DTC901: Spooky Sale Tips, Tips for Creative Diversity, and AI Mode Search Default

Good morning,

Here’s what you’ll find in today’s DTC:

🎃 Spooky Sale Tips
Scary good advice for BFCM prep.

🚀 Unlock Hidden Growth
By running smart pricing experiments.

🎨 Boost Creative Diversity
Tips on how to keep the ideas flowing.

🚨 Daily Tariff Update
U.S. inflation rises in August.

💸 Changes To Google’s Homepage
Will AI Mode be the new search default?

You’re reading this newsletter along with new subscribers from: Calitho, Team Sports Planet, and RealCraft. 👋

🫠 Skip The Migration Meltdown. Omnisend Makes Email + SMS Setup Stress-Free

No one wants to switch platforms right before the busiest weekend of the year.

👉 But if you’re going to do it… Omnisend at least makes it enjoyable.

For all new clients coming through their Sales team, they do the heavy lifting – moving your data, automations, forms, and templates for you. 💪

You’ll also get:

• 📨 Email + SMS living happily under one roof
• ✅ Personalized recommendations and AI assistance
• 👋 24/7 support from real people
• 📜 No long-term contracts (unless you want one)

Set it up once. Then get back to, you know, selling things. 💲

Find out how Omnisend can make your life easier.

[Ad creatives from Big Blanket, Fellow, and Anyday]

🎃 Test During Spooky Season and Spend More Efficiently During BFCM

Spooky season isn’t just about costumes and candy.

For ecommerce brands, Halloween is the last major holiday before BFCM, which makes it the perfect testing ground to sharpen your offers, creatives, and funnel.

Whether you run a spooky-themed sale or not, this window is your chance to build momentum and set the stage for a stronger Black Friday.

Here are five Pilothouse-approved tactics to make the most of it:

1️⃣ Reskin Your Evergreen Offer

Got an evergreen offer? Wrap it in Halloween branding.

• Add seasonal codes or visuals to make the promo feel fresh.
• If your discount normally lives sitewide, pull it back and push it out through PPC for added exclusivity.

💡 Resetting your evergreen promo now ensures your BFCM offer feels bigger and more impactful.

2️⃣ Run Your Final Split Test Before BFCM

Halloween is your last real testing window before the busiest shopping weekend of the year. Use it to identify your strongest offer structure.

Test things like:

• Discount codes vs. auto-applied discounts
• % off vs. $ off
• Tiered discounts vs. flat promos
• Free shipping thresholds

Lock in your learnings now, so your BFCM campaigns aren’t just guesses.

3️⃣ Build “Black” Creatives Early

Halloween and Black Friday share a core color: black.

Use Halloween campaigns as a way to launch black-heavy creatives early.

Meta will gather data and learning curves faster, so when you relaunch those same ads during BFCM, they’re already warmed up and ready to scale.

4️⃣ Layer in Evergreen Urgency Messaging

Alongside your seasonal ads, run urgency-driven promos that work year-round (“Ends soon,” “Limited stock,” “Don’t miss out”).

By BFCM, these urgency creatives will already have momentum and could become your highest-performing ads.

5️⃣ Have Fun With It!

Halloween is one of the few times brands can stretch outside their usual tone.

• Drop a spooky-themed product.
• Add playful copy or quirky visuals.
• Test concepts you wouldn’t normally use (customers expect it this time of year!)

Brands that test, learn, and build momentum now will hit November with proven offers, warmed-up creatives, and a head start on ad spend efficiency.

🤩 Psst..Want To Transform Into The Most Efficient, Best Version Of Yourself, Instantly? Here’s How

👉 Omnisend is on a mission to take the busywork off your plate, so you can spend your day on the work that actually matters.  

Ready to get efficient? Let AI handle the boring stuff.

Here’s what you can expect:

• ✉️ Write emails faster
• 💁‍♀️ Personalize effortlessly
• 🧠 Segment smart, not hard

😎 Turns out, letting AI steal the boring tasks feels great.

It’s time to reclaim your day and actually reach your full potential.

📦 Your Daily Tariff Check-In

Whether it’s a minor tweak or a major shift, we’ll keep you posted on the latest tariff changes—so you’re always in the know.

September 12, 2025 update:

• U.S. Inflation Climbs in August
  • Consumer prices rose 2.9% in August compared to a year ago, marking an uptick in price increases as Trump's tariff policy intensified.
  • The annual increase in inflation was the largest in seven months.

