Retain your best creators now
📆 Rebooking top creators one post at a time costs more and risks losing them, so price a retainer before January, Losing ads can reveal what to test next, and more!
Welcome to a space where every edition delivers insights, strategies, and inspiration to fuel your advertising brilliance. 🤯
📆 Turn your best one-off creators into 2027 retainers before they're booked up
Every program has a few creators who consistently outperform. Many programs rebook them one post at a time, renegotiating the rate and timeline every round.
That approach costs money, time, and sometimes the creator, who fills their calendar with brands that committed earlier.
Compare the math
Say your best creator charges $1,000 per post, and you book six posts a year one at a time. That's $6,000, plus a fresh negotiation each round.
A six-post retainer over six months at $800 per post costs $4,800. The creator gets guaranteed income, and you save $1,200 while locking in their availability. The 20% discount is illustrative, so negotiate your own.
A retainer is the formal version of what Insense builds into the process: brief once, rehire the creators whose ads performed, and keep a roster of vetted creators you can book every month.
Each creator delivers 20+ raw clips to cut into new hooks and angles, and you keep lifetime usage rights on everything. After the Black Friday rush, a cadence keeps fresh creative flowing into the quieter weeks that follow. You can book a free strategy call by November 6th and get $200 toward your first campaign.
What to include
- Volume and cadence: for example, one post a month for six months.
- A fixed brief window: such as the first week of each month, so the creator can plan.
- Usage rights: covering ads and owned channels for the retainer period.
- A performance review: at month three, either side can adjust the format.
- An exit clause: 30 days' notice if results drop well below the first quarter.
Pick the right creators
Offer retainers only to creators who beat your account average on cost per purchase in at least two campaigns. One great post can be luck. That rule is my judgment.
Time the offer
December is a good moment to propose a retainer. Creators are planning their next year, and your Q4 results give you fresh data to point to.
Use the extra time well
Retainers free up hours you'd spend rebooking. Use them for testing: new hooks, new formats or new products with a creator who already knows your brand. A creator on a retainer also learns your product deeply, which tends to show in the content.
What to track
- Cost per purchase per retained creator, monthly
- Content delivered on time against the agreed cadence
- Performance at month three against the pre-retainer average
List the creators who beat your average in two or more campaigns this year. Those are your retainer candidates for 2027.
Together with Omnisend
One Plain-Text Email Outearned a Month of Campaigns
Before you send everyone the same BFCM discount, check who keeps coming back. Your repeat buyers could justify an offer of their own.
For one skincare brand, 36% of customers had ordered more than six times. Enflow Digital used Omnisend to turn that loyalty into nearly $18,000 from one plain-text email.
Omnisend helped the team:
- Find purchase patterns in minutes, cutting out hours of manual analysis.
- Build a VIP audience of customers with four or more orders, ready for a separate promotion.
- Keep the VIP offer focused on engaged buyers by filtering out contacts inactive for 180 days.
The offer was available only through email: a higher discount plus a gift above a higher spend threshold. It increased order value while helping clear slower-selling stock.
Co-founder Karolina shares how it came together so you can apply the approach to your own repeat buyers before your BFCM offers are locked in.
⚡Losing ads can reveal what to test next
This framework argues that creative strategists should diagnose underperforming ads through CPM, CTR, CVR, and AOV rather than dismissing the entire creative angle. Understanding which metric is underperforming helps identify where the customer journey may be breaking.
Why it works: Breaking ROAS into its underlying drivers separates attention problems from conversion problems. Strong CTR with weak CVR, for example, may indicate landing-page friction or a mismatch between the ad's promise and the post-click experience.
Where it needs balance: Individual metrics don't always reveal the exact cause of poor performance. High CTR can attract unqualified traffic, while low CVR may reflect pricing, audience quality, or product demand. Creative decisions should combine metric analysis with customer insights and controlled testing.
🎥 Reel of the Day
What Works:
1. Instant Benefit Communication - The opening promises cured nails in just 60–120 seconds, immediately addressing time-consuming manicures. Demonstrating the UV light makes the speed claim tangible and gives viewers an immediate reason to consider purchasing.
2. Problem Solution Positioning - “No top coat, no base coat” removes two familiar manicure steps, positioning the product around convenience rather than technical features. This simplifies the buying decision for busy beauty consumers.
3. Aspirational Result Framing - The glossy nude manicure, soft lighting, and feminine styling establish a salon-quality aesthetic. Showing the finished nails helps viewers visualize the desired outcome before considering the product itself.
Lead with a specific time-saving promise, demonstrate the result immediately, then introduce a relatable discovery reaction. Convert that interest through a simple comment-to-DM CTA.
💃Events
🔥 What Changes When Your AI Can Actually See Your Business
November 5 | 11 AM ET | Virtual Event
HubSpot’s product team will show how ChatGPT and Claude can work directly with CRM context instead of relying on whatever you paste into the chat. See how to get better answers, update customer records from the conversation, and control what AI can access across your workflows.
Can't attend the session live? Register anyway, and you’ll get the recordings in 24 hours.
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Thanks for reading this edition! Keep pushing boundaries, testing ideas, and staying inspired. See you in the next edition with more ways to ignite your marketing success. 🥰