LMNT CAMPAIGN ANALYSIS

[what this is]

What this analysis covers

This is a full breakdown of LMNT's influencer program (drinklmnt.com). We cover the value props, the creator strategy, how we vet every creator and read their metrics, and the moves you can copy for your own program. It works whether you are just starting with influencers or expanding a roster you already have.

LMNT is a direct-to-consumer electrolyte brand. It sells a sugar-free, sodium-heavy drink mix to active, health-conscious people across the US and Canada.

[the opportunity]

LMNT's sponsored-video history

This is a slice of what we pulled from our database for LMNT alone. Every channel, its subscribers and views, the upload date, the offer, and the personal link.

[the audience]

The target audience, demographics and psychographics

Whether you are new to campaigns or already running them, we start with the same questions:

The content types that fit this buyer

The same hydration message works across different content, as long as the audience is in a moment where water alone falls short. That is why LMNT can book hundreds of creators and keep converting. Here are the content types that fit.

[the offer]

LMNT's offer

The offer is a free sample pack with any purchase, used on 1,076 sponsored videos. The buyer pays shipping and gets the pack free. The hardest part for a subscription product is getting the first customer in the door, and this fixes that.

It is also built on repeat purchase. LMNT is subscription-first, so the profit is made over the life of the customer, not the first order.

Breaking the offer into its components

• "With any purchase" is where the work happens. It is not a giveaway. You still place a paid order to get it, so LMNT walks away with a genuine first customer and a card on file, not just an email address.
• The buyer pays shipping. That's the quiet move. The customer covers fulfillment, so LMNT's cost to acquire them stays close to nothing, even though the offer still feels free to the person buying.
• Every read uses a creator-specific link. Things like drinklmnt.com/manriver. That gives clean tracking on who brought in what across all 1,076 reads.
• The subscription is the part that pays. The free pack is just the front door. The return comes from Subscribe and Save, repeat sticks, and people who turn it into a standing order.

[the goal]

The goal: break even on acquisition

Because LMNT is subscription-first, we would not chase a 2 or 3x return in the first thirty days. We aim to break even on the cost to acquire a customer as we scale.

Once you break even on acquisition, you can put a large budget into creator reads, bring in many subscribers, and let the renewals carry the profit.

[start in the database]

How we pick the creators

Picking the creators is where most of the money is won or lost.

We start from a roster of past-performing creators, plus more sourced through a partner agency, Whalar. Then we run every candidate against our sponsorship database, which holds nearly 285,000 sponsored videos across 31,000+ YouTube channels and 44,000 brands, going back years.

[signal 1]

Repeat sponsorship

The single best signal that an audience buys is a brand booking the same creator again and again.

Nobody keeps re-booking a creator who does not bring in conversions.

More Than Farmers (442K subs). LMNT booked this homestead creator 64 times. She is a good example, because she has also earned loyalty from other brands in completely different categories, so none of them compete:

• Thrive Market (the online organic grocery), 52 sponsored videos
• Superb Sealing (home-canning lids and jars), 45
• Xero Shoes (barefoot shoes), 31

When this many repeat-buyer brands keep coming back to the same creator, it tells you she has built a strong audience, one that listens to her for advice, not just entertainment.

One caution: make sure she is not also sponsoring your competitors. It reads as inauthentic, especially when the audience sees how many sponsorships she runs.

Why long-term partnerships convert

Michelle Roots has become almost exclusive with LMNT: 62 of her 70 lifetime sponsorships, and more importantly, ninety percent of everything she has run since 2023.

These are some of the best partnerships we see. Michelle has grown a lot since 2023, and her audience has grown with her. She also converts a large share of viewers.

Here is the part most people miss. Only about 5 to 10 percent of an audience watches any given video. Because each video is a different topic, or people miss it, you can convert a large share of the audience over time as they see the offer again and again.

A one-off read might convert 0.3 percent of viewers. Over a long-term partnership with an educational creator, getting to 5 percent audience conversion is possible.

That is why these long-term partnerships make sense.

[signal 2]

The four creator types

Subscriber counts are easy to buy and easy to forget, so we ignore them as the headline number. Instead we score each creator on signals that are hard to fake:

• Average views on videos older than thirty days but younger than six months.
• The ratio of those views to subscribers, a health check on reach.
• Engagement, and how recently they last posted.
• Loyalty, meaning how many times LMNT and other brands have re-booked them.

