An ongoing fractional CMO engagement with Eat Clean, a DTC prepared-meal brand. The first 90 days focused on email nurture revamp — driving 5× CTR lift and growing the email channel from $1.2K to $7.4K of net new monthly acquisition revenue. Plus a holistic growth assessment across every channel to inform a $1M+ growth-spend allocation, and an SEO strategy built for an AI-search era where commercial-intent traffic dynamics are shifting.
Named client engagement, published with the consent of the client. Specific revenue figures aggregated for confidentiality; lift multiples and channel deltas reflect actual results.
Company: Eat Clean — a DTC prepared-meal brand operating in the same broader category that Factor_ (acquired by HelloFresh) helped establish.
The constraint: Multiple marketing channels in play, none operating at the efficiency the unit economics required. Email channel underperforming materially relative to channel benchmarks for DTC food. SEO strategy needed to be reconsidered in light of how AI-powered search (ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews) was reshaping commercial-intent traffic patterns. A $1M+ growth-spend allocation decision pending, with no clear analytical foundation for where the next dollar should go.
What Treetop was asked to own: Fractional CMO leadership. Holistic growth assessment across every marketing channel currently in play. Email lifecycle revamp as the highest-leverage immediate win. SEO strategy designed for both traditional search and the AI-search era. Competitor and marketplace assessment to inform the growth-spend allocation.
The first high-leverage move. The pre-engagement email channel was producing ~$1.2K/month in net new acquisition revenue against a list size that should have produced 5-10× that. Diagnosis: lifecycle flows were generic batch sends rather than stage-segmented, creative was stale, and the offer architecture didn't tier appropriately to prospect intent signals.
Eat Clean had a $1M+ pool of new growth capital to deploy and an unclear analytical basis for where it should go. The work: assess every channel currently in play (paid social, paid search, SEO, email, influencer, retention) on a unit-economics basis, model where incremental dollars produce the highest marginal return, and produce a recommended allocation that the team could actually execute against.
A core piece of the engagement: how does SEO strategy change when ChatGPT search, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews are reshaping commercial-intent traffic patterns? The work involved understanding which queries are most exposed to AI-search disintermediation, which queries remain traditional-search dominant, and how content strategy needs to adapt to capture commercial intent across both surfaces.
Detailed competitive analysis across the DTC prepared-meal landscape: positioning gaps, creative patterns winning across the category, acquisition channel mix at scale, retention and lifecycle benchmarks. Used to inform pricing, brand positioning refinements, and the growth-spend allocation framework.
Engagement ongoing.
This pattern — fractional CMO engagement that combines email-first immediate wins + structural growth-spend strategy + AI-search-era SEO — fits DTC brands at the scale-up stage where the unit economics are real and the next phase of growth requires senior strategic ownership the founder/team can't provide alone. See the Factor_ case study for the related pattern at hyper-growth stage.