Trust Your Gut, Boost Your LTV: Why Marketers Who Trust Their Instincts Win

🔍 FUNNEL VISION:

When marketing results dip, trusting your experience and doubling down on fundamentals outperforms constantly switching strategies or becoming dependent on outside consultants.

• For pros: Your instincts come from thousands of hours of pattern recognition—respect that data even when metrics temporarily slip.

• For beginners: Build confidence by tracking what works from your own tests rather than chasing every expert's latest "secret hack."

🥡 THIS WEEK'S FUNNEL FEED

What we tested:
We implemented a dynamic visual progress bar during meal selection that shows both money saved and nutritional benefits as customers add more meals to their cart. elebration animations.

What happened:
The average cart value jumped significantly in just two weeks.

Why it worked:
Three psychological principles converged:

1. Loss aversion: The progress bar highlighted "savings left on the table" if they didn't reach the next tier

2. Endowed progress effect: Once customers started seeing the bar fill, they felt invested in completing it

3. Visual certainty: Customers could literally see the value proposition instead of just reading about savings

How to try it:

FOR $10M+ BRANDS:

• Build a custom progress element that updates in real-time without page refreshes

• Test different reward thresholds (we found three tiers performed better than two or four)

• Collect behavioral data on where most users abandon the process to optimize your "cliff points"

STARTING OUT? TRY THIS:

• Use simple CSS progress bars in your checkout process (plenty of free templates available)

• Create clear visual distinctions between each savings tier with both color and icons

• Focus on a single, compelling benefit that unlocks at each threshold rather than multiple confusing offers

🍱 THIS WEEK'S CONTENT BUFFET

These are some pieces of content that I felt inspired to write about.

For those who don’t know LTV stands for Lifetime Value.

It’s how much a customer spends with you over time.

It’s a crucial metric for businesses especially in today’s landscape.

You want this number to be as high as possible.

Here’s why:

Let’s say it costs you $100 to get a stranger to buy your product.

And your AOV (Average Order Value) is $100. 

That would mean you make $0 off that customer…

You probably lost money after expenses.

So you either need to make them spend more on that first sale, or have a way to sell them more stuff on the backend.

Here are some quick ways to do that.

Quick Tactical AOV Boosters:

1. Product bundling

2. Volume-based discounts

3. Free shipping thresholds

4. Post-purchase upsells

5. Pre-checkout bump offers

If you’re a newer business you have no idea what your LTV even is so you need to do everything to make your AOV as high as possible.

This might be one of my favorite tweets ever.

It breaks down what the most creative people in history have in common.

People like…

• Steve Jobs

• Walt Disney

• Nikola Tesla

One of the big takeaways is that all these people had different spaces for different things.

Now this might be narcissistic but I actually do the same thing.

Not trying to call myself a genius but I guess me and Steve have something in common.

For me I spend my morning at Lifetime - the gym or more like a country club.

I try to do all of my creative and deep work there.

From there I then will head to Nutre HQ to do meetings and meet with the team.

I can rarely ever do any deep work.

There is just too much going on to get in the zone.

And as a marketer who needs to be creative - I can’t “cook” in that environment.

So the main takeaway from here is that I’m a genius and have a dedicated area for different creative processes.

🍟 SWIPE OF THE WEEK

What it is: 

Why it's smart: 

• Doens’t really look like an Ad

• Faced paced

• Has a ton of social proof

Steal this idea: 

Make the hooks of your ads look more like organic pieces of content.

How do you do that?

Look what organic content goes viral and use those hooks as ads.

🧪 AI SECRET SAUCE

Tool/Prompt I'm Using: Act as a strategic brand positioning expert with 20+ years of experience working with companies like Nike, Apple, and Airbnb. Help me develop a clear, compelling, and differentiated brand positioning for [product/company].

Step 1: Ask me these specific questions about my brand:

• Who is your target audience (be as specific as possible)?

• What category do you compete in?

• Who are your top 3 competitors?

• What are your product's/service's 3 most unique features or attributes?

• What emotional benefits do customers get from your product/service?

• What broader impact or change are you trying to create?

Step 2: After I answer, analyze my responses and create:

1. A positioning statement following this format: "For [specific target audience], [Brand] is the [category] that [key differentiation] because [reason to believe]."

2. Three distinct positioning options that emphasize different competitive advantages

3. A critical analysis of each option, highlighting strengths and potential vulnerabilities

4. A recommendation for which positioning is strongest and why

Step 3: Develop a practical brand voice guide for my chosen positioning:

• Three core brand personality traits with explanations

• "We Are / We Are Not" contrasts for each trait

• Five examples of actual marketing copy that demonstrate this voice

• Three examples of how competitors speak and how our voice differs

Format everything with clear headings, bullet points, and examples that I could present directly to stakeholders.

How to use this prompt:

1. Replace [product/company] with your specific brand name

2. Answer each question from Step 1 with detailed, honest responses

3. Review the three positioning options and select your preferred direction

4. Save the final brand framework as a reference document for all marketing

5. Share with your team to ensure consistent positioning across channels

Pro tip: Add this line at the end to see immediate applications: "Now, apply this positioning and voice to create: 1) A homepage headline and subheadline, 2) An email subject line, 3) An Instagram bio, and 4) A customer onboarding message."

🧂 UNDERRATED TACTIC

Create a 'Data Confidence Calendar' where you commit to sticking with a marketing strategy for set time periods based on sample size, not feelings. (Example: 'We don't change ad creative until 5,000 impressions, landing pages until 1,000 visitors, or email sequences until 2 full cycles.') This prevents panic-switching and gives your original strategy time to prove itself.

🧩 FUNDAMENTALS TO MASTER

ONE THING newer marketers often get wrong about expertise: Assuming that outside consultants automatically know your customers better than you do.

INSTEAD, DO THIS: Develop a practice of documenting your own insights from customer interactions, sales calls, and support tickets before seeking outside perspectives.

WHY THIS MATTERS EVEN AT SCALE: Even $50M+ brands fall into the trap of discounting their team's accumulated knowledge in favor of consultant recommendations that lack context about their specific customers.

🧃 FOUNDER FUEL

🍽️ WHAT'S COOKING

We have a super secret project that we’re working on at Nutre that should be rolling out in the fall.

It’s going to disrupt the entire meal delivery industry no question.

✌️ That’s All For This Week

Hope you guys got value out of this email.

If you have any specific questions or want me to cover any topics, just respond to this email and I'll do my best to get to them.

See you next week!