Happy Sunday!
Today is the Super Bowl, and by the time you read this, about 100 million people will be sitting on their couches, watching brands pay $233,000 per second for 30 seconds of airtime. Zac Reitano, the CEO of Ro (the telemedicine brand), wrote one of the best breakdowns I've read on the economics behind their first-ever Super Bowl ad. The full piece is worth your time.
The key insight: when you factor in the fully loaded cost ($16-29M all-in for a 30-second spot including production, talent, and required companion spend on the network), the downside is capped at a 1-5% hit on your total marketing efficiency. But the upside is asymmetric. If the ad improves future marketing efficiency by even 2% for a company spending $500M/year, it pays for itself without a single direct conversion. It's not a crazy moonshot. It's a portfolio bet with favorable math.
But here's the thing. For 99.9% of brands reading this newsletter, a Super Bowl ad is not in the cards. And that's fine. Because the unsexy truth is that most brands don't have a reach problem. They have a conversion problem, a retention problem, and a cohesion problem. They're leaking revenue from a dozen places and trying to patch it with more ad spend.
I know this because I talk to, consult with, and work with multiple brands, helping them turn around their DTC businesses heading into 2026. Different categories, different stages, different team sizes. But the problems? Almost identical. Every single time.
So today, I want to give you the exact playbook. The seven things I fix first when a brand is in trouble. Think of this as the triage checklist, the stuff that stops the bleeding before you ever think about scaling.
But, before we get into that...
Vendor of the Week
Sales tax is one of those things that our web platforms (Shopify, even WooCommerce) makes feel “handled”… until the end of the year, when it absolutely isn’t.
Yes, your store can calculate tax, but registration + filing is still on you, and most brands learn the hard way when they realize they’re on the hook for taxes they never collected in the first place.
It also scales faster than people expect: once you clear $1M in annual sales, the list of states you need to actively manage starts stacking up. Clear $5M, and you’re basically dealing with every state, multiple times a year.
That’s why I recommend Anrok! They handle end-to-end sales tax compliance (registrations, reconciliation, and filings… not just “calculation”). They’re trusted by teams like Anthropic, Notion, and Mercury, and their tax leadership has built compliance infrastructure at Amazon and Uber.
They also just put out a free compliance guide for DTC brands that’s worth 6 minutes of your time if you’re planning 2026 expansion. The report highlights challenges every brand faces, and can help you identify gaps you didn’t know were there.
Click this special link to get the guide for free!
Limited Supply
This past week on Limited Supply I spoke with my friend Dylan Ander, who’s doing a lot of work with brands on AEO/GEO (bascially, how does / how can your brand show up in ChatGPT for answers). He shared a ton of great tips on how to improve visibility, where to start, what scripts/files you need on your site for the LLMs to crawl properly, and he even gives the crawl file away!
Listen on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube. Just search “Limited Supply” and click the one with the blue artwork!
The DTC Triage Playbook: 7 Fixes That Show Up Every Single Time
Well… there’s not much to say here, other than, let’s get into it.
1. Fix your email flows. All of them. Now!
This is the single highest-leverage thing you can do when a brand is underperforming. I don't care what else is going on. Fix the flows first.
Here's what I keep seeing… brands have a welcome series that was set up two years ago and never touched. Maybe an abandoned cart flow that's doing okay. And that's it. No browse abandonment. No site abandonment. No post-purchase education sequence. No win-back. No replenishment triggers. The flows that do exist have outdated copy, old product images, and messaging that doesn't match what the brand sounds like today.
I talked with one brand recently where 50%+ of their total email revenue was coming from the welcome series alone. That's not a sign the welcome series is great. That's a sign everything else is broken or nonexistent. There's a massive amount of revenue just sitting there in the other flows.
Here's the priority order I use every time, and just me riffing off the top of my head here:
Welcome series. This is your first impression. It should feel like the best version of your brand. Introduce who you are, why you exist, educate on the hero product, show social proof, and close with the offer. 5-6 emails, timed over 7 days. Most brands have 2-3 weak ones.