We roll those into a single zero to one hundred fit score with stated weights. It sorts the roster into four buckets, and a good program buys from all four.

Bucket	What it is	LMNT examples
Stars	High reach and high loyalty	Keltie O'Connor (28 reads, 188K avg), More Than Farmers (64 reads, 170K avg)
Workhorses	High loyalty, mid reach	Michelle Roots (62 reads), Clean & Delicious (30 reads)
Reach plays	High reach, lighter loyalty	Andrew Huberman (10 reads, 244K avg)
Smart bets	Small but hyper-engaged	Alexis Miestowski (10 reads, 79.5% view to sub on 38.7K subs)

[signal 3]

Check real views, not subscribers

Chris Williamson has 4.15M subscribers, but his videos averaged around 24 thousand views, only about 0.5 percent of his subscriber base watching a given video. That usually means one of a few things:

• The channel caught a wave of traction during a viral spike and then slowed down.
• Or they bought followers, though looking through his other metrics, we don't think he did.
• Or it just naturally happens to channels as they get bigger, the same way it does for MrBeast.

The bigger problem here is cost. A channel like this usually costs more, because the creator prices themselves on that subscriber count. That matters for whitelisting, when you run ads from their handle, because the ad shows the subscriber number. But for a normal sponsored read, subscribers who left years ago do not help you.

Compare that to Alexis Miestowski at 38.7 thousand subscribers, with a subscriber-to-average-view ratio of 80 percent.

That raises the value of the partnership, because a creator like her usually charges far less than a megachannel for better, more targeted exposure. You pay for attention you actually receive, not for a subscriber count that left years ago.

[signal 4]

Check the comments

Comments are the closest read on what is going on with an audience. We check whether they are mostly questions or mostly statements. A high rate of genuine questions usually means the audience treats the host as a trusted source, not background noise.

We measure that question to statement ratio across ten sampled videos and compare it against the rest of the shortlist. We also check for fake followers at scale, scoring each channel on how likely it is that bots are in the comments, based on how old and how active the commenting accounts are.

Accounts under a year old with no activity are the tell. A finalist only passes if its commenters are not meaningfully younger than channels we know are clean.

Examples of fake comments. These come from one channel we vetted out. We are confident the comments were bought. A full guide on spotting fake channels, some are very convincing now, is coming shortly.

The accounts behind the comments

Click into the accounts behind those comments and they are brand new, with no videos and no history.

That is what a bought audience looks like up close. (These three thumbnails are one exhibit, the accounts behind the same fake thread.)

What good comments look like

Good comments are thoughtful, specific, and show the viewer actually acting on what the host said.

[the rules]

Stay compliant

Supplements do not carry the cannabis-style fines, but they carry a claims risk, and the Federal Trade Commission has been active in enforcing it.

The main danger: a creator improvises a health claim, and the brand is held liable for it.

• Health claims are the line. An electrolyte mix does not cure, treat, or prevent anything. Helps you feel hydrated on a long run is fine. Fixes a medical condition is not.
• It has to be true to them. The endorsement must reflect what the creator actually thinks and does.
• Disclose every time. Clear disclosure in the spoken read, the description, and a pinned comment.
• Send them to the site. Every read points to drinklmnt.com, where the real ingredient detail and the offer live.

Two real reads, graded. A competitor, Cure Hydration, shows both the line and how to stay on the right side of it:

[the brief]

The creative brief

The creative brief is the cheapest thing you can do to stay out of trouble. Here is a sample (note: we don't share our real one, that stays internal with clients):

We would catch these things at review and ask for a re-record before it goes live, far cheaper than pulling a video months later.

[attribution]

How we track every sale

Multitouch attribution.

• We counted 315 distinct personal slugs, one per creator. A dedicated landing page is low effort and reliably multiplies your conversion rate. Every one follows the same pattern, drinklmnt.com slash the creator's name.
• Every order is tagged to the exact channel it came from, with the free sample pack as the hook.
• When a viewer clicks, a pixel fires, so they become the warm audience for retargeting later.

The full retargeting loop

Put together, every creator read feeds one loop that keeps working long after the video goes up.

[lifetime value]

Lifetime value

A customer who comes in through a creator is worth more than one who comes in through a cold ad.

• They bought on borrowed trust, so they stick.
• They keep seeing the product as new creators join.
• On a subscription, that loyalty compounds into months of renewals.

