D2C brands are companies that directly sell their products to customers without the involvement of middlemen. The growing presence of social media has imploded the shopping funnel and has offered D2C brands to build a strong base by directly connecting with potential prospects.
Nike adopted the D2C approach by selling products directly to consumers through its online platform. This strategy paid off and the brand saw a massive 84% increase in online sales during Black Friday, setting new sales records.
Moda Operandi, an online luxury store wanted to make shopping feel as exclusive and high-end as possible. To achieve this, they worked closely with top fashion publishers to attract customers and offer special clubs where members can pre-order the latest runway items before they hit stores. This clever approach offered a unique way for consumers to explore the brand’s offerings first hand.
What is the RACE Framework: How D2C Brands Can Implement?
RACE: framework is designed to help D2C brands engage with their customers by reflecting through awareness of the conversion journey of a consumer lifecycle. Let’s look at each stage.
Reach: This is the awareness-building stage. Focus on what activities will drive engagement and visitors to your online portals (social media, microsites, websites), when starting set goals and objectives to be fulfilled from the initiatives to be taken so you can monitor where your resources are being utilized well.
Act: Act here refers to interaction by the visitors with your offerings. This can mean reading a blog post, filling up contact details to subscribe to a newsletter for extra discounts, browsing products, etc.
This is the first level of engagement and if data collection is done correctly, same data can be used for retargeting efforts using ads.
Convert: Conversion is the most important step any business looks forward to. Different tactics to lure the prospect to buy your product like checkout offers, return-to-cart discounts, limited-time deals, etc. are a great boost to drive the action you are looking for! Of course revenue with high conversion rate and low acquisition cost.
Engage: This stage focuses on building customer loyalty and long-term relationships. Regular communication through emails, app notifications, member-specific offers, etc. drives repeat purchases and with a swift support team, you are also building up the brand reputation and visibility.
Core Principles of D2C Marketing Strategy for Brands
1. Building Direct Relationship
It is crucial to build direct relationships with customers; a strong relationship drives repeat purchases and brand loyalty. Using personalized messages, recommendations based on last shopping or browsing behaviors, giving extra discounts for members, etc. are some ways to turn customers into repeat buyers and advocates.
2. Customer Data
Data-driven strategies bring more to the table than traditional strategies. Analyzing consumer behavior and targeting them with what they are looking for helps in personalizing experiences.
Remember customers like to win and offering just what they are looking for boosts that feeling.
3. User’s Brand Experience
The overall customer experience — from website design to product quality and after-purchase service — is crucial for building strong D2C brands. For business owners, these elements are key to creating a seamless and positive customer journey. Well-designed website, high-quality products, and excellent after-purchase support all contribute to making customers feel valued and appreciated.
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4. Digital Marketing Channels
D2C marketing activities should focus on online channels to bring visibility about their brands to reach and connect to the customers. Social media platforms like Instagram, YouTube, Meta, Websites, PRs, etc. all are a great way to start.
Be it video marketing or informative how-to guides, these platforms offer a range of features to execute your marketing efforts.
5 Effective Tactics Driving D2C Brands Success in the Ecommerce Space
1. Hyper-Personalization
Personalization is very crucial for a happy customer experience. They feel valued and in turn, it results in more engagement for your e-commerce platform. As discussed above, these are the core principles in making your brands a success.
For instance, Amazon offers personalized recommendations on its home page offerings based on previous shopping and browsing behavior.
D2C Brands can develop experiences that increase conversions and loyalty by using data analytics to analyze consumer behavior. Hyper-personalization-focused D2C marketing techniques can significantly increase consumer happiness and growth.
Adding user-generated content, such as reviews, images, and videos, can further customize the buying experience and improve hyper-personalization. Including genuine reviews and experiences can increase legitimacy and boost sales since buyers trust other customers.
2. Leveraging AI and Machine Learning
Amazon’s voice-powered assistant Alexa offers quick and efficient responses to customers’ inquiries.
