Happy Sunday!
If you’re reading this, I hope you’re sitting comfortably, beverage nearby, and you’re ready for a rant. I feel like I have been advocating for better merchandising strategies and acquisition offers since 2017, yet there are still relatively few people who utilize them effectively.
So today’s newsletter is going to be a 5-minute conversation all around stronger merchandising. Because, with stronger merchandising, your conversion rate goes up, your AOV goes up, your customer repeat rate goes up... there’s no downside to doing this, and it’s free to do (you just need to spend some energy thinking through it all).
PS, did you see the new Sharma Brands website? If not, check it out!
Vendor of the Week
Roku — We’re here with more thoughts on Roku’s CTV platform.
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been staying close to Roku’s data team to understand what is testing well and lending itself to scale on their platform. Ahead of BFCM, now is the best time to get all the last tests in.
I even put together this quick video, with tips on setting your campaign up for success in Q3.
Brands big and small are seeing significant wins on Roku right now. Fatty15 recently drove 97K+ page views, with more than 25% of cart adds turning into purchases (that’s huge). Energy app Arbor crushed it too, reaching 153,000 unique households at just $0.05 per unique reach.
Why? Because Roku Ads Manager lets you easily leverage TV’s massive audience (125M U.S. households daily) with digital-like precision and simplicity:
- Launch and manage campaigns quickly and easily
- Target specific audiences with clear attribution
- Optimize toward the outcomes you care about (site visits, purchases, cart adds)
- Easily deploy interactive and shoppable ad formats
If you haven’t already, now’s the time to get on Roku. Set your Black Friday and holiday campaigns up for success with minimal hassle, maximum return.
Plus: Spend your first $1,000, and Roku matches it with another $1,000 in ad credits. Use code NIK1000 to claim the offer by 8/31/25 and kickstart your Black Friday strategy today. Terms apply.
👉 Sign up to get your Roku ad credits here
Limited Supply
Did you listen to this past week’s episode of Limited Supply? I spent 45 minutes with Billy Howell, the vibe coder from the Ecom AI Summit and the founder of Stupid Simple Apps. My goal, similar to the goal of this newsletter, was to give you something in your arsenal that is free/cheap/low-risk but has a high reward — that was vibe coding.
We talk about how to vibe code (use AI to build apps with you), what tools to use, examples of apps you can build that would eliminate $50-$250/month app charges, and where to start if you don’t know where to start. I ended up coding two functional web-apps right after filming this episode with Billy.
Listen on Apple, Spotify or YouTube, or just search “Limited Supply” wherever you get your podcasts.
Merchandising to Drive More Conversions
One of my favorite things to write about is something that has zero cost to a founder/marketer to implement, has little-to-no risk, and only has upside. Today that still stands true as I talk about merchandising. Whether you are curating a better catalog or shopping experience for consumers, or creating and testing acquisition offers with different price points and variant selection, showing up in a more convenient way for your customers will be well worth it.
The first thing to think about, is, are you selling the brand or the product? I don’t mean this in terms of where in the funnel someone is, but rather if you’re an apparel brand, you may be focused on selling the fabric technology vs a bundle deal. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s essential to account for the additional education required. You’re not selling an offer; you’re selling the fabric, the lifestyle, the quality of the materials, the exclusivity of the color, etc.
Typically, this happens in apparel. Even in apparel, you can still focus someone around an acquisition offer. True Classic or even a brand like Little Words Project are great examples of that. Selling the benefits of their materials, and then focusing their offers around bundling.
The merchandising and offers I want to discuss today are more focused on your new customer acquisition strategy, specifically your scalable channels, such as paid social, TV, influencers, and retail/shopper marketing. “Merchandising” is just a fancy word for “Deciding what goes where on the website and how it’s laid out”. It’s like the “front-end” of a product catalog. The truth is, good merchandising just makes it easier for a consumer to want to shop and make a decision relatively quickly. The sweeter your merchandising is (i.e., having a good welcome offer, education, and messaging), the faster someone will convert.