Abandoned cart. High intent. These people had your product in their hands and put it down. Hit them at 1 hour with a soft reminder, then at 24 hours address the real objections (shipping cost? trust? not sure about the product?), then at 72 hours create urgency.
Abandoned checkout. Even higher intent. They started entering payment info and something stopped them. Two emails, tighter timing. Don't overthink it, just remove whatever friction made them bounce.
Browse abandonment. Someone looked at a product and bounced. Remind them what they saw at 2 hours. Hit them with social proof for that specific product at 24 hours.
Post-purchase. The most underbuilt flow in DTC. Confirm the order, set usage expectations, educate on how to get the most out of the product, ask for a review, then cross-sell. This is where retention starts.
Win-back. For lapsed customers who haven't purchased in 60-90+ days. Different tone, different energy. Acknowledge the gap. Reintroduce what's new. Offer an incentive.
When I say "fix," I mean new copy, new visuals, new product photography, updated messaging that actually matches the brand's current positioning. Most brands have flows that feel like they were built by a different company. That disconnect costs real money.
2. Maximize how many emails you're actually collecting.
Your email program is only as good as the list feeding it. And most brands are terrible at building that list.
The first thing I audit is the popup. What's the offer? What's the design? When does it trigger? What's the conversion rate? Most brands I work with are sitting at 2-3% popup conversion, which means for every 100 visitors, 97 leave without giving you anything. That's a painful number when you're paying to drive that traffic.
Tools like Alia help turn this around. Instead of a generic "10% off your first order" popup that fires immediately and annoys everyone, you can run smarter popups that adapt based on behavior, timing, and context. Exit intent, scroll depth, time on site… the triggers matter as much as the offer. I've seen brands double their email capture rate just by upgrading their popup strategy. That doesn't sound sexy, but when your welcome flow is generating real revenue, every incremental email address has a dollar value attached to it. This is essentially free money you’re not setup to collect right now.
The second piece is identity resolution. The vast majority of your site visitors are anonymous. They browse, they look at products, they leave, and your flows never fire because you don't know who they are. Your abandoned cart emails only reach people who actually added to cart and were already in your system. Everyone else is invisible.
Identity resolution tools can match a meaningful chunk of that anonymous traffic to real email addresses, which means those visitors can now enter your automated flows: browse abandonment, site abandonment, the works. When you pair a high-converting popup with identity resolution feeding into well-built Klaviyo flows, you've turned a leaky bucket into something that actually captures demand. This is one of the first things I set up with every brand I work with because the lift is immediate and the math is obvious. Easy money machine.
3. Make the brand feel cohesive across every touchpoint.
I wrote about this a few weeks ago (the "Cohesion Tax" newsletter) and it keeps proving true. The fastest way to spot a brand in trouble is to look at their touchpoints side by side.
Pull up their Instagram. Then their website. Then open a few emails. Then look at their ad creative. Do they feel like the same brand? Same voice, same visual identity, same energy? Or does the Instagram feel like one company, the emails feel like a clearance rack, and the website feels like it hasn't been updated since 2022?
Every brand I've been helping has this problem to some degree. The fix isn't a 40-page brand guide nobody reads. It's a short, tight brand brief that answers five questions:
- Who are we for? Be specific. Not "women 25-45." What does she care about? What's her day look like?
- What do we solve? Not features. The actual problem in her life.
- Why are we different? Your real differentiation, not "premium quality" or "clean ingredients."
- What do we sound like? Three adjectives. That's your voice. Apply it everywhere.
- What's our visual world? Colors, photography style, typography energy. Make it recognizable.
Once you have that brief, audit every touchpoint against it. I guarantee you'll find 3-4 places where the brand feels off. Fix the biggest gaps first, usually email and social, and the compounding effect is real.
4. Build a brand-forward email campaign calendar.
Flows are the foundation. But campaigns are where brands really mess up.
