

Because here's what gets lost when they're separate. Retention knows which cohorts are actually profitable. They can tell you that the middle-aged health buyer retains 20% better than the bodybuilder, or that your holiday BOGO cohort has a stronger LTV curve than your percentage-off crowd.

That's gold for the growth team. But if there's no feedback loop, growth just keeps chasing whatever converts and whatever leadership put on the revenue board this quarter. Nobody's optimizing for the profitable customer, because nobody owns the whole picture.

Yes, this creates tension. The profitable cohort might convert worse, and if growth is judged on conversion alone, they'll resist. That's where leadership steps in and says the priority is profitability, not raw conversion.

So bake contribution margin into the goals, not just topline revenue. Sometimes you happily take a less profitable sale because it scales. You can only make that call when both teams see the same data.

Takeaway: Move subscriptions out from under retention and put them under someone who owns both growth and retention. Then set up regular planning sessions so the profitability data actually reaches the people buying the traffic.

2. Add complexity where the customer already tells you why they bought

Once the structure is right, the growth engine is still where a lot of your effort belongs. It's what brings people into the program in the first place.

You already have offers that work and offers you're testing. The next layer is angle. Go look at the Grüns ad library sometime. They're selling gummies, but through 20 different reasons someone might want more greens in their day.

That's the move. If your retention data shows the middle-aged buyer sticks around longer, build a landing page that speaks to getting older and staying healthy. You're not inventing angles. You're pulling them straight from the feedback loop we just built.

From there you add buying mechanisms. Product pages can offer one bag, two bags, three bags with a gift at three. Fine. But now you're big enough to test quizzes that route people to a subscription offer, and bundle builders that let someone pick their three flavors.

Sometimes that complexity converts worse on the product page. That's why your site becomes a resource. A quiz might lift AOV. A bundle builder might convert slightly lower but produce a stickier subscriber downstream. You only learn which by having the traffic to test it.

And don't skip the free money on the way. Your dunning flow is recurring revenue sitting on the table. Add retries, test the copy, and where your platform allows, segment by payment method so a PayPal subscriber updates in PayPal and a Shop Pay subscriber updates in Shop Pay. Moving recovery from 65% to 70% is real money every single month.

Takeaway: Use your retention insights to build acquisition angles and buying mechanisms, then tighten dunning so you stop leaking the subscribers you already paid to get.

3. Pick a time-bound LTV number and make everything roll up to it

This is the one that ties the whole thing together, and it's where most brands go vague.

When I ask what a brand's north star KPI is, I usually get "LTV" with no timeframe attached. That's not usable. You're making tests and changes right now, and a 365-day number is too slow to tell you if any of them worked.

So I use 90-day LTV. If you can bake in the cost to serve that subscriber over those 90 days, even better, because now you're looking at contribution margin per subscriber, not just revenue.

That's the number both teams lift. Then you break it out by function. Growth owns subscriber adoption and subscriber LTV. Retention owns net retention and profitability over 90 days.

And every touchpoint rolls up underneath. Your onboarding emails should be measured on 90-day LTV, maybe with 30-day churn and average days to cancel sitting under them. Your billing reminder flow ties up to the same number, whether it's lowering churn or lifting AOV.

The reason this matters is simple. When your retention team optimizes repeat purchase rate and your growth team optimizes new subscriber volume, they can both hit their numbers and still leave the business flat. A single shared 90-day figure makes that impossible to fake.

Even your program work sharpens under this lens. Break onboarding out by product so your hero SKU gets its own flow. Test your cancellation survey differently for month-one subscribers than for months two through five. Lean on win-backs with strong bundle offers instead of a different email for every cancel reason. Every one of those tests should point at the same number.

Takeaway: Choose 90-day LTV with profitability baked in as your north star, then assign a slice of it to every person and make sure each flow you touch rolls up to it.

Bottom line: Most established programs aren't stuck because of one broken flow. They're stuck because growth and retention are scored on different things and never share what they know.

Fix the org so subscriptions sit across both. Feed the retention data back into acquisition so you're chasing the profitable customer, not just the cheap one. Then put a single 90-day LTV number over both teams so everyone is rowing in the same direction.

Get those three right and the flows, offers, and dunning tweaks all start compounding instead of pulling against each other.

Until next Tuesday, that's your Subscription Prescription. 💊

- Matt Holman 🩺