One Campaign. Lower CAC. Higher Conviction.

One day, tariffs are ruled illegal.

The next day, they’re back.

On top of that, Meta's ad ecosystem keeps shifting. Retention isn’t optional anymore. And the old creative testing playbooks are changing fast.

If you’re leading a brand right now, you’re not just running marketing or ops. You’re managing volatility. You’re a ship at sea in a storm.

Hopefully, this edition can be a bit of a lighthouse for you.

Here’s what’s inside:

• ⚖️ Your Margin on Trial: The legal war behind tariffs, and why "uncertainty" is the new line item on your P&L.

• 🔁 How to earn more from every customer: From AOV to LTV, how LTV-minded brands are squeezing more revenue from every customer.

• 💍 One campaign to rule them all: How Seed Health stopped isolating creative tests and rebuilt their entire paid media workflow around one ASC campaign.

• 📌 Quick Hits: The latest Meta bug, YouTube’s new ad format, and a killer prompt course from Anthropic.

Let’s get into it 💪

📢 What Meta Buyers Are Stealing from Google in 2025

Learn how top brands are scaling search and protecting ROAS in the chaos.

Everyone’s focused on Meta. But behind the scenes, some brands are quietly unlocking profitable scale on Google.

Join Obvi’s CMO Ashvin Melwani and the DigiCom team (who manage $100M+ in annual ad spend) for a tactical breakdown of:

• The Google campaign structures keeping ROAS healthy in 2025

• How to convert both branded and non-branded search efficiently

• Why most brands FAIL to scale Google (and how to avoid it)

• Live Q&A to get your questions answered by operators in the trenches

🗓️ Tuesday, June 10 | 11 AM MDT
🎟️ Register now to save your seat →

⚖️ Macro: Your Margin Is on Trial

Unfortunately, we have to keep talking about tariffs.

Last week, a U.S. federal court ruled that Trump’s tariffs, imposed via emergency powers, were unconstitutional. Two days later, a federal appeals court reversed the decision, reinstating them while litigation continues. 🙄

So, where does that leave ecommerce brands?

Caught between policy whiplash and operational paralysis.

This isn’t just about trade anymore. It’s about uncertainty becoming systemic, and brands paying the price.

 Read more: Washington Post, CBS News
🔗 Bonus: Tariff Whiplash is Rewriting the Rules for Cross-Border Ecommerce

⚖️ What’s Actually Happening..

The original court ruling challenged the use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) as justification for sweeping tariffs, saying presidents can’t bypass Congress without clear limits.

If that precedent sticks, it could permanently change how tariffs are imposed in the U.S.

But for now the tariffs are still live. And the legal fight has only made everything murkier.

This ambiguity is now its own form of damage, because brands can’t plan around a maybe.

🚢 Panic Buying Is Back

While some headlines framed the ruling as a “pause,” every buyer and supply chain manager saw it for what it really was: a window. And they rushed through it.

Freight demand is surging not because tariffs are gone, but because no one believes the pause will last.

Vietnam is also setting records. Everyone’s trying to land product before the system locks back up.

And it will.

😬 The New Margin Risk: Decision Latency

The bigger risk isn’t just higher COGS, it’s the drag on execution:

• You can’t price confidently if costs are uncertain

• You can’t commit to inventory without clarity on duties

• You can’t forecast cash flow if the rules might change next quarter

As one operator told us:
“We’re planning for both a repeal and a doubling down. It’s exhausting—and it’s slowing us down.”

Even if tariffs stay flat, this volatility is silently eroding speed, confidence, and margin.

🧱 What To Do Now

• Plan for tariffs to stay. If they vanish, you win back margin. If not, you’re protected.

• Model dual-scenario forecasts for Q4–Q1. Build SKU ladders, promos, and bundles that flex with margin swings.

• Renegotiate vendor terms now—freight, 3PLs, packaging, ingredient suppliers. Leverage the chaos while you can.

• Localize fulfillment and split SKU catalogs by region.

• Use Shopify’s new Summer ‘25 tools like Tariffguide.ai, DDP labeling, and duties-in-checkout to reduce friction and churn.

🧠 Takeaway

You’re not just in a trade war. You’re in a legal war. And your margin is stuck in the middle.

This isn’t about reacting to headlines. It’s about building a business that can operate when no one (not even the courts) knows what comes next.

Price for risk. Forecast for chaos. Execute as best you can.

🔁 Trends: How to Earn More from Every Customer

In an environment of trade war chaos, rising CACs, and thinner margins, brands can no longer afford to think of retention as a nice-to-have.

But here’s the twist: Retention isn’t just about sending better emails. It’s about architecting the entire experience—from opt-in to cancellation—to give customers a reason to stay or buy more.

Acquisition used to be the holy grail and the path for may brands to scale to 8 figures and more. But these days a strong focus on loyalty, LTV, AOV, and profitable customer cohorts is non-negotiable.

💳 Nick Shackelford on Subscription UX That Converts

Nick Shackelford of Brez shared how a few no-cost UX tweaks drove an extra $1.1M in subscription revenue for the THC beverage brand. No price hikes. Just a cleaner setup.

