Good morning,
Here’s what you’ll find in today’s DTC:
✨ The art of the subtle upsell. How Anthropologie PDPs encourage customers to spend more.
🧠 Learn why only looking at the ROAS metric can be misleading: Keen Decision Systems shares how to track and optimize spend across channels.
🔎 Are your margins growing or shrinking? Accounting firm EcomCFO analyzed the P&L sheets of top brands and shared actionable tips.
💸 Maximizing ROI on Amazon Ads. Learn how to get the most incremental value from your ad spend.
🤖 And…will the tariff war spur further AI adoption?
You’re reading this newsletter along with new subscribers from: Case Specific Nutrition, Matson AI, and Cheeky Rascals. 👋
✨ Subtle Ways To Upsell Customers on PDPs
Looking to upsell without using any intrusive pop ups?
Here’s how Anthropologie increases its average order value by doing these two things on its product detail pages.
The lifestyle brand is well known for their stunning product images, but rather than just focusing on a specific product, they also use this as an opportunity to showcase other products within a collection and complementary SKUs.
Here’s an example 👇
On their PDP for Valentine Day plates, Anthropologie includes images of the item but also cross-promotes other pieces in the collection, like their Valentine-themed cups.
Scroll further down, and there are dedicated sections that invite customers to ‘Shop the Collection’ and a button to see more details about the other products
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This targets two types of customers: those who are ready to make an impulse purchase and customers who want more details before hitting the buy button.
Why these tactics works so well:
Customers want to see other items within a collection, so don’t leave them to hunt for them on their own!
Anthropologie provides a seamless shopping experience without customers ever leaving the page.
This minimizes the chances of customers being unable to find these other items or getting frustrated by the time it takes to search.
The takeaway?
Make products within a collection easy to find.
Tweaking your PDPs to include other items in your collections is an easy way to upsell customers and increase basket size without introducing pop-up messaging.
🧠 Rethinking Profitability: How to Market Like an Investment Banker with Bradley Keefer from Keen
Today, we’re discussing how brands should optimize their marketing spend for scalable, long-term profitability—not just short-term ROAS wins.
We’re joined by Bradley Keefer, Chief Revenue Officer at Keen Decision Systems, an AI-powered software platform that helps brands justify their marketing budgets and optimize their spending across channels. 🤝
Why this is so important in 2025: The marketing landscape has changed—Meta isn’t the scale button it once was, and most DTC brands overspend on performance marketing while neglecting brand-building.
In this podcast, we cover:
✅ Why looking only at ROAS is misleading: Here’s the metric you should be tracking instead.
✅ When brands should shift from performance-heavy spending to a brand-building mix.
✅ How to measure interaction effects between Meta, Google, Amazon, and retail.
✅ Why the best brands use this amount of marketing channels for scalable growth.
✅ The rise of TikTok: How the app is outperforming Meta in key marketing effectiveness metrics.
👉 You can listen to the full episode with Bradley here.
👀 Want to See What Your Competitors Do to Get More Traffic? Now You Can.
Take a sneak peek at what techniques your competitors are using to get ahead. 🧑💻
Ahrefs' Content Changes allows you to see what changes were made to a web page over time, and discover if these changes resulted in traffic growth. 📈
It’s like a playbook to solving SEO problems before you even encounter them.
You can also look at your competitors’ performance chart and see if traffic spikes were caused by updating their content and in which way.
👉 Uncover what your competitors do and copy what works.
🔍 EcomCFO Insights: Ways to Improve Your P&L Sheet
After reviewing dozens of brands ranging from $1M to $100M in revenue, EcomCFO uncovered common financial challenges and strategies to boost profitability.
Here are some key learnings from 2024 and actionable tips to help put your business on the path to profitability this year.
1️⃣ Big brands thrived, small brands struggled. Brands with over $50M in revenue saw strong growth, while those under $50M faced stagnant or declining sales.
👉 SMBs, don’t rely on Q4 to save you. A last-minute holiday push isn’t a sustainable strategy.
2️⃣ Returns hurt all brands—especially smaller ones. Managing returns effectively, especially for smaller brands, is critical.
👉 Offer gift cards instead of refunds to retain revenue and customers.
