DTC968: Presell Pages, Financial Case for CRO, and Speed Up Video Performance

Good morning,

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

• 🤔 How Relevant Are Presell Pages in 2025?
• ❌ Why You Shouldn’t Scale Ads on a Low-Converting Site
• 🏃 A Swift Hack for Improving Video Ad Performance

You’re reading this newsletter along with new subscribers from: The Tush Present, World Nomads, and The Naturally Curious. 👋

‍🏆 Win 2026 With These Niche Marketing Moments Your Competitors Aren’t Watching

🏃 Year after year, every brand chases the same shopping holidays. But what if you owned the ones they didn’t see coming? 🛍️

Think niche celebrations, untapped opportunities, and standout sales that make your brand pop... as long as you’ve planned ahead.

📆 Meet your secret weapon: Klaviyo’s 2026 marketing calendar. It’s your month-by-month breakdown of need-to-know dates and campaign inspiration.

👉 Get your 2026 marketing calendar to get in on:

• 🛒 Key shopping holidays, sale seasons, and under-the-radar opportunities
• 💡 Omnichannel campaign ideas and best practices for planning
• 💸 Proven plays for sparking urgency and sales

🔥 Ready to make this your best year yet? No more missed opportunities...

‍💰 Why You Need A Presell Page For These Types of Products

Remember when presell landing pages were the secret weapon for 15xing conversion rate (CVR) for paid social traffic?

Presell pages acted as the step between an ad and PDP to improve performance, but as user behavior and algorithms have evolved, plenty of business owners and marketers ask: how relevant are presell pages in 2025?

The answer? It depends!

The Pilothouse Meta team typically sees wins with presells for these buckets of products:

1️⃣ Higher Average Order Value (AOV) & Complex Products

• If your product is over $150 and needs more education, a presell page still bridges the gap between ad and PDP.

2️⃣ Medical and Supplements

• Medical devices and supplements typically require more education and trust-building, which is best done on a presell page.

3️⃣ Commodities

• If you sell what everyone else sells, it’s crucial to sell users on your brand through presell pages, so they pick you over a competitor.

For impulse purchases and low AOV products, PDPs and collections pages typically outperform.

This is a more recent post-click win from the Pilothouse team using presell landing pages. 👇

The presell page is outperforming the homepage with both a higher AOV and CVR.

For this brand, the main KPI is CVR as they are focused on subscriptions. The higher AOV will definitely support a higher lifetime value for the brand as well.

The takeaway?

Presell pages are relevant for a large portion of brands that have complex products and a higher AOV. Having a well-thought-out angle, design, and offer are typically the key to success when building out a page.

‍🛍️ Here’s What BFCM 2025 Revealed About Today’s Holiday Shopper

🎄 If you want to understand how shoppers are approaching holiday shopping, take a closer look at Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Klaviyo’s 2025 BFCM Recap shows a major shift: earlier discovery, smarter browsing, and a whole lot more interest in brands that actually know their customers. 🎁

🎯 BFCM 2025 proved that connection beats promotion thanks to AI, loyalty, and CRM channels outperforming discounts all weekend long.

👉 You’ll find:

• When BFCM momentum really started
• Which channels actually shaped decisions
• How AI and loyalty influenced spend
• Brand examples fueling the season

🧑‍🎄 With the holidays still unfolding, these trends show you exactly where to focus next.

‍🎧 The Financial Case for CRO

In this episode of TWBERP, Jordan from Pilothouse breaks down the financial case for CRO and why scaling ads on a low-converting site can actually make your business less profitable.

He walks through a simple, realistic model used in real DTC audits and shows why improving conversion rate beats throwing more money at paid acquisition.

What you’ll learn:

• Why scaling ads far below benchmark conversion rates is a losing game
• How a jump from 1% to 1.5% CVR can dramatically increase margin
• Why CRO, email, and owned traffic should come before acquisition spend
• The real role of advertising (and why it’s not short-term revenue)
• Why revenue per session is a better metric than raw conversion rate

▶️ Watch the full episode on YouTube here.

🎧 Or click here to listen on Spotify.

‍Struggling with watch time on your videos?

A user on X shares how making this one change helped raise conversions.

These types of videos consistently outperformed videos playing at normal speed. No other edits required.

This is a great way to improve your drop-off rate, so test it out!

‍💰 Shopify Rolls out Advertising Network for Merchants

Shopify’s new advertising network, ‘Product Network,’ now enables merchants to make additional revenue off of ads.

Merchants can install the Product Network app within the Shopify app store and receive Shop Campaign credits for hosting ad placements.

Learn more here.

‍🛍️ BFCM brought crowds of new customers. Your next moves decide if they keep coming back. Discover tactics in Klaviyo’s latest fireside chat about how to keep the momentum going. Watch it here. *

‍📥 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 Kulfi Beauty Expanded to 720 Sephora Stores with Zero Ads
• 🚀 AKNF 567: Pilothouse Drives 30% CTR with Less Campaigns
• 🏠 Ad-venturous 32: Building the Omnipresent Brand Part 1
• 🏅 TWBERP 63: Black Friday: What Worked and What Didn’t
• 🔧 What To Fix First: Growth Metrics 7-Figure Brands Need To Track
• 🔥 AKNF 565: BFCM + Meta in 2025: Scrappy Pivots That Crushed

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.