If the only time you email your list is when you’re running a sale, what do you think happens? Your customers start waiting for the sales. They see your regular-priced products and think, “Nah, I’ll wait. They’ll have a sale in a couple of weeks.”

And then you’re stuck in this cycle where you have to keep discounting to generate revenue, which destroys your profit margins and devalues your brand.

But here’s the part that most brands don’t actually sit down and calculate: the math of discounting is absolutely brutal, especially when you factor in the high ad costs we’re dealing with right now.

Let’s say you discount your products by just 10% – which seems pretty modest, right? – you need to sell 25% more volume just to make the same net profit.

Now, let’s add in the reality of paid advertising to drive traffic and win new customers.

So now you’re discounting by 10%, which means you need 25% more volume. But to get that volume, you’re paying on average $50 ad spend per purchase (even more during peak promotional periods).

Do the math. The amount of extra sales you need to generate just to maintain your profit margin increases drastically. You could need to sell 40%, 50%, even 60% more just to end up in the same place profit-wise.

And for what? So you can say you had a good Black Friday? So you can compete with every other brand throwing discounts around?

It’s exhausting. And frankly, it’s not a sustainable way to run a business.

But here’s where the strategy we’ve been talking about – using your email database smartly, building customer loyalty, focusing on repeat purchases – completely changes this equation.

In this episode, we discuss the practical steps you can take to lift your return on ad spend by 300-400%.