John Feeney has spent more than a decade in e-commerce, first in SEO and paid social, then running his own agency, Sonus Media. Now on the brand side, leading e-commerce for Nutravita, one of the UK's largest supplement businesses. In between, he ran e-commerce and marketplaces for Aromatherapy Associates, the forty-year-old premium wellness brand. He has seen acquisition and retention from both sides of the table, and he has firm opinions about which customers are actually worth acquiring in the first place.
What follows is an edited version of our conversation.
ALEX – You've been on the agency side and the brand side. Take me through the path.
JOHN – I started around 2012, 2013, humble beginnings in SEO and paid social, back when Business Manager was still called Power Editor, so that dates me. The whole time I had little side projects running as a testing ground. I'd try a paid social angle or a funnel structure on my own thing, see it work, then bring it into my nine-to-five and help the account managers sell it into clients. Then I decided to do my own thing and launched my agency, Sonus Media, about a month before COVID. I thought I'd made the worst decision of my life. Instead it went zero to a hundred almost overnight, because every bricks-and-mortar business that had been avoiding digital suddenly needed it to survive. The thing I pride myself on is that I only ever sold clients the tactics I'd used to acquire them in the first place. They'd come in and ask, "How did you get in front of me?" — and the answer was the strategy I was about to run for them.
ALEX – A lot of subscription and repeat-purchase brands lean on discounting to acquire, betting they'll recoup margin over the lifetime. What's your take?
JOHN – Discounts are easy, aren't they. On the front end it all looks wonderful, you put on a sale, your paid's doing well, ROAS of five, happy days. Then the finance director taps you on the shoulder and tells you you're burning fivers, because brand contribution is in the toilet. When I started at Aromatherapy Associates, that was the biggest challenge. Premium brand, heritage brand — sixty-five, seventy pounds for a bottle of bath and shower oil. You cannot put 40 or 50% off that without ruining it. And there were legacy customers conditioned to expect discount on discount. So you have to be honest about what a deep discount actually does: if you buy a customer at 40 or 50% off retail, you're training them long-term to expect it, and when it doesn't happen, they don't buy from you.
ALEX – When you pulled discounting back, did you rip the band-aid off or wean them slowly?
JOHN – I ripped it off, because I had to — the profitability wasn't there. But I didn't go to zero, which would've been silly. It's discount when it makes sense — bank holidays, summer sales — not all the time. Then I offset it with a proper tiered loyalty program, bronze-silver-gold, that had been sitting in the background doing nothing. That gives customers value beyond a hard discount, so they'll buy more even without a heavy price cut. The alternative is what I saw in the historical data — a four-week summer sale at 40% off. It did okay on the surface, but you're attracting a customer who came in at forty percent off and won't hang around. You're attracting the wrong type of customer. Get the right one in, educate them on the value, and they'll buy at full price again and again — and your LTV and AOV both climb.
ALEX – Do you treat acquisition and retention as separate budgets or one pool?
JOHN – Separate, and I'm very firm on that. My whole ethos is an e-commerce engine where acquisition funds retention and retention funds acquisition — it just goes around in a wheel. When I pooled them earlier in my career, it could only take me so far, and you're not being strategic. Acquisition is the lifeblood of growth, but if your back end is set up properly, retention does the heavy lifting from there. At Aromatherapy Associates we were good at acquiring and weak at retaining, so we ran a set budget for both — loyalty, subscription, upsells — and after a while it started to take care of itself. The split was around 60/40 in favor of acquisition, with the goal of getting to 70/30.
ALEX – With a big SKU portfolio, are you auditing the assortment to see which products bring in better customers, not just more of them?
JOHN– Regularly. We can all talk about best-sellers, but that's top-line revenue. The real question is which products acquire customers who then generate higher follow-up purchases — and that's where a platform like RetentionX earns its keep. I also weight return rates heavily. I don't want to push a product with a twenty percent return rate at a new customer, because we've paid to acquire them, they send it back, they may never return, and now we're eating the returned unit on top. So it's about placement — where a product sits on the site, where it sits in the welcome flow — and using the data to build a natural post-purchase sequence: given what you just bought, what's the next logical product? You splice the data with your own category expertise and build flows that acquire customers you hope to keep for two, three, four years.
Lightning Round
ALEX – Do you treat ROAS as a North Star?
JOHN – No. We track it, you have to be mindful of it, but you can have a fantastic ROAS and terrible profitability — and then what's the point? I tell every team: look at it 360 degrees. What's the platform telling you, and what's the business telling you? So ROAS, yes, but CAC matters more, and specifically payback period. I'll happily wear a higher CAC if it pays back quicker; a low CAC that never pays back is useless. And MER — marketing efficiency ratio — doesn't get talked about enough. Most brands aren't looking at how their entire spend affects everything else. That halo effect is where the real picture is.
ALEX – Amazon or DTC — where does your next dollar go?
JOHN– DTC, every day of the week and twice on a Sunday. I'm a brand advocate, and you build a brand on DTC in a way you can't on Amazon.
ALEX – A metric most brands track that's useless — or one nobody tracks that matters?
JOHN– Too many brands are fixated on ROAS. "I've got a 10 ROAS" — that means nothing if you're overspending and the bottom line's a mess. The one they underweight is LTV. I still have conversations in 2026 with operators who say they're "more into CPAs and ROAS," and when I ask about LTV they say, "It's a consideration." Then I ask how they plan to keep expanding their cohorts, and there's this assumption that if they just stay the course, the wheel turns on its own. It doesn't. And if you can take it a step further, get to product-level LTV, not just the broad number — some brands don't have the platform to see that, and I have empathy for it, but if you can, it's the difference between serious growth and hitting a ceiling.
ALEX – Best acquisition channel for consistent high-LTV customers?
JOHN– You have to look at Google. You've already got people with their hands in their back pockets — intent is there. Get them in, get them into your retention motion, and they compound.
ALEX – Last one before the lightning round — what category are you most bullish on?
JOHN– This surprises people: independent fragrance. You'd think scent is impossible to sell online because it's sensory, and yet we've seen independent fragrance brands do exceptionally well. Part of it is that there's a robust creator community built around discovering new fragrances, and part of it is that you can be incredibly generous with samples and seeding in a way that's cost-prohibitive in other categories. You can just get the product into people's hands.
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