What They Changed To Spend 60-70% Less on Ads
- Vanesa Lalo
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
In this episode of The DTC Insider, Brian Roisentul sits down with Nick Sanetra, Director of Marketing at Clove, to discuss how the footwear brand is rethinking customer acquisition, creative strategy, and profitability while staying focused on understanding its customers.
Nick shares how Clove evolved from a growth-first mindset to making every marketing dollar pull its weight, explaining how stronger targeting, creative strategy, marketing systems, and a consistent product and promotional calendar have helped the brand build a more efficient approach to growth.
They dive into paid media, targeting, creative strategy, attribution, and why broad and highly automated campaigns didn’t work as expected for Clove. Nick also shares how changes to targeting and creative helped the brand spend 60–70% less year over year in a given month while generating more revenue, why TikTok is becoming a bigger part of its media mix, and how post-purchase surveys help the team understand customers and make better budget allocation decisions.
Plus, they explore customer retention, email and SMS marketing, why Clove’s loyalty program has become a consistent driver of incremental revenue, the importance of building repeatable systems instead of relying on goals alone, and why AI can accelerate analysis without replacing human curiosity, judgment, and critical thinking.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
• How Clove evolved from prioritizing growth to focusing on profitable growth.
• Why understanding unit economics is critical when setting marketing and customer acquisition goals.
• How a consistent marketing calendar of product launches and promotions supports growth.
• Why Clove moved away from relying heavily on broad targeting and automated campaigns.
• How changes to targeting and creative helped the brand spend 60–70% less year over year in a given month while generating more revenue.
• Why knowing exactly who your target customer is can change the way you approach paid media.
• Why optimizing campaigns for actions higher in the funnel can bring traffic that doesn’t convert.
• How TikTok is becoming a larger part of Clove’s customer acquisition strategy.
• Why Meta, Google, and TikTok remain Clove’s three main performance channels.
• How Clove adapts its creative strategy to different stages of the customer journey.
• Why UGC works particularly well for introducing new customers to the brand.
• How addressing objections like price can help convert customers further down the funnel.
• Why post-purchase surveys have become one of Clove’s most valuable sources of customer and attribution data.
• How customer insights can influence targeting, creative strategy, budget allocation, and product decisions.
• How email and SMS help Clove maintain strong customer retention.
• Why Clove’s loyalty program drives incremental revenue even with a durable product and longer repurchase cycles.
• Why loyalty programs need to be continuously analyzed and optimized instead of being set and forgotten.
• How Clove uses AI to accelerate time-consuming analysis without outsourcing critical thinking.
• Why knowing which questions to ask remains essential as marketers adopt AI.
• Why strong systems, repeatable processes, and listening to customers are fundamental to sustainable growth.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Sponsor for this episode:
This episode is brought to you by BSR.
BSR helps 7-figure+ brands build and optimize strategic growth systems that unlock hidden revenue and scale profitably, without adding chaos, channels, or unnecessary spend.
To learn more about BSR, visit their website or book a call here.
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