Engagement Can Be Misleading

Hey there Smarty 👋

Are you geared up to catch the latest and greatest in quick shorts?

And just a quick heads-up! If you stumbled upon us through a friend, make sure to subscribe here! That way, you’ll never miss out on the trending shorts.

Together with The Shift

Master AI In Just 5 Minutes A Day With This Free Newsletter

AI can do a lot, but most newsletters leave you wondering what’s actually worth trying.

That’s where The Shift comes in.

It doesn’t just tell you what’s new in AI. Every edition always answers ONE question:

“What can you do with AI today that saves you time, money, or effort?”

In The Shift, you’ll get:

✅ Real-world examples of smart AI hacks by brands that you can steal
✅ Mini step-by-step guides to build smarter AI workflows in minutes
✅ Access to 3,000+ curated AI tools and free courses
✅ 500+ powerful AI prompts you can copy/paste/tweak

No hype. No wasted time. No “just in case” news.

If it’s in The Shift, it’s because it can make your work better. Today.

Subscribe to The Shift now - it’s free!

📩 Engagement Can Be Misleading

Have you ever felt like email is getting sharper, more efficient, more “professional”… but the business still isn’t compounding?

That is rarely a segmentation problem. That is usually a system design problem.

Because the truth is, email is not one channel. Email is three different engines stacked on top of each other, and everyone only optimizes one.

The Three Email Growth Phases

People think email is one dashboard. In reality, there are three separate layers:

1. Extraction (harvesting existing buyers)
2. Expansion (pulling new buyers into repeat behavior)
3. Resurrection (recovering lost demand)

Click rates only tell you how well extraction is working. Growth comes from the other two.

Peek Inside What Actually Happens in Strong Brands A wellness brand improves click rate from 3.0% to 3.7%. Revenue stays flat.

Why?

Because the list is now mostly made of repeat buyers. The channel has quietly become a loyalty machine, not a demand machine. That means email is no longer creating incremental customers. It is simply converting the same customers faster.

This is the hidden plateau: High engagement, low net-new growth.

The Real Metric that moves the needle: Net-New Demand per Send

Advanced operators stop asking:

“How did this campaign perform?”

They ask:

“How much new demand did this create that would not have happened anyway?”

That requires tracking: Incremental revenue, not attributed revenue, Reactivated buyers, not total buyers, New customer share inside flows, Total audience expansion rate

Email can look strong while doing nothing incremental. That is the real illusion. The More Dangerous Trap: Audience Compression

When you suppress unengaged users aggressively, you create a smaller but hotter list.

That feels efficient. But over time, you are doing something risky:

You are training the algorithm of your business to only speak to buyers who are already loyal.

The brand loses its ability to persuade cold humans. That is how brands become fragile. Strong brands build persuasion muscle, not just efficiency.

So What Do You Do Instead?

If rates are rising but growth is flat, the unlock is not micro-optimization. The unlock is building an Email Expansion Operating System:

• Weekly acquisition inflows are tied directly into lifecycle
• Quarterly reactivation “return moments,” not discount blasts
• Creative built for new belief shifts, not just offers
• Reporting split into: Efficiency Health (rates) Demand Growth (net-new volume)

The takeaway:

Email is not a conversion channel. Email is a customer population system. If you are only optimizing engagement, you are optimizing extraction. If you want compounding growth, you have to build expansion and resurrection alongside it.

That is the difference between a high-performing email program…

…and an email engine that actually scales revenue over time. 

⚡ Meta Is Turning Discovery Into Its Core Growth Engine

Meta is tightening two huge levers at once. Creator partnerships are becoming smarter and more predictive inside Marketplace. And behind the scenes, Meta’s AI feed and ad systems are cranking engagement, Reels velocity, and conversion performance across every app.

 The Breakdown:

1) Creator Marketplace now recommends high-intent partners - Brands will see creator suggestions based on who already follows, tags, or has engaged with their products, making it easier to find creators who are genuinely likely to accept collaborations.

Meta is adding “Similar Creators” search based on past top partners, plus new indicators that highlight creators with strong ad experience and those predicted to drive high-performing campaigns.

3) Meta’s AI feed engine drove major engagement lifts - Feed and video ranking improvements pushed Facebook views up 7% and Threads time spent up 20%, while Facebook began surfacing 25% more same-day Reels and Instagram boosted original content prevalence by 10%.

Meta’s AI-powered video generation tools reached a $10B revenue run-rate, growing nearly three times faster than overall ads revenue, while upgraded ad ranking models delivered a 3% conversion lift across Instagram Feed, Stories, and Reels.

Meta is rebuilding discovery end-to-end, from which creators and brands partner with, to which content users see, to how ads convert. The strategy is clear: tighter AI control, faster creative performance, and more predictable outcomes across the entire platform.

Together with The Operator's Stack

The Decision That Could Save Your Quarter

Every quarter, another channel slips away. CAC climbs, conversions shrink, and leadership asks for answers you don’t have. The funnel didn’t break; the market evolved faster than your playbook.

Rewriting the DTC Rulebook is built from campaigns that sold to the toughest buyers. Inside, you’ll get:

• Storytelling frameworks that turn attention into trust
• Value-mapping canvases for clearer positioning
• Referral and cashflow calculators for growth without waste
• Unit economics analyzers that expose hidden profit leaks
• Outreach libraries with 50+ proven templates
• Supplier negotiation toolkits that give you leverage instantly

On top of that, you’ll unlock two pro-level playbooks and 2,000+ Viral Video Hooks (updated monthly).

That’s over $900 of execution-ready strategy. No theory. No filler. Just tools you can deploy today.

Get your copy now and stay ahead before the next quarter’s numbers land!

🚀Quick Hits

📉 Checkout optimization does not matter if delivery feels generic. Shipfusion’s clear protein audit found 80% showed star ratings on PDPs, then removed social proof at checkout, weakening confidence before the wait. If you ship products to customers, download the DTC Delivery Files to benchmark the experience you are shipping.

📱 TikTok says its US services are fully restored after a power outage triggered cascading infrastructure failures, pushing back on censorship rumors and confirming view counts, searches, and monetization tools should now be back to normal.

📊 Google Ads API v23 now enables Performance Max reporting by individual channels like Search, YouTube, Display, and Discover, finally giving advertisers clearer visibility beyond the old “mixed” black-box results.

🧩 OpenAI appears to be laying the technical groundwork for ChatGPT ads, with ad-related code now showing up in page source, signaling a near-term launch of premium, high-intent ad placements inside conversational results.

📉 U.S. ad spending finished 2025 nearly flat, rising just 0.2% overall, with December growth sharply slowing versus the 15% surge seen in December 2024, highlighting a volatile and uneven market year.

That’s a wrap for today! Tell us your thoughts about today's content as we line up more Shorts! And don’t hesitate to share this with someone who’d adore it. 🥰