For the past ten years, direct-to-consumer brands were a bright spot in the economy, winning new customers and attracting investor dollars while iconic brands suffered a retail apocalypse. More recently, D2C brands have struggled. In a recent article, Reinventing the Direct-to-Consumer Business Model, Harvard Business Review lays out the troubles D2C heroes have faced. For instance, “Casper’s February IPO valued the company $600,000 lower than its last private fundraising round. And within days of that fiasco, “Brandless — akin to a D2C dollar store — ceased operations and laid off 90% of its employees. Glossier suspended its color cosmetics line Play after lackluster sales, and Outdoor Voices CEO Tyler Haney was forced to resign amid a reported $2 million monthly burn rate on $40 million of annual sales.”
According to HBR, the challenge is that the tactics most D2C relied on to expand their customer base couldn’t deliver the necessary growth.
Whether you’re a new or established D2C brand, growth requires a solid foundation to continue building your business. The platform you may have launched with initially — Shopify, Magento Open Source, BigCommerce might have served you well. But when it comes to taking your business to the next level, a platform that’s built for D2C business is a mandate.
If you haven’t considered an upgrade or migration to another platform before, here are five reasons to consider replatforming your eCommerce site to Adobe Commerce.
Personalize your web experience to each customer segment
D2C marketers are masters at creating engaging experiences that attract loyal customers. But growth will require you to look beyond your initial customer base. In the near future, you will likely expand into adjacent product categories to reach new pools of customers who had never considered your brand before. How will you personalize the experience of these new customers and cohorts as you advance?
Adobe Commerce allows you to glean data from your website and social channels to create nuanced personas to drive the customer experience. Adobe Commerce’s Product Recommendations will allow you to present customers with items of interest based on their browsing and purchase behaviors. And you can extend that personalization to your social channels, email, and SMS campaigns.
According to eMarketer, research shows that consumers who engaged with a recommended product had a 70% higher conversion rate during that session. And Magento reports that 40% of people said they spent more than they originally planned because their experience was personalized. Over 78% of consumers say they will only engage with offers that are personalized to their previous engagements.
Loyalty programs are table stakes
Loyalty programs are a great way to keep customers buying from your brand, even if your price point is higher. There are numerous loyalty program plug-ins for Adobe Commerce, enabling you to select from a wide variety of features. If your product line is a bit premium, you can launch a loyalty program that allows your customers to save up points for a big-ticket item. Or, you can offer tiered loyalty points based on average spending. The possibilities are endless.
True, there are some costs involved in maintaining a loyalty program. Still, you save in other important ways, such as reducing your customer acquisition costs (it costs five times more to acquire a new customer than it does to retain an existing one).
Consumers are Omnichannel (Your D2C Brand Should be too)
Consumers will engage with your brand in numerous ways — online, in-store, from a social media ad or via their mobile devices. Let’s say a consumer discovers your eCommerce site and puts an item in your cart, but clicks away without purchasing. Is that customer lost forever? Not with an omnichannel approach to eCommerce.
All touchpoints to your business are fully unified, so you can pick up conversations where they were left off. For instance, you can remind customers of the items left in the cart on social media and even offer an incentive to convert like free or low-cost shipping or double loyalty points for purchasing now.
Adobe Commerce offers unparalleled omnichannel capabilities. And with a large community of developers, you can be assured you will have many options for expanding into new channels that capture the consumer’s imagination and eyeballs.
Think B2B
The most successful D2C brands expanded beyond the initial model of selling directly to consumers and have formed relationships with wholesalers, distributors, and other retailers. Brands like Allbirds still sell directly to consumers, but they also sell via Amazon and Nordstrom’s. B2B relationships offer significant growth potential, allowing you to benefit from your partners’ sales and marketing initiatives.
Adobe Commerce is unique in that as it allows you to run a B2B site and your D2C site in the same instance. That will save you time, money, and administration hassles.
Room to grow
One of the most compelling reasons to migrate to Adobe Commerce is that it can grow alongside your business. Adobe Commerce can easily scale and allows you to deploy more sophisticated features — gift registries, PO support for B2B distributors, website personalization, integrated marketing campaigns — as needed. The investments you make in Adobe Commerce today will carry your business far into the future.
Furthermore, we have seen an explosion of companies quickly pivoting their consumer options to include new options to maintain, repurpose employees, satisfy consumer needs, and keep commerce moving, including:
- Ship from store, leveraging inventory in the store.
- Delivery, offering a delivery option in addition to standard shipping.
- Buy Online with Curbside Pick-up, allowing customers to order, confirm, pay, receive a status of “Available at…,” drive to the local store or other distribution location, pop the trunk, and an employee will drop your order in the trunk with a “thank you.”
The flexibility of your eCommerce platform is a major factor in determining how quickly you can pivot your business to institute the changes, technology, and processes you require to keep working.
How Ziffity Can Help
The biggest challenge to migration is the time and effort it requires but Ziffity has you covered. We will:
- Build your online store from scratch and have you up and running in no time.
- Migrate from a third-party eCommerce infrastructure to Adobe Commerce.
- Extend the capabilities of your Magento store by building customized features that suit your business logic. Our experts can perform code refactoring, custom module development and customization for your existing functionalities.
And once you go live, we offer managed services for your technology and marketing needs, thus improving your operations and sales.
If you are thinking of replatforming your D2C brand from a third-party platform to Adobe Commerce or building your D2C online presence, Ziffity can help.
