DTC909: Bid Strategies, Dangers of List Growth, and Wicked Collabs

Good morning,

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

💡 Don’t Waste Your Meta Ad Spend
Determine your winning bid strategy before Q4.

✅ Emailing Without ______.
How doing this kills deliverability and profits.

🚨 Daily Tariff Update
More trade deals are coming.

🪄 Team Elphaba or Glinda?
The latest pint-sized Wicked collab.

You’re reading this newsletter along with new subscribers from: Aspire Drinks, Barkers Clothing, and Malouf Home. 👋

🤔 Ready For Some Winning Marketing Math? 1 UGC Creator = 20+ Ad Variations—All For Under $150

👀 Wondering how major DTC brands, including Beauty Pie, Bones Coffee, Flo Health, and Aceable, scale UGC without killing team bandwidth?

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💡 Test and Discover Your Winning Bid Strategy!

Typically, with the way Meta’s algorithm works in 2025, open targeting and scaling vertically are your best bet for the most efficient results.

But the Pilothouse Meta team also recommends conducting light structure testing heading into Q4 to gather learnings, just in case you need to scale horizontally through November.

By going horizontal, you’ll tap into other subsets of audiences using your top ads and scale up faster on campaigns that might be at their scale ceiling.

Here is one test that Pilothouse recommends setting up:

Bid Strategies: Cost Cap vs. Min ROAS

• Create two new campaigns and at the campaign level, set one campaign to a cost per result goal, and the other to a ROAS goal.

• At the ad set level under “Conversion”, adjust the ROAS and CPA goals. (The Pilothouse Meta team recommends using your PRS average from the last 30 days as a starting point.)

• For this type of test, the Pilothouse team suggests using broad targeting and all placements.

• At the ad level, duplicate your top 5-8 ads to give Meta the opportunity to spend into different creatives.

Once you’re ready to launch, give equal budgets to both campaigns for a cleaner test.

Run the test for 7-10 days minimum or until you reach 10x your target CPA in spend, then determine the winning bid strategy to continue running through Q4.

The Pilothouse team shares the winning bid strategy can vary by brand.

For some brands and markets, min ROAS wins, and for others, cost per result goal wins.

It’s best to give this a try to truly know what will work best for your account!

💥 See How The Perfume Spot Went From Small Storefront To Ecommerce Juggernaut

When The Perfume Spot started it was just a small store on Staten Island.

👏 Now, they’re an ecommerce juggernaut with a team of 25 people and 8 figures in sales each year. How?

In part by selling on Walmart Marketplace.

📈 With Walmart Marketplace, The Perfume Spot was able to instantly reach millions of shoppers, access powerful tools for scale, and sell on a platform invested in their success.  

Could you be the next Walmart success story? 🌟

Sign up today to see. It just takes a few minutes to get started.  

📦 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 24, 2025 update:

• Southeast Asia Trade Deals Are Coming
  • The U.S. states that it is moving closer to finalizing trade agreements with several Southeast Asian nations. This may lead to tariff reductions in that region.
  • While the U.S. has said it had reached agreements with Indonesia and Vietnam, representatives from those countries say they are still finalising terms.
  • Vietnam risks losing $25 billion annually as a result of the 20% tariff imposed on its goods.

🎧 Don’t Let This Tactic Tank Q4…

Too many DTC brands are obsessed with growing their email list at all costs, but if you’re doing it without consent, you’re killing your email channel from the inside.

In this episode of TWBERP, Jordan from Pilothouse shares that email only works long-term if you respect permission and engagement.

Tools that email people who never opted in erode deliverability, inflate vanity metrics, and risk your brand’s most valuable retention asset.

Here’s how to build your list the right way so it doesn’t just get bigger, it gets more profitable.

1. Focus on Native Subscribers

A native subscriber is someone who chose to sign up through your popup, landing page, or checkout.

They want to hear from you. They want to engage. And they buy more.

Contrast that with passive “captured” addresses from 3rd-party tools. They didn’t opt in, often never open, and click spam at a much higher rate.

👉 Grow your native list by improving your onsite popups and lead gen offers not by scraping or renting engagement.

2. Segment Ruthlessly

Your list isn’t one audience. It’s many. At minimum, segment your list by:

• Source: Native vs. third-party
• Engagement: Active clickers vs. silent lurkers
• Purchase behavior: Buyers vs. prospects

This lets you see which segments are actually driving revenue and suppress the ones dragging down your deliverability.

👉 Segmentation = clarity. You can’t optimize what you can’t measure.

3. Suppress the Dead Weight

If someone hasn’t read your emails in 2 or 3 months and hasn’t bought, it’s time to suppress.

Why? Because email providers like Gmail and Yahoo will notice and tank your deliverability.

👉 Good list hygiene is profitable. Dead weight is expensive.

4. Use Strict Rules for Non-Permissioned Addresses

If you must use a third-party tool that captures emails without explicit opt-in:

• Only use them in welcome, cart, and browse abandonment flows
• Never include them in campaigns unless they’ve recently engaged
• Set engagement windows: clicked in the last 60–90 days, or nothing

👉 If they haven’t clicked, they’re not interested. Respect that, or risk damaging your reputation.

The takeaway?

The best way to grow revenue from your list isn’t adding names. It’s increasing the relevance of your messages.

That starts with consent, continues with engagement, and ends with revenue.

Build your list the right way, and it will print money for years. 💰

👉 Listen to the full episode with Jordan here.

🛍️ Are your buyers using AI? Make sure they can find you. 200+ brands including Ollie, Grüns, Latico Leather, and Motion use Athena to get onto AI Search. Get your free AI Search audit here. *

We are seeing brand collaborations pop up again for the second installment of the movie Wicked: For Good.

The latest? American Girl Dolls revealed this week that they will offer  different dolls modeled after the two lead characters, Elphaba and Glinda, launching this month.

📥 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?

• 🧸 How Lovevery Built a Nine Figure Subscription Engine
• 📈 AKNF 544: Break Through Scaling Ceilings in Google Ads
• 💡 Ad-venturous 20: Creative Workflow Hacks  
• 💸 TWBERP 51: Email Like A Billion Dollar Brand Part 2
• 🍭 Rotten’s Retail Expansion: Seeding Strategy and Brand IP
• 🚀 AKNF 542: Using TikTok Symphony To Scale Sales

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.