From Paid Ads To Owned Audiences: DTC Growth Strategies With Newsletter Monetization

Today's episode explores a critical shift in how scaling Shopify brands can build deeper, more profitable customer relationships.

As digital ad costs climb heading into Q4—with BFCM just around the corner—too many brands waste budget competing in noisy landscapes, ignoring an untapped resource for ongoing engagement and conversion: owned audiences through branded newsletters.

Most DTC brands still rely solely on transactional email flows from ESPs like Klaviyo, Omnisend, or Mailchimp—abandoned carts, promotional blasts, order confirmations. But newsletters offer something fundamentally different: a direct line to engaged subscribers who actually want to hear from the brand, enabling thought leadership and relationship-building beyond the transactional nature of traditional email marketing.

What if launching premium branded newsletters that drive organic growth, monetize audiences, and integrate seamlessly with Shopify didn't require expensive engineering or platform lock-in?

Today's guest, Moshe Zippel, Senior Lead of Advertising Success at Beehiiv, breaks down how modern newsletter platforms give DTC brands an unfair advantage. As a Beehiiv customer myself, I've seen firsthand how the platform makes it incredibly easy to launch beautiful branded newsletters. Moshe shares the most actionable strategies—from automating subscriber growth through partner recommendations to activating Beehiiv's in-platform ad network—for building owned lists, driving engagement, and monetizing communities outside the "ad-taxed world" of Google, Facebook, and random-interruption advertising.

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