His playbook:

• Pre-select subscription, but with clear, transparent messaging.

• Visually compare one-time vs. subscription price/savings.

• Highlight benefits like pause/skip/flexible billing.

• Build a post-purchase flow that prevents buyer’s remorse.

And crucially:

• Make cancellation easy, but give users alternative options.

• Track cancel reasons to spot churn trends early.

📌 See his full thread

📬 Melanie Balke on the Broken State of Email

Everyone is rushing to email in the face of rising Meta costs, but retention marketing isn’t as simple as “batch and pray” anymore.

Melanie Balke warns that most brands are flying blind in the inbox thanks to:

• Apple’s MPP: You can’t trust opens anymore.

• Bot clicks: You can’t even tell what’s real.

• New deliverability rules from Google & Yahoo: Require clean lists, strict authentication (SPF/DKIM/DMARC), clear opt-ins, and fast unsubscribes.

So what works now?

1. Clicks > opens. Every email you send needs a reason to interact.

2. List cleaning is mandatory. Ghosts will tank deliverability.

3. Build for value, not spam. Think: post-purchase education, quiz follow-ups, and helpful flows that actually serve the customer.

📌 Read her breakdown

🖼️ Leverage framing to increase AOV

This one isn’t technically about retention, but it is about earning more from the customers you already have.

Ron Shah shared how Obvi restructured their core offer and upsell logic to increase revenue per visitor by $5.70–$10.43.

Key shifts:

• From bundle → system: Reframe a 3-product kit as a "morning–afternoon–night" wellness system.

• Multi-month upsells: Offer 1-month vs. 3-month versions at checkout.

• Urgency tests: Countdown timers (3-min vs. 5-min) boosted decision momentum.

• Multivariate testing: to find winning combinations faster.

Psychological framing + small UX tweaks = big AOV lift.

📌 Full thread here

🧾 Takeaway

Retention and LTV growth is more than a flow or discount code. It’s:

• Understanding the real experience of subscribing, uptake, and churn

• Navigating a chaotic inbox landscape with precision

• Reframing offers to maximize revenue from the very first purchase

You can’t just acquire customers at scale and hope for expanded lifetime value anymore. You must actively design for it across CRO, UX, email, and SMS.

💍 Tactics: One Campaign to Test Them All

Let’s check out how Seed Health rebuilt their Meta ads workflow around a single ASC and got better results, faster.

Standard creative testing = flooding Meta with variations, splitting ad sets, forcing budget, and promoting winners to a scaling campaign.

Seed Health—spending 7 figures a month—found that approach increasingly inefficient.

So they flipped it.

In a recent deep dive with Dara Denney, their team revealed how they restructured their Meta workflow into a single, centralized ASC campaign and then let the algorithm do the hard work of finding winners.

How Seed Rebuilt Their Paid Creative Workflow

1️⃣ One ASC Campaign Per Sprint

Every creative test (usually 15–20 ads across 3–5 concepts) gets launched into one Advantage+ Shopping Campaign (ASC).

No forced spend. No separate ad sets. Meta allocates based on predicted performance.

2️⃣ Only High-Conviction Concepts Get In

No more running 50+ half-baked angles.

If Seed’s growth + creative team doesn’t believe in it, it doesn’t ship.

3️⃣ Meta’s Spend Allocation = Signal

If an ad gains spend, they learn from it. If it doesn’t, they move on.

No manual budget juggling. The algorithm reveals scale potential.

4️⃣ Winning Concepts Get Multiplied

Seed’s breakout hit, the “aspirational pooping” UGC concept (seriously), wasn’t just “an ad that scaled”.

It was reimagined across static graphics, influencer whitelisting, and in-house formats. Each one tailored to its format, not just copied.

5️⃣ Attribution Isn’t the Whole Story

Internal incrementality tests showed that the best-performing campaigns weren’t the ones with the lowest CPA, they were the ones with diverse creative sources inside a unified campaign.

Real business lift > platform-only metrics.

🛠️ What You Can Do Right Now

💡 Build one ASC testing campaign per sprint.
Label it cleanly, group your creatives, and let Meta work.

📉 Ditch creative volume-for-volume’s sake.
Focus on testing ideas you believe in. Kill the rest.

🎨 Remix what works across formats.
In-house, UGC, agency, influencer—one idea, but many executions.

📊 Track allocation, not just ROAS.
The algorithm’s spend decisions are early performance signals.

📁 Make learnings portable.
Seed shares winning concepts across their entire marketing org.

👯‍♂️ Sync growth and creative teams.
If they don’t share performance goals, your testing loop breaks.

🧠 Takeaway

This isn’t a “hack.” It’s a re-architecture.

And it matches Meta’s movement towards ditching complex ad account structures and giving the algo more room to make decisions.

One campaign. Cleaner signals. Faster learning. Lower CAC. Higher conviction.

Worth a test.

Quick Hits

• READ THIS THREAD if you are in health & wellness 👆

• A Breakdown of YouTube’s new (groundbreaking?) ad format and how to use it

• David Protein Bar announced their $75M series A funding round

• Tuft & Paw also announced their $4M Series A fundraise

•  Free, interactive course on prompt engineering from Anthropic