# Luke Raben

Luke Raben shares practical perspectives on DTC ecommerce growth, including how to measure profit after acquisition costs and use varied ad creative to reach new customers.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/luke-raben/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/luke-raben
- LinkedIn followers: 3,124
- Topics: ecommerce, paid-ads, dtc-ecommerce
- Based on 11 dated posts, latest 2026-09-29

## Summary

Luke Raben is most useful for DTC growth measurement around CM3 and creative diversity for net new reach.

- Best for: A DTC ecommerce brand rebuilding profitability reporting and testing creative for net new customers.
- Not for: Broad reach, multi-channel sponsored promotion, or campaigns outside DTC ecommerce operator audiences.
- Check first: Confirm whether they offer partnerships and agree scope, commercial terms, and audience analytics.

### Takeaways

- Growth reporting should end at CM3, not revenue.
- Use aMER when email lists can distort MER.
- Creative diversity aims at net new reach, not only ad fatigue.

## Main ideas

- **Growth reporting should end at CM3, not revenue**: Raben argues that standard growth metrics—ROAS, CAC, average order value, conversion rate—and revenue itself can mislead because they do not show what the business keeps after acquiring an order. CM3, or Contribution Margin 3, is revenue minus cost of goods sold, shipping, payment processing fees, and ad spend. What remains is the profit contribution per order. They want CM3 to become the decision metric: new offers, conversion-rate tests, and major creative shifts should be judged by whether they improve CM3. It should also inform pricing experiments, bundles and upsells, and conversion-rate optimization.
- **Use aMER when email lists can distort MER**: Raben distinguishes aMER from MER. MER alone can be heavily influenced by email revenue; aMER is usually cleaner because email lists contain fewer non-customers, so changes in aMER are more influenced by ads, print, influencers, and out-of-home activity. The takeaway: choose the blended metric that reflects the channel you are trying to judge.
- **Creative diversity is for net new reach, not just ad fatigue**: Raben's main goal is to increase incremental reach month over month and get net new eyeballs on LABFRESH. They call creative diversity the biggest lever and explicitly distinguish it from ad fatigue. A new ad is not there to beat an existing one; it should become another winner and bring in an incremental new customer. A visually different ad with the same message can reach people who have not seen the brand or persuade previously reached people to convert.
- **Build the measurement system in the open, as a work in progress**: Raben is still building CM3 reporting into the system and working out how to use it consistently. They credit a piece by Josh Lachkovic with prompting the CM3 write-up; it was an inspiration, not their own earlier work.
- **Content capacity should sit close to founders and move fast**: Raben values hands-on content creation, direct founder access, and room to experiment. The internship post seeks someone who films, edits, posts, brings ideas, and executes them, with experience or passion for TikTok, Reels, and Shorts, and an interest in fashion storytelling and digital culture. The role is 24–40 hours per week for five months or longer, based in Amsterdam, with applications going directly to Raben at LABFRESH; agencies and recruiters are excluded.
- **Expect to relearn as the category moves**: Raben treats continuous relearning as part of working in DTC ecommerce. They say the space moves faster than other industries and that the number of possible actions can be overwhelming. Rather than treating relearning as a problem, they frame it as an opportunity for growth.

## Work to read

- [CM3, explained by its calculation](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/luke-raben_ecommerce-dtc-profitability-activity-7345717474346123264-6cHc)
- [Why CM3 matters more than revenue in weekly reporting](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/luke-raben_ecommerce-growth-dtc-activity-7338903553907810324-HTCn)
- [Creative diversity for incremental reach, not just ad fatigue](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/luke-raben_facebookads-creativestrategy-creativediversity-activity-7305235771861471234-oecJ)
- [A content creator internship at LABFRESH](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/luke-raben_internship-contentcreation-ecommerce-activity-7336398674815504388-lYTq)
- [Learning pace in DTC ecommerce](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/luke-raben_i-truly-believe-dtc-ecom-is-the-most-exciting-activity-7510609231075758080-71VX)

## Brand relationships

- **LABFRESH** (employment)

## Partnerships

Luke Raben's five LinkedIn posts cover DTC growth practice—CM3 contribution-margin reporting, creative diversity for incremental reach, and a content-creator internship—but do not set out a partnership or sponsorship offering, rate card, format description, media kit, or terms for brand collaborations. The clearest brand tie is LABFRESH, a fashion ecommerce company they post about in the first person (“our incremental reach,” “net new eyeballs on LABFRESH”) and recruit for, indicating an operator role rather than a published sponsorship product. Ask them directly about partnership formats and terms.

## Alternatives

- Ali Chaudhary: Choose Ali Chaudhary when the bottleneck is how paid media is structured and directed, not how margin is reported. One post treats Meta Ads as a customer acquisition system rather than a boosted-post habit: settle the business objective, offer, audience, creative, funnel and measurement before spending, and accept that reach, clicks and engagement can all rise while acquisition still loses money. A second post argues that as Advantage+ takes over delivery, bidding and testing, the buyer’s job becomes deciding what to test, which creative angle fits, whether the fault sits in audience, creative, offer or funnel, and when to scale or stop. For a brand whose CM3 view shows the loss but not the cause, this is a direct route into the campaign layer rather than the reporting layer Luke Raben covers.
- Lais Karvelis: Pick Lais Karvelis when the profitability problem looks wider than the media plan. One post lists 16 things that destroy ecommerce profitability, including tracking contribution margin over ROAS, bidding on brand terms, landing pages below 2% conversion, cost of goods above 35%, weak retention, email under 15% of revenue, missing loyalty and upsell funnels, low average order value and ego. Another post describes leaving a DTC role at Tupperware, taking three months off, testing Amazon, a CPG brand, an ads agency, info products, dropshipping, TikTok affiliate and TikTok Shop, then settling on building a TikTok Shop-first brand and documenting the work. If the need is to find where margin leaks across merchandising, retention and channel mix, Karvelis covers ground Luke Raben’s posts do not.
- Ian Lenny: Ian Lenny is the stronger pick when the job is auditing an account you have just taken over and fixing the creative supply behind it. One post lays out a five-step audit: pull access in one request; sort by spend volume to see which campaigns, targeting and creative actually matter; check whether testing budgets sit in structures isolated from proven campaigns; use exclusions so cold traffic excludes remarketing audiences and incrementality stays measurable; then assess creative testing across nine main creative types and whitelisting. A second post argues the constraint is not better creative but a distributed creative department: a stack of remote studio product shoots, DTC-focused editors, UGC creators with edited content, licensed influencer content, content calendars and systemised workflows, flexed with demand and cash flow instead of a fixed in-house team or agency retainer.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/