The perfect introductory offer encourages customers to experience your product and how it should be consumed. The main ingredients for a perfect welcome offer are:
- Assortment of variants to sample
- AOV and discount
- Convenience to the customer
Without enough variants to sample (flavors, scents, colors, textures, scents, etc.), you can’t drive enough sampling for someone to find something they might like amongst a best-selling variety.
For new customers, identify which products drive the highest sell-through rates for net-new customers. An easy way to figure this out is to see what customers are buying who come from your Meta prospecting ads (this is why it’s essential to use proper UTM parameters in your ads, so you can see this data within Shopify reports). You can export data and ask it questions or, if you use Triple Whale, you can ask Moby questions like this directly, and get the answers.
Then, building AOV... Adding gifts is one of the most straightforward ways to build a welcome offer. There are a couple of main types you can add:
- Other SKUs you have that aren’t best-selling but people are loving.
- Complimentary products or trinkets to what you sell.
- Digital products or subscriptions.
In either case, individually or in combination, the goal is to raise the AOV for your orders, but also leverage the stronger perceived value of the total order. If you can create an AOV for your new customer merchandising that is 2-3x the normal brand’s AOV (like with Everyday Dose, for example), you make it easier for subsequent purchases where the AOV (as an existing customer), doesn’t feel out of line.
The more you can pack into a single order, the more you can also give efficiencies to your customer, by offering discounts.
Lastly, IMO, when thinking about digital products to incorporate in your customer merchandising, the best part of including a digital product in a subscription is that you don’t have hard costs associated to it. For example, the plant protein brand, Orgain, was running a promotion to give you a month of Centr App (fitness/training app) with any purchase. That gives the customer a $29.99 perceived value; it probably costs Centr pennies (if that) to host an additional account on their server, and it helps Centr acquire a new customer. It’s a win for Orgain, a win for Centr and a win for the customer. The triple win is my favorite type of scenario.
Adding additional gifts here also allows you to put the perception of the discount on the gifts, not on the main flagship product you are selling.
If you have a consumable product, your discount sweet spot typically ranges from 20-30%. For a one-time purchase, it’s around 15-20%. Now, here’s the thing — you don’t NEED to just discount the main product you’re selling. In fact, I would recommend not doing that, and instead leveraging the retail value of the gifts you’re including to create the discount.
To conclude this rant, it’s 2025, and while you believe your ads stand out, you need to consider how your merchandising competes with that of your competitors. If your competitors sell the same or a similar product, and they have better merchandising, making it easier for the average person to experience an amazing product, you will lose when it comes to providing that experience in a convenient way. Don’t let bad merchandising be the reason you don’t sell enough, or you didn’t provide enough for new people to sample/try your brand the right way. It should be a healthy mix of what people will like based on historical data, and what patterns you recognize your best customers already engage with.
Try using dedicated new customer acquisition offers, with proper disclaimers, focused on people who’ve never experienced the brand. I promise that if you can crack the code on finding a net-new number of daily customers, the rest of the business greatly benefits from ripple effects of acquiring better customers.
If you have any questions related to merchandising, bundling, acquisition offer building (I’m happy to help you build one if you reply to this email), or anything else related to this topic, pleas reply and ask. I would love to help you crack this code.
That's all for this week
I hope today’s newsletter, although it was more of a rant, still had a nugget for you to grab and leverage this week. I can’t stress enough the importance of figuring out an acquisition offer that works across all channels. It makes testing new channels, let alone scaling them, so much easier.
It’s a Sunday night, so I hope you get 9 hours of sleep tonight. As we enter the peak Summer season, make sure to take care of yourself. Go for walks, sleep, hydrate, workout, and spend time with people who make you feel special.
While you do that, I am delving into a topic for next week’s Sunday newsletter that will be one of those newsletters that get printed out and forwarded around. I love a good Sunday tactical newsletter.
Have a great upcoming week, and I’ll see you next week!