The CRM for the DTC marketing leader defending LTV to the CFO.
A VP Marketing or CMO at a $10M to $200M DTC brand owns paid plus owned plus earned, defends LTV versus CAC math to the CFO, splits retention versus acquisition investment across a growing team, and runs the wholesale expansion funnel in parallel. Strkr collapses the Klaviyo plus Northbeam plus Shopify plus Looker stack into one workspace with executive-ready reporting on every surface the board asks about.
A DTC marketing leader at a $10M to $200M brand sees a different set of problems than the operator. The CFO wants LTV versus CAC math down to the cohort, the board wants retention plus acquisition split by channel, the team scaled from 2 to 12 people with no shared data layer, and the wholesale expansion funnel just got a dedicated hire that nobody has tooling for. The six pains below show up on every DTC marketing leader call we run, across apparel, beauty, consumables, and vertical DTC brands past the Series A.
LTV versus CAC math
The CFO wants cohort LTV, not blended LTV.
Blended LTV divided by blended CAC is a vanity number that the CFO stops accepting past $20M in revenue. The real question is 180-day LTV by acquisition cohort versus fully-loaded CAC per cohort, and the real answer lives across Shopify, Klaviyo, four ad platforms, and a Looker workbook maintained by one analyst. Strkr computes cohort LTV natively against fully-loaded CAC per acquisition cohort and surfaces the gap on an executive dashboard the CFO opens without asking the marketing leader for a rebuild.
Attribution across paid plus owned plus earned
Email revenue, influencer revenue, and paid revenue double-count.
Klaviyo claims $400K in email-attributed revenue, Meta claims $300K, the influencer agency claims $200K, and total revenue was $700K. Everyone counts the same order through their own lens. The marketing leader cannot defend the channel split in the board meeting because the math does not add up. Strkr ships a single-source attribution engine with cross-channel deduplication so every dollar is counted exactly once with a defensible multi-touch model.
Retention versus acquisition split
The retention budget and the acquisition budget argue every quarter.
The CFO wants to know whether to shift $200K from paid acquisition into retention programs. The retention lead says LTV lift from the current winback flow is 18 percent. The paid lead says incremental CAC payback is 90 days. Both numbers are defensible in isolation and useless together. Strkr ships a unified retention plus acquisition dashboard with incremental ROI per program so the quarterly budget conversation is grounded in one number, not two advocacy decks.
Team scaling and tool sprawl
The team grew from 2 to 12 and nobody owns the data layer.
Hired a creative lead, a lifecycle manager, a performance manager, a retention manager, a brand manager, an influencer manager, a wholesale lead, and three coordinators. Each hire brought their favorite tool. The marketing leader now runs a stack of 14 SaaS subscriptions with no shared data layer and no clean handoff between paid and lifecycle. Strkr collapses the stack with role-based permissions so every hire opens the surface they need without a per-tool login or a per-seat negotiation.
Wholesale expansion funnel
The wholesale lead has no CRM and no attribution.
The brand just hired a wholesale lead to open 50 retail doors a year. The lead is working out of a Google Sheet with retailer contacts, a Faire dashboard, and a Gmail label. There is no pipeline, no attribution back to the marketing programs that sourced the retailer, and no sell-through tracking. Strkr ships a wholesale pipeline with retailer records, buyer-event tracking, and cross-link to the DTC customer base so the marketing leader sees the full brand funnel on one surface.
Board-ready reporting
The board deck takes a week of analyst time every quarter.
The quarterly board meeting needs cohort LTV, retention by channel, CAC payback curves, wholesale funnel progression, email plus SMS performance, and influencer ROI. One analyst spends a week in Looker pulling the numbers into a slide deck, and half the questions in the board meeting cannot be answered live because the data model does not support the drill-down. Strkr ships executive-ready reporting as a native surface, and the drill-down from any top-line number to the underlying records is one click.
How Strkr fits the DTC marketing leader week
The weekly primitives a $10M to $200M DTC marketing team runs.
Strkr for a DTC marketing leader is the same CRM every hire on the team uses, with an executive surface layered on top. Everything below ships on every paid tier with no premium executive module gate. The primitives map to the five jobs a DTC marketing leader repeats every week: defend LTV plus CAC math to the CFO, review the retention plus acquisition split, drive the wholesale expansion funnel, coach the team through weekly 1:1s on specific programs, and ship the executive dashboard to the board.