👉 Optimize reverse logistics strategy. Work with an inventory loss recovery partner to resell returns and recover costs.
3️⃣ Gross margins remained steady, except for public companies. Private brands saw little margin change, while public companies averaged a 5.4% increase.
👉 SKU rationalization is essential. Budget down to the SKU level and cut underperforming products.
👉 The Honest Company improved margins by exiting low-margin European and Asian markets in 2023.
4️⃣ EBITDA dropped sharply for smaller brands. Fixed costs—software, contractors, and site maintenance—took a bigger bite of revenue.
👉 Audit recurring fees! Amazon storage and shipping costs are rising, and Shopify apps that charge a revenue percentage should be reevaluated.
The Bottom Line?
Brands must get creative with margins.
Take Chewy, for example—they launched a sponsored ad business that offers brands premium marketplace placement, unlocking a new revenue stream beyond physical products.
As costs rise, brands must budget realistically and take action to protect profitability.
Follow these actionable steps above to strengthen your P&L statement.
Want to see more insights? Access the full EcomCFO report here.
📈 Bluesky Is Gaining Popularity
Bluesky has now hit a new milestone: 30 million users.
While its daily active user count still trails behind Threads, the platform is growing quickly and even announced a new photo-sharing app, Flashes, which is now in beta testing.
Are you using Bluesky?
🎙️ Maximizing ROI on Amazon Ads: Incrementality Explained
Amazon Sponsored Ads are an incredibly effective way to spotlight your product in a massive marketplace.
They offer a chance to sit shoulder-to-shoulder with major brands on the digital shelf for just a few dollars per click.
But once your product climbs into the top spots for your key search terms, a big question arises: should you keep advertising on those terms?
Does that ad spend simply cannibalize organic sales?
Or is it a necessary cost to defend your ranking?
This debate around incrementality has been front and center for the Pilothouse Amazon team for months.
The best, data-driven approach we’ve found to answer these questions lies in the Search Query Performance dashboard (accessible in Seller Central > Brands > Brand Analytics).
This dashboard shows your brand’s share of purchases for specific search terms.
While the purchase data has a 24-hour attribution window and excludes metrics like Sponsored Brand ads, it’s still Amazon’s most reliable insight into organic sales.
Here’s the process: adjust ad spend on your target search terms, then monitor your brand share of purchases in the dashboard.
If your share holds steady despite a decrease in spend…that spend was likely just cannibalizing organic sales.
So, what’s the verdict from testing this across multiple brands?
👉 As expected, ad spend delivers the highest incremental value when your product isn’t already in the top 1–4 ranking positions for a search term.
Once your product reaches those top spots, incrementality from ad spend drops significantly. 📉
In some cases, scaling back ad spend has even boosted organic rankings—likely due to improved conversion rates from less diluted traffic.
However, this strategy only works when your product is already dominating those top rankings.
For lower-ranked products, ads are often essential to generate any meaningful traffic.
This underscores the importance of brand recognition, competitive pricing, compelling promotions, and an attention-grabbing hero image—all of which drive CTR and CVR without relying heavily on search-term-specific ads.
The takeaway?
To get the most incremental value from your Amazon ad spend:
1️⃣ Focus your budget on keywords where you’re relevant but not yet in the top spots.
2️⃣ For top-ranked keywords, cautiously reduce spend while using the Search Query Performance dashboard to maintain brand share of purchases.
By striking this careful balance, you’ll drive smarter ad spend and maximize results, all while protecting and growing your organic rankings.
🌐 IN THE SOCIAL SPHERE
What’s the solution to Trump’s tariffs?
Users on X debate how the tariff war will drive up costs of goods leaving brands with only a handful of options to improve their P&L sheet.
A likely solution? Adopting AI tools across the board to improve workflows and cut down on unnecessary expenses.
💸 MERGERS & ACQUISITIONS
📥 Got a B2B Biz?
Join dozens of B2B companies finding demand-gen success through our niche community of 150k brand leaders and founders this year. Talk to our team to learn more.
Have you heard our latest podcasts?
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DTC Newsletter is written by Rebecca Knight and Frances Du. Edited by Eric Dyck.
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