Today’s episode is an expert panel discussion from the Commerce Accel Conference. The session was hosted by Kaleigh Moore, with an expert panel consisting of Benjamin Smith, Eric Bandholz, Jeffrey Sawyer Lee and Josh Elizetxe.

The current eCom landscape is probably as volatile as it can be. On one hand you have the massive growth in eCom, on the other you have changes like iOS 14, the continuing pandemic and the now super prevalent supply chain issues. There are opportunities and challenges galore. The growth (and survival) strategy for businesses is constantly shifting and where the market will be 1 year from now is anything but certain.

In this episode, you’ll gain practical insights into how DTC operators build brands that transcend inevitable events like privacy, pandemics, and more. You will get to hear firsthand from Founders of 4 Fast Growing DTC Brands . This is a great episode for operators and business owners looking for ways to grow in Q4 and beyond.

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Here is a summary of some of the most important points made,

• • eCommerce is expected to grow 11-15% this holiday season even over last year
  • There has been a massive adoption amongst individuals aged 50+
  • Consumers now will no longer be forgiving retailers or econ for disruption due to COVID inability to deliver
  • 37% of the consumer will continue to buy online and pick up
  • Payment plans and family bundles are good ploys for giftable products
  • SMS subscribers are worth over 6X of email subscribers

Covered Topics:

On today’s episode, the expert panel discuss,

• Dealing with the “New Normal” Post-Covid
• Building Future-proof Brands
• Leveraging New Channels like TikTok
• Dealing with Supply Chain Delays
• Grow Your Subscriber Base or focus on Subscriber Nurturing?
• Giving Customers Flexibility in their Subscriptions
• Leveraging SMS Marketing
• Tapping Owned Marketing Channels

Timestamp:

• 15:00 – Dealing with the “New Normal” Post-Covid:
  • Eric:
    • There is still an aura of uncertainty which might lead to tightening of their wallets
  • Josh:
    • There’s definitely a change in consumer sentiment intent, the stats show that 25-30% of stimulus money that’s been kind of saved away.
    • Reports show that eCommerce is expected to grow 11 to 15% this holiday season even over last year, which was a Whopper of a year for e-commerce.
    • COVID restrictions are still going to keep people from traveling during the holidays, which means they’re going to be online shopping and are going to be gifting for the family.
    • Our business decided to pull back from subscription sales a little bit, and kind of lead into more giftables and gift packages.
  • Ben:
    • We’ve seen a shift towards an older consumer demographic.
    • There’s been a massive adoption amongst that cohort of like 50 plus individuals.
    • One in the proliferation of social media use. So they’re getting targeted ads from probably all of our brands as well as the adoption and sort of rapid increase of adoption of online shopping as a consequence of that, too.
  • Jeff:
    • Our studies show that customers have really grown accustomed to this new way of living and the shopping trends and behavior here to stay long term.
    • Accessibility, Affordability and Convenience are key. Consumers now will no longer be forgiving retailers or econ for disruption due to COVID inability to deliver.
    • 37% of the consumer will continue to buy online and pick up. So it’s very important for us to start thinking about store as a fulfillment center. We call it BOPIS – Buy Online Pickup In Store.
    • Brand loyalty is declining as well. I think supply chain across the board has been strained at the height of the pandemic and consumers turn to the, the most available brand and the, then now more open to brand switching as well.
  • Ben:
    • I think going forward, the bigger DTC brands will look for ways to basically have same day or next day delivery, not necessarily through the traditional 3PLS or warehouses, but through partnerships with other retailers.
• 19:45 – Building Future-proof Brands:
  • Jeff:
    • A lot of things have changed since iOS 14. And to start that I would say any DTC operator or brand owner needs to go back to the basics and they need to understand the core foundation of what makes a business great.
    • Having a great product, having a great customer engagement strategy, which then leads to a returning customer, which then leads to high LTV and then having a very solid understanding of the customer and a very solid understanding of data as well.
    • Number one is having a great product. And what I would measure here is really the NPS score, the churn rates, the reviews and stuff like that.
    • The second part, which is focusing on lifetime value and customer repeat rate, and that comes from satisfaction with the product, as well as having a great CRM and engagement strategy in place.
    • The third part, which is solid understanding of the customer, understanding your customers so well that you build products they can live without that have a strong product market fit.
    • And the most important part. I think it’s having a solid understanding of your marketing data on how to test and how to read them as well.
• 26:45 – Leveraging New Channels like TikTok:
  • Eric:
    • There is a movement towards people consuming content on TikTok. We’ve been able to grow our TikTok audience from zero followers to over 300,000 followers in about four or five months.
    • And it was several, several of those TikToks getting millions of views. YouTube has YouTube shorts and Instagram has Instagram reels, and we’ve been able to take the same content and upload it on all, all three platforms. So we’ve been able to reach several million more eyeballs than we’ve been doing up to this point.
    • You have to have content that is naturally engaging and is something unique. So it forces you to really put yourself in the customer’s viewpoint.
    • We do a post-purchase survey using a Shopify plugin called grapevine. We have one question and we ask, how did you first hear about Beardbrand? And what we’ve seen is now TikTok after only being part of our business for the past five months is now driving about 5% of our revenue, a hundred percent organic.
    • It is still a blue ocean on these platforms. And you still have a lot of opportunity to produce content on these platforms that hasn’t been produced by someone else.
• 30:30 – Dealing with Supply Chain Delays:
  • Jeff:
    • It is still something we’re struggling with. And for me, e-commerce success really depends on the last mile and brands that do it as well will be the ultimate winners.
    • We focus on what we can control, which is how we communicate with our customer by being transparent and letting them know ahead of time that there is a delay and holding hands very close throughout that journey.
    • The other thing we do as well as the messaging around that, I think historically in the past when there has been a delay, so where it’s like, oh, we’re so sorry, there’s a delay. Whereas we kind of switched the messaging around a flight, Hey, you know, we’re out of stock at the moment, blah, blah, blah. But turning that into a good thing of how excited we are that we’re out of stock, you know, how amazing we are having a vitality fact that we kind of implemented that within our messaging on the middle funnel and bottom funnel as well.
• 33:10 – Grow Your Subscriber Base or focus on Subscriber Nurturing?:
  • Josh:
    • We’ve been splitting our ad accounts based on the product based on price range, based on subscription versus versus one-time sale.
    • We’re going to lean on buy now, pay later. So payment plans and we’re going to lean on family bundles, you know, buy more, save more.
    • I believe that we’re not going to have to discount as heavily this Q4 because the demand is going to be the highest it’s ever been before in history.
  • Ben:
    • If you have a product that would work well as a subscription, I highly encourage you to try and push that more just because of predictability.
• 37:45 – Giving Customers Flexibility in their Subscriptions:
  • Josh:
    • We’re investing heavily into our dashboard
    • We also have a 1-800 number, right at the top of our website. You can call talk about your subscription
    • We try to make ourselves hyper available that we realize helps mitigate chargebacks refunds, you know retain customers even if they’re wanting to refund or cancel their subscription.
    • We don’t want our customers to feel like they’re forced into anything or feel stuck
• 40:10 – Leveraging SMS Marketing:
  • Josh:
    • Our SMS list has about 350,000 subscribers
    • It’s a phenomenal way for us to obviously promote new products, promote sales
    • We make over a million dollars a month just from texting our customers
    • A way to engage with customers, get feedback. We have a two-way system.
    • SMS subscribers are worth over six times our email subscribers now in terms of kind of forecasting out
    • SMS just has a high open rate. The links are right there. It’s, you know, people are shopping more and more on their phones.
• 42:00 – Tapping Owned Marketing Channels:
  • Ben:
    • We’ve started investing pretty heavily on the backend infrastructure of the business and that included one or two community managers and an influencer manager.

Takeaways:

• eCommerce is expected to grow 11-15% this holiday season even over last year
• There has been a massive adoption amongst individuals aged 50+
• Consumers now will no longer be forgiving retailers or econ for disruption due to COVID inability to deliver
• 37% of the consumer will continue to buy online and pick up
• Payment plans and family bundles are good ploys for giftable products
• SMS subscribers are worth over 6X of email subscribers

Links:

• Benjamin Smith on LinkedIn

Tweetable Quotes:

“we’re not going to have to discount as heavily this Q4 because the demand is going to be the biggest it’s ever been before in history.”

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