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Huel's Growth Marketing Playbook
Learn: Using Uplift Studies to Reduce CAC and Find New Customers

Hey legends, Dev here 👋
Hope you’re well and ready to win the most important quarter of the year - Q4!
Given the hecticness of this time of the year, I’ve decided to temporarily slow things down with this newsletter by sending fortnightly case studies instead of weekly. If anything, I think it will give me more time to find the most insightful and practical strategies that you can weave into your own campaigns.
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PS: I have capacity to bring on one more client for 1-1 growth marketing coaching. If you need help fine-tuning your strategy and execution in a 16-week sprint, you can apply to work with me here. Clients in this program typically say that this is a great alternative for DTC brands who are looking for a more tailored approach that agencies can’t deliver.
Let’s dive in 😎
Today’s case study is one of the UK’s fastest-growing health companies — Huel. In 2023, they reported a revenue of $185 million, marking a 28% increase from the previous year. Since inception, they have maintained a growth rate of 45-50% year-on-year, and have 988,000 active customers.
This is what I’m covering in today’s edition:
Building with Hueligans: How they make their loyal customers part of their success and growth.
Scaling top of the funnel: Breakdown of how Huel was able to fix its attribution challenges, find new customers and reduce its acquisition costs through uplift studies.
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FEATURE CASE STUDY
Huel
The spark for Huel ignited when Julian, a busy professional juggling work and life, found himself frustrated by the challenges of maintaining a healthy diet. He craved a solution that was not only convenient but also packed with nutrition.
Determined to make a difference, Julian dove deep into research, uncovering the alarming realities of food waste and the environmental toll of traditional meal production.
Teaming up with nutritionist James Collier, the duo embarked on a journey of innovation. For over a year, they meticulously crafted Huel, blending science and passion to create a revolutionary meal replacement. At the end of that process, they discovered a delicious, plant-based powder that delivers all the essential nutrients your body craves, without compromising on taste or convenience.
Since then, Huel has taken the world by storm, attracting health enthusiasts and busy professionals across 80 countries, and selling over 300 million meals.
Key Takeaways From This Breakdown:
→ Promote the lifestyle your product or brand enables
→ Showcase UGC to build trust and credibility. This creates a sense of community and provides social proof to get new customers.
→ Provide resources and support to help your customers achieve their goals
→ Encourage referrals, and track and reward them.
→ Move beyond last-click attribution to include clicks, impressions, and offline advertising. Use platforms like Fospha, Segment or Amplitude.
→ Optimize your top-of-funnel by visualizing activity vs outcome relationships with flowcharts, and testing scenarios with hypothetical data for informed budget decisions.
→ Identify high-impact channels, adjust strategies based on market saturation, and regularly use performance data to scale top-of-funnel activities.
COMMUNITY
Huel’s Community Building Strategies

Hueligan is a coined term by Huel that describes their loyal customers and community members who are actively engaging with the brand. A pivotal part of their growth and success.
Here’s how they convert people into Hueligans and keep them entrenched within the brand:
Huel’s social strategy is focused on promoting an aspirational lifestyle where they share content related to fitness and sustainability. They typically post recipes, workout tips, stories on environmental activism and messages of positivity — putting people at the forefront.
Get their customers to share their experiences via the #huel hashtag. They feature customer stories, photos, and videos on their website and social media channels, creating a sense of authenticity and transparency
Customer-centric content that gives customers the tools and resources to achieve their lifestyle goals. Quizzes to find the right product, recipes and fitness tips keep them coming back.
Turn their biggest fans into brand advocates. They track referrals and incentivise customers who refer friends, who often become new customers.
NEW CUSTOMER ACQUISITION
Overcoming Attribution Challenges and Scaling Top of Funnel
Since 2021, privacy updates have made tracking harder and less accurate. Huel faced challenges with their ads in saturated markets and needed a profitable expansion. Essentially, like most DTC brands, they struggled to compare data from different channels.
Then they discovered Fospha, a game-changing marketing tool. Unlike GA4 and ad platform data, Fospha allowed Huel to measure marketing effectiveness at every step. By tracking all clicks and impressions, they could see exactly how each campaign and channel brought in sales.
Here’s how they improved new customer conversions by 54% and reduced ad spend by 20% without losing revenue:
Unifying CAC: Huel’s new approach unified all platforms, providing like-for-like comparisons of their customer acquisition cost (CAC) across their entire marketing mix.
Instead of relying on last-click, they were able to consider clicks, impressions and offline advertising as well. Giving them a complete view to make budget re-allocation decisions. A good example of this in action was on YouTube.
They stopped YouTube ads because sales didn't show up in their tracking. With a new model measuring the full customer journey, they found YouTube was actually driving more sales, especially from new customers.
Causal inference studies: Huel used causal inference studies to validate their marketing data by seeing whether the increase in new customers was due to their marketing actions and no other factors.
Causal inference study in marketing determines whether a specific action (like a marketing campaign) directly causes a particular outcome (like an increase in sales).
Here’s how Huel applied this to make better decisions to scale their TOF activity:
They used flowcharts to see and understand the relationships between their activities. This showed how spending more on social media ads increases website visits, which then increases sales. These diagrams display a clear cause-and-effect relationship.
They use fake data to try out different situations. For example, they can see what happens if they double their spending on social media ads without changing anything else. This helps them understand what might happen if they spend more money.
By hypothesising situations, they figured out whether to spend more money on a specific advertising channel. Using fake results that act like real ones, they decide on their investment amount to scale.
From this experiment, they saw a 10% uplift in new customer acquisition, which included a 7% lift in their most saturated market, the UK. All within their CAC target for the project.
RESOURCES
Further Reading
That’s all for today! Let me know what you think of this edition.
Dev✌️
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