Happy Sunday!

If you're reading this, I hope you've had a good weekend, you're staying hydrated, and you've got a few minutes for one of my favorite topics… landing pages, specifically crafting an incredible listicle.

The difference between a well put-together listicle and one that is just jumbled together with AI copy, is success and failure. You simply can’t just run AI slop and expect to out-perform your competitors. But before we get deep into it…

Vendor of the Week

Instant — the AI retention engine brands are racing to turn on before July 4th.

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That's the conversation I keep having with brands using Instant. More of their merchants crossed $1M in incremental revenue last month than in any month in the company's history. Onboarding slots ahead of July 4 are filling fast.

Instant creates personalized flow copy, unique subject lines per recipient, send-time optimization, and constant testing across subject lines, content, visuals, and timing. The longer it stays on, the sharper it gets.

Skatie went live mid-February. Month 1: 61x ROI. Month 3: 141x. Month 4: 180x and still climbing. They crossed $1M in incremental revenue in four months. Open rate up 12%, click rate up nearly 18%. Their lifecycle manager used to spend 2 hours a day building one email. Now she builds the entire week's campaigns in 30 minutes... One master campaign, smart rules change content per shopper, unique subject line for every recipient, etc.

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Crafting the Perfect Listicle

Today, I want to talk about listicles. Specifically, the "7 reasons why" or "5 best of 2026" page you drive paid traffic to before the product page. This is one of the most underrated assets in DTC and almost nobody is running them well. When they're built right, they pull a 35%+ CTR into the product page. They make your CPM cheaper. They make your CAC look better. And the customer who lands on your PDP after reading one is already half-sold. When listicles aren’t built right, they can be an expensive waste of a click.

Last month I was talking to a brand doing about $9M a year. They were running cold Meta traffic straight to their PDP. The page wasn't bad. The product was good. The CAC was just bleeding. They asked me what to test. I told them to stop sending cold traffic to the PDP at all. Build a listicle. Run the ad to the listicle. Let the listicle qualify the visitor before the PDP has to.

They built it in a week. The PDP didn't change. The ad didn't change. The CAC dropped meaningfully. Same product, same creative, just a different page in the middle. That's what a listicle is… a qualification layer.

What a listicle actually does

Cold traffic is skeptical. The customer who clicks your ad doesn't know you, doesn't trust you, and isn't ready to buy. If you send them straight to the PDP, the PDP has to do five jobs in twelve seconds. Stop the scroll. Explain the category. Differentiate you from the alternatives. Justify the price. Get the click. That's too many jobs.

A listicle takes three of those jobs off the PDP. It explains the category. It differentiates you. It justifies why you're the winner. By the time the reader hits "click to view," they've already nodded their way through the reasons. The PDP doesn't have to convince anymore. It has to close.

That's why good listicles pull 35-50%+ CTR into the PDP and the PDP converts higher off that warmer traffic. It's also why you know you have a good listicle when someone can read it and use it to justify why they bought something to their annoyed husband, wife, boyfriend, or girlfriend. That's the bar.

The reasons have to be reverse-engineered

This is where most people who want to move quick and get a listicle up go wrong. Either you just use AI to write you a listicle without much real context, so the output is slop, or you crowdsource the listicle ideas from your internal team… in this scenario, unfortunately nobody asks the customer.

The reasons on a listicle aren't reasons you come up with. They're reasons you reverse-engineer from what your market is already saying, thinking, and believing about your product. The good news is the work is already done for you. It's sitting in your reviews. It's sitting in your support tickets. It's sitting in the comments under your TikTok ads. It's sitting in the Reddit threads where your category gets discussed. Your customers have already written your listicle for you. You just haven't gone to read it.

You can use AI to export all of this data (ad comments, customer service tickets, press mentions, reviews from customers, etc.) and analyze it to find patterns. That's your list. Not what you think the reasons are. What the data tells you the reasons are. The volume comes from the team. The selection comes from the customer.

Then put them in descending order

The next decision is order, and order matters as much as the contents. Most talked about goes at the top. Least talked about goes at the bottom. Descending.

Reason number one is the reason your most universal, most skeptical customer needs to nod at. If they don't nod at reason one, they're not nodding at reasons two through seven. People scan the first two bullets and decide whether to keep reading. If your strongest, most universal reason is sitting at #5, the page didn't get a chance.

This is also where you can segment. If your category has two clear customer types, build two listicles. Same product. Different reasons in a different order based on what each segment talks about most. Send each segment to its own version of the page. The ad creative does the targeting. The listicle does the conversion.

A few more things while you're building it

A handful of things that separate the listicles that hit from the listicles that flop:

• Headline has to be specific and current. "The 7 Best Magnesium Supplements of 2026" reads like editorial. "Why You'll Love Our Magnesium" reads like a brand. Editorial wins.

• 5-7 entries. Fewer feels thin. More feels overwhelming.

• Put your product at #1 or #2. Sometimes #2 actually feels more credible because it doesn't read like you wrote the page.

• Each entry needs a one-line verdict, two or three pros, one real con, the price, and a CTA. The real con is the move. One real tradeoff makes the whole page more believable.

• Sound like a smart friend, not a brand. First-person plural ("we tested") beats corporate voice every time.

• Don't trash competitors. Acknowledge their strengths. Explain why yours wins for your buyer.

• Short paragraphs. 1-2 sentences. Walls of text kill conversion on this format harder than anywhere else.

If you spin some new landing pages up, email them over, I’d love to give some feedback. You can also score it against my own site roasting tool. Good luck building your next high-converting listicle.

That's all for this week

The brands that build listicles once win twice. They get a cheaper click on the way in because the format is built for cold traffic. And they get a warmer customer on the PDP because the qualification work already happened. Plus, once you figure out a good format, they’re easy to replicate and quickly test with multiple angles. Ok, enough on landing pages.

It's Sunday night, which means we aim for 9 hours of sleep tonight to start the week off right. Make sure you take care of yourself, get 10,000 to 30,000 steps per day, and have an amazing upcoming week!