The VIP Campaign Trap
đ When Your Best Customers Make Growth Look Better Than It Is, The real PPC shift nobody is talking about, and more!
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In this newsletter, youâll find:
đ The VIP Campaign Trap
⥠The real PPC shift nobody is talking about
đ Ad of the Day
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đ The VIP Campaign Trap
Thereâs a type of campaign that almost always âworks.â
You send it to your most engaged customers. You add a discount. The numbers jump immediately. Revenue per recipient spikes. Conversion rate looks incredible. Everyone feels relief. And then, quietly, the business stops growing.
This is the VIP trap.
Targeting your best customers doesnât create demand. It harvests it. Thatâs fine when itâs intentional. It becomes a problem when itâs used to prove efficiency.
When teams want to show improvement quickly, they often narrow the audience. Fewer sends. Higher intent. Cleaner metrics. The dashboard improves, but the underlying engine doesnât.
Those customers were already leaning toward buying. The campaign didnât change their behavior as much as it claimed credit for it.
This is where performance starts lying.
Revenue per email goes up because the denominator shrank, not because the program got better. Discounts accelerate purchases that would have happened anyway, often pulling future orders forward. The short-term lift feels real. The long-term impact shows up later as softer repeat behavior and a thinner pipeline.
The dangerous part is how convincing this looks.
Leadership sees efficiency. Teams feel validated. Cadence slows. Exploration stops.
Meanwhile, the rest of the list gets quieter. Newer customers receive fewer touchpoints. Education drops off. Intent never gets built for the next layer of buyers.
The brand becomes very good at converting people who already love it and very bad at creating new reasons for people to care.
Thatâs not retention. Thatâs stagnation with good optics. Healthy email programs separate two jobs clearly.
One job is harvesting demand from high-intent customers. Thatâs where VIPs belong, and it should be measured honestly as extraction, not growth.
The other job is building demand in everyone else. That means sending messages that donât convert immediately but make future purchases more likely. Those emails rarely look efficient on their own. They only pay off in aggregate.
When everything is judged by revenue per send, that second job gets cut first.
The fix isnât sending more discounts or fewer emails. Itâs changing the question being asked.
Not âWhich campaign performed best?â
But âWhich campaigns created buyers who didnât exist before?â
VIPs are important. They just shouldnât be used to prove progress.
Because when your best customers are carrying the dashboard, theyâre often hiding the fact that nothing new is being built underneath.
⥠The real PPC shift nobody is talking about
2025 quietly rewired how paid media actually works. Not because of one feature launch, but because control, creativity, and measurement all started behaving differently at the same time. Hereâs the cleaner way to look at what matters heading into 2026.
What Works and What Doesnât:
⢠Performance improves when advertisers stay hands-on with structure, keywords, and conversion signals, using Performance Max and Demand Gen as force multipliers rather than autopilot systems, and relying on scripts.
⢠Creative and planning anchored in real people still win, with UGC and influencer-style content outperforming polished AI ads, especially when teams optimize toward business outcomes instead of chasing ROAS in isolation.
⢠Fully automated creative assets remain a liability, with Automatically Created Assets introducing brand risk, misaligned messaging, and inefficient budget allocation due to limited approval and control.
⢠Platform rigidity keeps increasing, as hidden toggles, long learning periods, modeled conversions, and complex interfaces make fast, confident decisions harder, especially for smaller or seasonal campaigns.
PPC success is shifting from execution speed to decision quality. As 2026 approaches, platforms are evolving faster than ever, and the biggest changes likely havenât even been announced yet. Advertisers who stay flexible, protect signal quality, and pair automation with judgment will win.
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The AI Newsletter That Solves Problems, Not Creates Them
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đ Ad of the Day
What Works:
1. Product-aware - The buyer already wants a lip product; theyâre just deciding which one actually feels worth buying.
2. Everything is shown, nothing hidden - Product shots, real lips, feature callouts, and a human review all stack quickly so the buyer doesnât need to imagine results.
3. Conversion support - This ad exists to answer last-mile questions like âWill it look good on me?â and âIs this practical for everyday use?â
When buyers are comparison shopping, over-show. Real usage visuals and simple proof beat clever copy every time.
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