Executive dashboard
Twelve tiles the CFO opens on Monday morning.
The executive dashboard ships as a template: revenue, blended ROAS, MER, new customer rate, repeat purchase rate, 180-day cohort LTV, fully-loaded CAC, CAC payback days, retention revenue share, acquisition revenue share, wholesale pipeline value, wholesale closed revenue. Each tile is filterable by month, quarter, or year and drills down to the underlying cohort or program. The CFO bookmarks the slug and the Monday finance review runs off the live dashboard.
Cohort LTV versus CAC
Fully-loaded CAC per cohort, matched to LTV progression.
Every acquisition cohort carries a fully-loaded CAC computed from paid spend, agency fees, creative production, and lifecycle cost allocated to the cohort. The LTV progression at 30, 60, 90, 180, and 365 days renders against the fully-loaded CAC on the same card. The marketing leader defends the number to the CFO with the math visible, not a Looker workbook screenshot. Payback curves by cohort show which months acquired paying-back customers and which did not.
Attribution with deduplication
Every dollar counted once across paid, email, SMS, and influencer.
Strkr ships a cross-channel attribution engine with deduplication logic so the Meta claim, the Klaviyo claim, and the influencer claim collapse into a single multi-touch allocation per order. The marketing leader presents the channel split in the board meeting with a defensible total that ties to Shopify. Model weights are tunable per segment so a short-cycle apparel motion and a long-cycle beauty motion get motion-appropriate attribution.
Retention plus acquisition split
One dashboard, two sides of the ledger.
The retention plus acquisition dashboard splits revenue, spend, and incremental ROI across retention programs (lifecycle, VIP, winback, loyalty, replenishment) and acquisition programs (paid-social, paid-search, influencer, affiliate, PR, events). The marketing leader toggles between the two sides and spots which program delivered incremental lift versus which was holding budget without ROI. The quarterly budget conversation runs off the dashboard, not two advocacy decks.
Wholesale funnel
Retailer pipeline cross-linked to the DTC base.
The wholesale pipeline carries retailer records, buyer-event source, pipeline stages (line sheet, sample, PO, net 30, reorder cadence), sell-through numbers where retailers share them, and the rep-of-record. Cross-link to the DTC customer base shows which retailer buyers are also direct customers (and vice versa) so the marketing leader sees the full brand relationship on one record. The wholesale lead runs the pipeline inside the same CRM as the DTC team.
Team 1:1 prep view
Every direct report, program status pre-loaded.
Each direct report carries a 1:1 workspace that opens with program progress, program ROI, pipeline moves (for wholesale), creative performance (for paid), flow performance (for lifecycle), and the open-item list from the last 1:1. The marketing leader walks into the 30-minute 1:1 with context pre-loaded and spends the hour coaching, not pulling screenshots. Shared and private notes live on the same timeline.
Program ROI cards
Every active program with spend, revenue, incremental lift.
Every active marketing program (paid campaign, lifecycle flow, influencer deal, event, partnership, affiliate program) renders as a card with spend, revenue, incremental lift versus a control cohort, cost per outcome, and a status band (green, amber, red). The marketing leader scans the program library weekly and kills the losing programs before the quarterly review. The board deck pulls from the same cards so the narrative is grounded in program-level math.
Strkr AI executive summary
A one-paragraph executive brief every Monday.
Strkr AI drafts a one-paragraph executive summary every Monday: revenue, blended ROAS, cohort LTV progression, retention versus acquisition split, best program, worst program, wholesale pipeline change, suggested next-week focus. The marketing leader edits in five minutes and ships the executive email to the CEO and CFO. The summary rebuilds every week so stale narrative never leaks into a board deck.
What Strkr automates for a DTC marketing leader
The repeatable work the executive layer should run before Monday.
A DTC marketing leader at a $10M to $200M brand cannot afford to hand run cohort LTV computation, cross-channel deduplication, program ROI calculation, and board-deck preparation every week. Strkr Flows handle the dozen automations every ecommerce marketing leader should run, and each one ships as a native trigger with no analyst time. The pattern below is what shows up in week two of every mid-stage DTC deployment, usually replacing a Looker plus Northbeam plus three analyst days per week.