🎧 How to Build a Testing Roadmap That Drives Real Profit, Not Just Revenue with Drew Marconi

In this episode of the DTC Podcast, Drew Marconi, co-founder and CEO of Intelligems, breaks down why profit per visitor is the only metric that matters and how brands can unlock hidden growth by treating pricing, shipping, and offers as testable levers instead of fixed decisions.

Drew explains how to run structured pricing experiments, build a culture of continuous testing, and why conversion rate is a “dumb metric” if you want sustainable profitability.

In this episode, we explore:

• Why Conversion Rate Misleads: Drew explains why brands should focus less on vanity metrics and more on optimizing gross profit per visitor.
• The Pricing Flywheel: How straddle testing reveals true elasticity and informs smarter decisions.

“Start with a straddle test: +8% and -8%. You’ll quickly learn where elasticity lives for your brand.”

• Beyond List Price: Why shipping thresholds, discounts, and return policies are all part of your pricing strategy.
• Building a Testing Culture: How top brands run weekly experimentation meetings, and use the ICE prioritization framework to decide what to test first.
• The Future of Optimization: Drew explains the concept of “infinity testing”, agentic AI that continuously generates and tests new variations.

👉 Listen to the full episode with Drew here.

🎧 6 Ways To Boost Creative Diversity Before Q4

Feeling creatively burnt out?

In this episode of Ad-venturous, Aves from Pilothouse shares how she consistently pulls some of the highest creative diversity scores from her Meta rep’s portfolio of big brands.

Here’s tips on how to keep a constant flow of fresh creative:

1. Switch Up the First 3–5 Seconds

Meta rewards meaningful changes, not small tweaks.

• Don’t just add new overlays.
• Change the opening visuals to reset delivery and performance.

💡 New hooks = new opportunities for scale.

2. Make Daily Creative Check-Ins a Habit

Every morning, review results before diving into more changes.

• Keeps feedback loops tight.
• Surfaces learnings you can act on the same day.

💡 Small habit = big compounding results.

3. Ideate Between Tasks

Don’t confine creative thinking to what's on your calendar.

• Keep a Figma board or scratchpad handy.
• Drop in ideas during downtime or between calls.

💡 The best ideas often happen outside of “work blocks.”

4. Set Weekly Creative Challenges

Push yourself to stay consistent:

• Convert 5–10 top-performing videos into statics (and vice versa).
• Focus on volume and variation, not perfection.

💡 Regular challenges keep your creative engine running.

5. Tap External Expertise

If you’re short on in-house resources or just curious how to scale a creative system reach out to Pilothouse (mention you’re an Ad-venturous lead).

💡 Don’t go it alone if you don’t have to.

6. Don’t Forget About Amazon

Q4 = Amazon’s moment to shine.

Fast shipping, ease of use, trust…it’s where shoppers go first.

• Refresh your storefront.
• Update A+ content.

💡 A strong Amazon presence pays off big during holidays.

Winning on Meta takes volume, variety, and consistency. Build good habits now so your creative pipeline doesn’t stall when it matters most.

👉 Listen to the full episode with Aves here.

Google has added “AI Mode” to the top left corner of search results but will it soon become the default?

Rumor has it Google plans to make AI Mode the standard search experience, which would mark the biggest shift to Search in the company’s history.

How do you feel about this change?

I’m for it!
This is an awful idea.

👀 Black Friday is just around the corner. Up your sales game with email and SMS. Brands using Omnisend on average make $68 for every $1 spent. Plan ahead and try it now! *

📥 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?

• 💰 TWBERP 50: Email Like A Billion Dollar Brand Part 1
• 🧠 Master The First Second: Hook Attention in Meta Ads
• 🎃 AKNF 540: Using Seasonal Ads Like Halloween as Q4 Prep
• ✨ Ad-venturous 18: Taste v.s. Discernment Around Creative and AI
• 📥 TWBERP 49: American Eagle v.s. Everlane Part 2
• 🧑‍⚕️ How Proov’s Turned Hormone Testing into a Scalable Platform

Don’t forget to rate the DTC Podcast on Apple (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)

DTC Newsletter is written by Rebecca Knight and Frances Du. Edited by Eric Dyck.

Please note that items in this newsletter marked with * contain sponsored content.