On day one the two customers look identical. By month six they are not close, and that gap decides how much you can pay for the next creator.

The payout plumbing is solved. Off-the-shelf affiliate software tracks each creator's code and pays them their share automatically. The same job runs in other affiliate platforms too, so the payout side is never the hard part.

[the forecasting model]

What we measured over one quarter

Here is what we counted over three months, from January to March 2025. We priced the views at a $30 CPM (CPM = what you pay per 1,000 views; $30 is the going rate for good creators). Allowing for about 4% of viewers reaching the site, that is on the order of 788,000 visits to the free-sample page.

Metric	Value (Q1 2025)
Period	January to March 2025
Sponsored reads	110
Creators	60
Total views	19.7M
Avg views per read	~178,997
Likes / comments	637,356 / 40,717
Engagement rate	3.4%
Blended CPM (cost per 1,000 views)	$30
Media value (what the views are worth)	$590,691 (~$5,370 per read)
Click rate (incl. people who search Google after watching)	4%
Visits to the free-sample page	~788,000

The first 30 days

ROAS (return on ad spend) is how many dollars come back for each dollar you put in. We price the media at a $20 CPM, the same rate you would pay Facebook for the same number of views. We then assume 4 percent of viewers reach the site, 2 percent of those buy, and an average order value (AOV) of $45, which is one box at about a dollar fifty a stick.

Step	Rate	Result
Views	actual	19,689,714
Media cost (at a $20 CPM)	$20 CPM	$393,794
View to site	4%	787,589 visits
Site conversion	2%	15,752 first orders
First-order revenue (at a $45 AOV)	$45 AOV	$708,830
30-day ROAS		1.80x

Even on the first order, inside 30 days, the creator videos already pay for themselves at 1.8x.

A Facebook ad at the same $20 CPM will often sit at breakeven ROAS, because the viewer is hearing it from a creator they already trust. It lands like a friend's recommendation rather than an ad interrupting them. Think of a referral versus cold traffic.

Cost to acquire vs lifetime value

On a subscription product, the two numbers that matter most are the cost to win a customer and what that customer is worth over time. If you don't sell a subscription product, we can help you package one and structure deals that let you sell more to the same customers.

Metric	Value
Customers acquired	15,752
Cost to acquire a customer (CAC)	$25
Lifetime value over 6 months (LTV)	$270 (6 x $45)
LTV to CAC ratio	about 11 to 1

CAC lands at about $25. If a customer stays the industry-average 6 months, and one box lasts roughly a month, they place about 6 orders, an LTV of about $270. So you spend $25 to win a customer worth about $270, an LTV to CAC ratio of roughly 11 to 1.

A healthy store aims for 3 to 1. This sits well above the bar, because the trust the creator passes along means more people buy, and then keep buying.

ROAS over 6 months

Finally, the same quarter measured out over six months, once the renewals are counted.

Metric	Value
Customers acquired	15,752
6-month revenue (15,752 x $270)	$4,252,978
Media cost (at a $20 CPM)	$393,794
6-month ROAS	about 10.8x

[proof, not just the model]

The same pattern, on two campaigns we tracked

The numbers above are our forecast. Here are two real campaigns from our tracker where it played out. In both, the first orders did not cover what it cost to win the customer, so early on the campaign looked underwater. Then, as those customers renewed month after month, the tracked lifetime value passed the cost, and the return turned strongly positive.

Month one is the wrong scorecard for a subscription product. The win shows up as the renewals stack up.

Tracked campaign 1: WHOOP with Linda Sun

Tracked campaign 2: BetterHelp with thewizardliz

[scaling the winners]

The flywheel

Once you have winners, you double down on them, and then find new creators to fill the pipeline, depending on how fast you're scaling.

Many people worry an audience gets tired of the same product. But a growing channel rarely saturates its audience, because only a fraction of subscribers watch any single video, and the channel keeps adding new viewers every month. That is why we like to partner with up-and-coming creators, the audience is fresh and still expanding.

• The 85/15 rule. Keep the top eighty five percent, swap the bottom fifteen for fresh creators every month.
• Do more of what works. Run a winner's best read as a paid ad through their own handle.
• Partner deeper with the best. Many times you can keep partnering with the same creator and get great results.
• Build ambassadors. Fly the top creators out for events and content days (we can help coordinate this if it's your first time).