Analysis of user purchase behavior, and designing in-app experiences using AI builds the seamless customer journey. D2C brands can use AI that offers insights into customer preferences, shopping behavior, browsing history, etc. to allow you to optimize your offers.
This allows you to offer your products according to the unique preferences of each customer at the price that works best for them. You have a far higher chance of securing conversions and generating ROI with a customized D2C marketing strategy.
3. Omnichannel marketing
Customers may walk into your store or use a desktop or mobile to make a purchase, the aim is to have a unified experience across all the channels.
Choosing omnichannel means considering the platform and the device the customers are using and ensuring that it provides an integrated experience for them. Omnichannel marketing is different from multichannel.
IKEA has built a strong omnichannel strategy, combining physical stores with online shopping, mobile apps, AR tools, and social media to create a seamless customer experience. Customers can shop, check out, and arrange delivery online, or use features like AR to visualize furniture in their homes before buying.
Their ads stand out and inspire the viewers to buy them and not to forget the use of AR to show how different products would look in the homes before buying.
4. Perfect mix of SEO and PPC
The perfect blend of using SEO-focused content backed by PPC brings good relevant traffic to your website. Using both simultaneously is the key to ensuring the SERP game in the long term.
Every business aims to reduce its CAC and using organic content marketing efforts coupled with paid ads enables to reduce customer acquisition costs.
Your website may rank because of SEO bringing in visitors to your online storefront, but some people take time to make up their minds. They can be targeted using ads using less budget to bring them back to complete the purchase.
5. Community Building and Engagement
Building a strong community around your brands increases brand loyalty, awareness, brand equity, and repeat purchases. D2C brands have a great opportunity to use social media to build a community and engage with them aiding as a catalyst for the D2C marketing plan.
Homegrown D2C brands like boAtLifestyle, Curapod, Sugar For She Is, Swiggy, etc. have a strong social outreach and they go aggressively on content marketing efforts. Influencer marketing, customer stories, contests, in-store activities, engaging video campaigns, etc. are used to build an engaging community on their social handles.
What This Means For D2C Brands: A checklist
- Success in ecommerce requires cross-functional and cross-collaboration at a higher scale to achieve breakthroughs. CEO and top leaders’ ownership and commitment is required to go all hands on deck.
- Prioritizing and allocating investments to remain ahead of the curve is needed to operate at a successful scale. It is important to build the resources including people and technology to help businesses propel forward.
- Location and attracting talent are other must-haves. The required talent to take your D2C business to soar higher must possess relevant skillsets and mindsets that will bring expertise and credibility to your operations. Clear lines of communication must be ensured to drive collaboration and ease of alignment around difficult decisions.
- As discussed, customer experience should be carefully designed aiming to deliver value to them. This should be a fundamental part of every organization’s daily goals. Scalable solutions for CX, ranging from content, mobile and web experience design, flexible pick-up and delivery options, and marketing all should amount to delivering value.
- Rethink the role of physical retail in your sales channel. With the purchase funnel collapsing, are you positioning it as a sales channel or as more of a brand experience center? Think of the many new ways that a brand can connect holistically across platforms with its target audience via storytelling, experiences, and services that all add to the brand experience.
- Last not the least, building recurring long-term relationships with consumers. It is noted that the cost of acquiring a new customer is five times higher than retaining an old one. Loyalty programs and subscription models are two ways of keeping the prospects connected to the brands and thus promoting loyalty.
Looking to scale up your D2C business? We are just a call away.
Spinta Digital, a leading digital marketing and branding agency based out of Chennai, will enable you to accelerate your brand with optimized strategies tailored to your requirements. We have helped D2C brands by using content creation, social media marketing, newsletters, google ads and ecommerce website building to establish their presence in the market. From creating branding strategies to building your ecommerce platform we bring the best with our D2C marketing strategies.