Cohort LTV refresh
Every cohort recomputes nightly against fully-loaded CAC.
A nightly Flow recomputes LTV per acquisition cohort at every window (30, 60, 90, 180, 365 days) and matches to fully-loaded CAC from paid spend, agency fees, creative production, and lifecycle allocation. The executive dashboard tile pulls the current number without an analyst running a Looker refresh. The CFO opens the Monday review with current math, not a stale screenshot.
Deduplicated attribution
Every order allocated to one multi-touch model nightly.
A nightly Flow runs the cross-channel attribution engine on every Shopify order and allocates revenue across paid, email, SMS, influencer, and organic channels with deduplication logic. The channel split tiles pull the current allocation. Discrepancies against raw platform claims surface on an audit log so the marketing leader can model the gap for the board.
Program ROI alert
Programs below incremental threshold surface before quarter-end.
A weekly Flow runs incremental lift against control cohorts for every active program and surfaces programs below threshold. The marketing leader kills the losing program in week six instead of month three, and the budget redistributes before the quarter closes. The alert attaches the suggested cut-or-double-down framing with the specific signal.
Board-deck auto-draft
Quarterly board slides draft from live dashboard numbers.
A quarterly Flow drafts the board slides from the live executive dashboard: revenue narrative, LTV plus CAC progression, retention versus acquisition split, wholesale funnel update, top programs, bottom programs, next-quarter focus. The marketing leader edits the narrative in two hours instead of a week of analyst back-and-forth. The deck ties to the dashboard so follow-up questions in the board meeting drill into live records.
CAC payback alert
Cohorts missing the payback target surface in week six.
A weekly Flow checks every acquisition cohort against the CAC payback target (90, 120, or 180 days per segment) and surfaces cohorts off-track in week six. The marketing leader intervenes with a cohort-specific winback or lifecycle lift before the cohort closes the window. The payback curve updates nightly so the trajectory is visible, not inferred.
Wholesale pipeline nudge
Retailer stages past threshold surface weekly.
A weekly Flow identifies retailer accounts stuck in a wholesale stage past the per-stage threshold and surfaces the batch on the marketing leader dashboard. The wholesale lead sees the stuck list on Monday with the next step suggested per account. The quarterly wholesale review opens with the pipeline health number already surfaced.
Team pacing digest
Monday email per direct report with program status.
A weekly Flow sends each direct report a program status pacing email: programs owned, program ROI, flagged programs, pipeline moves (for wholesale), creative performance (for paid), flow performance (for lifecycle). The marketing leader gets a parallel digest. The Tuesday 1:1 is grounded in a shared number, and the direct report walks in with a plan instead of a status update.
Executive summary email
Monday 7 AM email to CEO and CFO.
A weekly Flow renders the Strkr AI executive summary into an email: revenue, blended ROAS, cohort LTV, retention versus acquisition, best and worst program, wholesale pipeline change, next-week focus. The CEO and CFO get the email before standup. The marketing leader stops rebuilding the executive update, and the Monday meeting runs off the shared number.
What a DTC marketing leader sees that a VP never got in the old stack
An executive layer that stays out of the operator surface.
The operator team opens Klaviyo, Shopify, and the ad platforms. The marketing leader opens the executive dashboard, the cohort LTV view, the retention versus acquisition split, and the program ROI library. Strkr ships both surfaces as one app with one bill, one admin page, and role-based permissions so operators see what they need and leaders see the executive layer without the operators losing their workflow. The surfaces below are what gets added for the marketing leader.
Program library
Every active marketing program on one scrollable view.
The program library shows every active marketing program (paid campaign, lifecycle flow, influencer deal, event, partnership, affiliate program) grouped by category, sorted by ROI or spend. Filter by owner, by segment, by status band. Collapse per category when running the quarterly review and expand per category when running a 1:1 with the owner. The library is the single source of truth for program-level math.
Private 1:1 notes
Leader notes that direct reports do not see.
Notes captured during a 1:1 can be marked private to the marketing leader or shared with the direct report. Private notes feed into the quarterly review and the development dashboard so the leader has running context on each hire across the year. Shared notes become visible to the report on Monday with action items queued. Both live on the same timeline.
