4 ways to optimize your DTC marketing strategy

Marketing directly to consumers is one of the primary assets of a DTC brand. The ability to control the message, the marketing mix and the customer experience has skyrocketed many brands in this space past the competition on the retail shelves. Because of the huge opportunity here, marketing budgets are often disproportionately large…a benefit of cutting out the costs associated with a middle-man. But when you’re competing with major retailers that have a lot of brand power, influence and know-how, competition is fierce. The convenience factor is removed from the equation. Impulse buying is not a thing. Which means, it’s all up to your marketers to make sure your brand is discovered and purchased. 

Historically, DTC brands have invested heavily in either organic content creation or social media advertising and influencer marketing to drive brand awareness - often with little expected return until they reach mass awareness. Because brands in this space own their first-party data, it’s been possible to create an excellent customer experience and really personalized marketing, even with the death of cookies and tighter regulations. Although DTC first brands have done a really good job navigating the ever-changing world of marketing, they still have a lot of ground to cover to make up for those large initial investments.

If you’re in charge of marketing for your DTC brand, here are four ways you can optimize your planning for more effective campaigns. 

Let the data decide which products you promote

Your new product is amazing. It’s going to change the world by making lives better. Everyone is going to want it. The best thing since sliced bread. It’s time to go all-in and spend that capital you raised on a major marketing campaign - this is the moment you will scale. But then you run the campaign and see a huge influx of buyers…who never purchase your brand again. Yes, the cash came in. But what’s next? Another funding round? Another marketing campaign?

See, there are some products that are really good at driving first-time buyers. But those buyers might end up with a low lifetime value (LTV) and never make up for the cost of acquisition. Then there are products that may require more marketing to win first-time buyers, but they lead to a high repeat purchase rate and loyal brand champions. Which strategy is right for your brand? Which strategy will lead to sustainable growth for the future? 

The only way to definitively answer that question is by looking at the data. If your data has been cleaned and unified across platforms, it’s possible to follow the customer journey and really, truly understand which products will appeal to customers with the highest potential LTV. Maybe this is the product you should feature in your next marketing campaign. 

Reward loyalty the right way

There’s no question that loyalty is the goal for DTC brands. We all understand that it’s much cheaper and more effective to keep a customer than it is to win a new one. The thing is, it’s almost impossible to even understand loyalty with messy customer data that’s spread across platforms. Whether it’s because of honest mistakes, guest checkouts, promo abuse or something else altogether, your customer database is likely full of duplicates. No matter how good the logic is that onboards new customers into the system, it still can’t tell that zack@gow.com is the same person as zgow@orita.com. Repeat customers are constantly being reclassified as a first-time buyer. It’s inevitable. 

When loyalty is such a core value driver, it’s important to get it right. It’s important that repeat buyers are made to feel part of something larger, to feel important to your brand. This should come across in the exclusive offers they receive. Getting this wrong stunts growth and even drives away your brands’ most important customers. Today, understanding loyalty is not optional for DTC brands that want to grow. And clean data is not optional when it comes to understanding loyalty. 

Create better audience cohorts

All successful DTC brands have a purpose. A story that connects shoppers to their ideals. But is this the same reason people are buying products today? Has your brand ever gone back and evaluated whether the story that “got you there” is the same story that will “keep you there?” The reasons a shopper buys your product is important. For example, lululemon started out as a hardcore yoga brand and now yoga hardly makes an appearance in their marketing. Somewhere along the way, the reasons customers valued the brand changed. And because lululemon was able to take that feedback, the brand grew to a household name. 

Audience cohorts are crucial to understanding how and why shoppers engage with your brand. By grouping your users by a common identifier it’s possible to uncover what’s causing purchase decisions and adjust marketing campaigns to speak to those drivers. Cohort analysis can answer questions like: In what order did our most valuable customers purchase our products? What is causing churn? What are the common characteristics of customers who abandon their carts (did they perhaps come to your site from an Instagram ad)?

While cohorts start with asking the right questions, they depend on having the right data. If in-store and e-commerce data aren’t integrated and unified around real customers, there’s no chance of creating cohesive audience cohorts. The same goes for data that lives across marketing or e-commerce systems, or any combination of the platforms you use to run your DTC business. 

Save money by cutting out duplicates

This one might be the simplest, but it also has a very immediate cost savings for your brand. Delivering marketing to the same person multiple times – or even worse, to accounts that don’t represent real people – is simply a waste. If your brand has a catalog, the cost of a duplicate is obviously way more than a brand that relies on email marketing…but a penny wasted is a penny wasted. In fact, we’ve seen brands with only half of their customer records coming from IRL shoppers. It would be a shame to pay for twice as many impressions as you needed. Of course, you wouldn’t want to pare your list down so small that you left customers out. It’s important for customer data to be unified around real shoppers, so that money’s not wasted and potential purchases aren’t left on the table. 

With clean and unified customer data, there are so many ways to optimize marketing for your DTC brand. To explore how clean data can help you create more effective campaigns, drop us a line this week.