The pattern I see constantly: the email calendar is 80% promotions. Flash sale. Sitewide discount. Bundle deal. BOGO. President's Day sale. Valentine's Day sale. It's just sale after sale, and the list is getting trained to only buy on discount. That's a death spiral for margin.
Here's how I restructure the calendar:
The mix should be roughly 60% brand / 40% promotional. Brand emails build affinity. They educate. They tell stories. They make people feel something. Promotional emails convert. You need both, but most brands are wildly over-indexed on promo.
Brand email ideas that actually work: Founder story or behind-the-scenes content. How the product is made, sourced, or tested. Customer transformations and use cases (not just reviews, but stories). Educational content tied to the product category. Ingredient or material deep dives. "Why we made this" for new product launches. Cultural moments that align with the brand's values.
The cadence: 2-3 sends per week, segmented properly. Your most engaged subscribers can handle more. Your less engaged list should get less. Stop blasting the entire list with every email.
The segmentation play nobody does: Create a "brand engaged" segment, people who open brand content emails but haven't purchased recently. These people like your brand. They're warm. Hit them with a soft conversion email and watch what happens.
5. Get your social media feeling like a real brand, not a product catalog.
Social is where brand cohesion either clicks or completely falls apart. And for most brands in trouble, the social feeds look like a random collection of product shots, repurposed ad creative, and the occasional meme that doesn't fit the brand at all. From a consumer’s perspective, your brand’s social media is their first (maybe last) impression of you… you have to create that perception and aura. Here's what I push for:
Visual consistency. Your feed should have a recognizable look. This doesn't mean every post looks identical. It means the photography style, color palette, and overall aesthetic feels intentional. When someone lands on your profile, it should take 2 seconds to understand what vibe this brand has.
Content pillars (3-4 max). Not 10 content pillars that nobody can keep track of. Pick a few themes and rotate through them. For a wellness brand, that might be: product education, real customer stories, founder/team moments, and lifestyle content that shows how the product fits into someone's actual life. For a home goods brand: design inspiration, behind the scenes, and product in real spaces. Everything you post should map back to one of those pillars. If it doesn't fit, it probably doesn't belong on your feed.
Stop posting just to post. Three great posts a week beats seven mediocre ones every single time. Before you hit publish, ask yourself: does this build brand affinity, educate someone, or give people a reason to engage?
Reels and short-form video. This is where reach lives in 2026. The content doesn't have to be polished. It has to be authentic and entertaining.
6. Build a real creator content pipeline.
Every brand I'm working with right now has the same gap: they need more creative, and they don't have a system to get it.
The brands that win at paid and organic are producing 10-20+ new creative concepts per month. The brands in trouble are testing 2-3 ads at a time and wondering why performance is stalling. You can't win the creative game without volume, and you can't get volume without a pipeline.
Here's the system I set up:
Build a roster of 10-15 creators. Not influencers with huge followings. Content creators who can produce good-looking, authentic content on a reliable schedule. Think of them as your outsourced creative team.
Set clear SLAs. Send product, provide a brief with 2-3 talking points and 2-3 hook options, and expect deliverables within 72 hours. Each creator delivers a set number of clips per product send. No ambiguity.
Brief them on the brand story, not just the product. This goes back to the cohesion point. If your creators don't understand what makes your brand different (the positioning, the voice, the "why"), they'll produce content that looks like it could be for any brand in your category. A good brief with clear talking points and a sense of the brand's personality will outperform an expensive creator with no direction every time.
Whitelist their accounts. Run their content as paid ads from their handles. This performs significantly better than running the same content from your brand account. More authentic, better engagement, lower CPMs.
Repurpose everything. One creator shoot should give you way more than a single asset. Cut it into multiple ad variations with different hooks. Pull stills for email. Use clips for organic social. Grab quotes for landing page testimonials. If you're getting one deliverable per creator and calling it a day, you're massively underutilizing the relationship.