Role-based permissions
The lifecycle manager does not see the paid budget.
Strkr role-based permissions ship granular surfaces per hire. The lifecycle manager sees flows, segments, and lifecycle ROI. The performance manager sees paid campaigns and ROAS. The wholesale lead sees the retailer pipeline. The marketing leader sees everything. No per-tool login negotiation, no shared Klaviyo account, no accidental exposure of paid spend to a creative coordinator.
Benchmark against category
Brand numbers against a category median.
Repeat purchase rate, cohort LTV, blended ROAS, email revenue share, and SMS revenue share render against a category median (apparel, beauty, consumables, home) so the marketing leader knows whether 22 percent repeat is good or terrible for the category. The category benchmark grounds the board narrative in context instead of a vacuum.
Strkr AI growth signals
Where to lean in and where to pull back, flagged weekly.
Strkr AI reads the full data set and flags growth signals weekly: a cohort converting at an unusual rate, a creative pattern driving outsized paid returns, a segment showing retention lift from a specific lifecycle flow, a retailer pattern in wholesale. The marketing leader walks into the weekly leadership standup with signals already surfaced, not hunches.
Share with CFO and CEO
Read-only executive views for CFO, CEO, and board.
Strkr ships executive and board read-only roles on every paid tier with no incremental billing. The marketing leader shares the executive dashboard URL and the CFO opens the live number instead of a screenshot in Slack. Board members get a scoped view with cohort LTV, blended ROAS, and retention versus acquisition without the operator surface. The role matrix is configurable per board member.
Full export and audit log
Every record exportable, every change audited.
Every list, every program, every attribution view, every cohort exports to CSV. Every change to a flow, a segment, a permission, or an attribution weight writes to an audit log the marketing leader reviews weekly. The CFO gets exports for the audit, the CEO gets exports for the board, and the migration risk stays at zero. No premium data-export seat, no API quota, no vendor lock-in.
Head-to-head
Strkr vs Klaviyo plus Northbeam plus Shopify plus Looker.
Most $10M to $200M DTC marketing leaders run Klaviyo for email, Postscript or Attentive for SMS, Shopify for commerce, Northbeam or Triple Whale for attribution, Looker or Mode for executive reporting, Faire or a direct wholesale CRM for retail, and a handful of specialty apps for subscriptions, loyalty, returns, and reviews. The stack is eight surfaces, eight bills, eight logins, and eight places where the LTV number drifts. Strkr collapses that into one workspace with one bill and one admin page, with the executive surface shipped by default on every paid plan.
What matters
Strkr
Klaviyo + Northbeam + Shopify + Looker
Executive dashboard
Native twelve-tile template, drillable to records
Looker workbook maintained by an analyst
Cohort LTV versus fully-loaded CAC
Native computation with payback curves
Analyst day in Looker every month
Cross-channel attribution dedup
Native engine, one dollar counted once
Northbeam or Triple Whale at $2,000 to $5,000 per month
Retention versus acquisition split
Native dashboard with incremental ROI
A board deck rebuilt every quarter
Wholesale funnel cross-linked to DTC
Native pipeline on same CRM as DTC
Faire or Google Sheet, no cross-link
Program ROI library
Native card per program with incremental lift
Fragmented across six tools
Role-based permissions
Granular per hire, scoped to surfaces
Per-tool seat negotiations
Board-deck auto-draft
Quarterly auto-draft from live dashboard
Analyst week every quarter
Strkr AI executive summary
Native weekly draft, edit in five minutes
Written from scratch Sunday night
Admin surface
One page
Eight nested app menus
Full CSV export and audit log
Native, every view, one click
Paid export tiers or API quotas
Monthly cost at mid-stage DTC
One per-seat line, see pricing page
Seven to eight per-seat lines stacked
See the CRM built for the DTC marketing leader defending LTV to the CFO.
Start a trial with the full executive surface enabled: executive dashboard, cohort LTV versus fully-loaded CAC, cross-channel attribution with deduplication, retention versus acquisition split, program ROI library, wholesale funnel, team 1:1 views, Strkr AI executive summaries. One bill, one workspace, one source of truth for the brand. Migrate from the Klaviyo plus Northbeam plus Looker executive stack in a sprint and keep every program, cohort, attribution model, and board number intact on the way in. The pricing page lays out the per-seat line in full so the renewal math is clear before the trial starts.
Can Strkr replace the Klaviyo plus Northbeam plus Looker executive stack for a VP Marketing?
For most $10M to $200M DTC marketing leaders, yes. Strkr ships the executive dashboard, cohort LTV versus fully-loaded CAC, cross-channel attribution with deduplication, retention versus acquisition split, program ROI library, wholesale funnel, and board-ready reporting on a flat per-seat line. The Northbeam or Triple Whale subscription retires with the attribution engine. The Looker workbook retires with the native dashboard. The Klaviyo contact-bucket renewal retires with the native lifecycle surface. For edge cases that need a dedicated BI tool for cross-domain analytics beyond marketing, Strkr integrates with the BI platform via CSV export or a direct connector and keeps the CRM as the single source of truth for marketing data.
How does Strkr compute cohort LTV versus fully-loaded CAC?
Cohort LTV is computed per acquisition cohort at 30, 60, 90, 180, and 365 days from Shopify order history with returns and partial refunds subtracted automatically. Fully-loaded CAC is computed per cohort from paid spend (across every ad platform), agency fees allocated to the cohort, creative production costs allocated, and lifecycle costs (email, SMS, influencer, loyalty) allocated. The LTV progression renders against fully-loaded CAC on one card so the CFO sees the full economics per cohort, not just blended CAC against blended LTV. Payback curves show which cohorts paid back within the target window and which did not. The computation is visible in the view so the number holds up in CFO review.
How does cross-channel attribution deduplication work in Strkr?
The attribution engine runs on every Shopify order and allocates revenue across paid, email, SMS, influencer, and organic channels with deduplication logic. Where Meta claims a conversion through view-through and Klaviyo claims the same conversion through email click, the multi-touch model collapses the claim into a single allocation that sums to 100 percent per order. The marketing leader presents the channel split in the board meeting with a defensible total that ties to Shopify revenue, not a sum of overlapping platform claims. Model weights are tunable per segment so a short-cycle apparel motion and a long-cycle beauty motion get motion-appropriate attribution. Where raw platform claims diverge from the Strkr allocation, the delta surfaces on an audit log the marketing leader can model for the board.
How does Strkr handle the retention versus acquisition budget conversation with the CFO?
The retention plus acquisition dashboard splits revenue, spend, and incremental ROI across retention programs (lifecycle, VIP, winback, loyalty, replenishment) and acquisition programs (paid-social, paid-search, influencer, affiliate, PR, events). Incremental ROI is computed against control cohorts where feasible, so the marketing leader shows the CFO the actual lift per program versus a counterfactual, not the raw revenue claim. The quarterly budget conversation runs off a shared number: shift $200K from acquisition into retention and the dashboard projects the net LTV lift given current retention program ROI. The CFO sees the math, not a slide deck.
Can the wholesale lead run their pipeline inside Strkr alongside the DTC marketing team?
Yes. The wholesale pipeline runs in the same CRM as the DTC customer base, with retailer records, buyer-event source, pipeline stages, sell-through numbers, and the rep-of-record. The wholesale lead opens the retailer pipeline every Monday, and the marketing leader sees the wholesale funnel progression on the executive dashboard. Cross-link to the DTC customer base shows which retailer buyers are also direct customers (and which direct customers are gatekeepers for retailer accounts), so the marketing leader sees the full brand funnel on one surface. Role-based permissions keep the wholesale lead focused on the retailer surface without accidentally exposing the full DTC ad budget.
Can the CFO and CEO see the executive dashboard without a paid seat?
Yes. Strkr ships executive and board read-only roles on every paid tier with no incremental billing. The marketing leader shares the executive dashboard URL with the CFO, the CEO, and board members, and each opens the live dashboard instead of a screenshot in Slack. The role matrix is configurable per role so a board member sees cohort LTV, blended ROAS, and retention versus acquisition without the operator surface. Read-only roles cannot edit records, change settings, or export sensitive data, so the executive gets the number without the admin surface area. Audit logs record every view so the marketing leader has a trail of who saw what and when.
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