The goal is to have a continuous stream of fresh creative that feeds both organic social and paid acquisition. Without it, you're stuck refreshing the same 3-4 ads until they fatigue and performance craters.
7. Fix the website before you scale spend.
This is the one that founders hate hearing, because they want to scale NOW. But sending more traffic to a broken site is lighting money on fire. Fix the site first. Then scale. What I look for in the first 48 hours:
Conversion rate by traffic source. Pull this report before you do anything else. You'll almost always see a massive gap between branded Google traffic and cold Meta traffic. That gap tells you the problem isn't your ads, it's the landing experience for people who don't already know you. Cold traffic needs a different entry point than someone who Googled your brand.
Mobile experience. Load your site on your phone and try to buy something. Not "look at it." Actually go through the entire flow from landing to checkout. Time it. Count the taps. If there's any moment where you're pinching to zoom, scrolling sideways, or hunting for a button, that's a conversion killer. The majority of your traffic is on mobile and most brands still treat mobile as an afterthought.
Product pages. Your PDP is doing the job of a salesperson, and most PDPs are bad salespeople. The hero image needs to be strong enough to stop someone mid-scroll. The headline should communicate the benefit, not just the product name. Pricing should be clear, with any subscription savings or bundle incentives visible without having to dig for them. Add-to-cart should be above the fold on mobile.
And here's the one most brands completely botch: social proof. Reviews, star ratings, and real customer testimonials need to be prominently placed — not buried at the bottom of the page where nobody scrolls. If you have strong reviews, put them above the fold or immediately below the hero. If you have press mentions, doctor endorsements, certifications, or notable customer quotes, those should be visible within the first couple scrolls. Social proof is the single most underutilized asset on most PDPs. People trust other people more than they trust your marketing copy, so let your customers do the selling for you.
Email capture. What's your popup conversion rate? If it's weak, your popup needs work. The offer, the design, the timing, the copy — something is off. This connects directly back to point #2. Every visitor you don't capture is a visitor your flows can't reach.
Landing pages for paid traffic. Stop sending cold Meta traffic to your homepage. Build dedicated landing pages that match the angle of your ad creative. If the ad leads with a specific claim or hook, the landing page needs to echo that exact promise above the fold. This is where most brands break the chain. The ad does its job, gets the click, and then dumps the visitor onto a generic page that has nothing to do with what caught their attention. Narrative continuity from ad to landing page to checkout is where conversion lives.
I've seen brands meaningfully improve their conversion rates without changing a single ad — just by fixing the landing experience and making the site work harder. That's revenue you're already paying for.
The Pattern Underneath All of This
If you zoom out, these seven things all point to the same root cause: fragmentation. Fragmented email. Fragmented brand identity. Fragmented creative process. A site experience that doesn't match the ads driving traffic to it. A team with five different people touching customer-facing work and no shared playbook connecting any of it.
The brands that are growing profitably right now aren't doing anything exotic. They're just tight. Their email sounds like their website, which sounds like their social, which sounds like their ads. The flows are built and maintained. There's a creative pipeline with actual cadence. The landing pages match the ad angles. The campaign calendar has a real mix of brand and promo, not just discount after discount.
None of this is revolutionary. But the gap between knowing it and actually executing it consistently is where most brands live. That gap is expensive!!
If your brand is in trouble right now, or even if it's doing fine but you know it could be better, start from this email. Pick the one thing from this list that's the most broken and fix it this week. Then move to the next one. In 90 days, you'll be running a fundamentally different business.
That's all for this week
I hope today’s email was a fun yet honest read, and inspired you to think of an area to focus on improving (whether it’s flows or your website) going into the new year’s busy season (right around the corner). Next week’s email is going to be a bit more tactical within one of these areas… maybe email me back and let me know what I should dive into.
It’s Sunday night, so I hope you plan to get 9 hours of sleep going into the new week. I hope you have an amazing upcoming week. I’ll see you next Sunday, same time, same place.