Growth Points for DTC brands in 2022 based on Shopify eCommerce trends
My comments are based on conversations I've had with customers over the past few months.
Shopify's business and eCommerce trends are curated to help your business get ahead. Advice from experts on how to succeed in social media, mobile commerce, and more. After reading the Shopify market trends report earlier this year, I found it quite interesting to briefly summarize it with comments on how the situation changes closer to the middle of the year.
90% of the information represented in Shopify's report I discovered in talks with customers via customer interviews.
Trend #1 is the Rising in Acquisition costs
Direct-to-consumer competition is rising. The largest Commerce marketplaces hold 65% of the market. As a result, they became too expensive for independent entrepreneurs who can drive business by themselves supporting the acquisition, fulfillment operations, and customer support. So DTC became the best strategy around sales channels rather than purchasing channels.
Acquisition Costs: Skyrocketing. New large players came till the pandemic. They bring a large marketing budget with one intention of growth, skyrocketing the CAC in some niches dozen times. And now, in the middle of 2022, circumstances are considerably worse. As capital becomes more expensive, there is no straightforward method to simply raise marketing budgets while ROI does not grow. As a new reality of eCommerce, particularly for DTC brands, efficiency comes first, followed by investments.
Branding is an important factor in attracting clients. The reason is simple: conventional eCommerce distribution is insufficient to expand your business and make it lucrative (or at least as profitable as you'd like). You need something more—something that will persuade consumers to return because they are interested in your brand or products/services.
See also the prior point concerning CAC. Branding has evolved into a critical factor in attracting and converting customers. As the number of sellers has expanded, customer behavior in research among several offers has continued to evolve. Customers who are bouncing between product offerings will be brought back to the distinct and frequently encountered brand. And, although 41 percent of brands plan to increase Customer Acquisition expenses through paid and organic channels, we typically see an attempt to win the battle with the upper side of the funnel while neglecting the middle part of the sales funnel - in-store/interface buyer journey and Conversion Rate Optimization.
Trend #2 is Death of Cookies makes Brands Rethink personalization.
And I want to expand on the concept of community building as a key component of capturing a loyal audience in the post-cookie world.
While the key thoughts flow through blogs, Discord servers, or email campaigns, I recommend thinking about DTC DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization). Building the DAO vs traditional communities means bringing together Your DTC Brands adopters to collaborate on marketing, branding, word-of-mouth, network effects, and everything else that makes the DAO idea useful. Who will be the initial DTC DAO? Please let me know, and I will gladly discuss it!
And community is inextricably linked with the development of customer loyalty and data. I won't get into the future of DAO in that role again, but I would want to emphasize the importance of new Social Tokenization (SBT or Souldbound Token) which can revitalize this idea even more by transforming your customers into contributors and leaders. Isn't there too much talk about tokenization and Web 3.0 for eCommerce in 2022?
Trend #3. Opportunities Emerge on the biggest social platforms
- Ecommerce is migrating to social media platforms. Social platforms become the rare opportunity where an interested audience is likely to review your product in a complimentary way. No cookie world means more attention to interest magnet channels. Influencers attract like-minded people with huge sales opportunities.
- Social platforms are presenting new ways to engage customers. Influencers as new showmen engaging the Z-generation in the flow of entertainment and educational formats with interactive potential. So we have a mix of interest and interactivity as leverage to sell and engage the audience with everything you want.
- Video is making social commerce more sociable. Even though up until the previous year I constantly encountered the idea that sound will be the future and video will become obsolete (Hello, Clubhouse! ), we are still looking at how successfully short video content is growing across the market. The generation of automated video content for direct-to-consumer businesses is, in my opinion, where eCommerce will be headed in the near future. Production done manually is more expensive for the market as a whole, but automation is what has the potential to reshape the standards of product catalogs and headless CMS linked with multiple social media interfaces.
Blend changes to uncover conversion insights.
The number of touchpoints surrounding the average DTC brand is rising. Paid vs. social channels vs. influencers vs. community vary according to the complexity of eCommerce systems and several interfaces.
And I propose to reconsider our approach to Customer Journey Discovery and Conversion insights from within. This method addresses all of the challenges that DTC brands encounter, as discussed in the article. Customer pitfalls identification can aid in the fight against ineffective marketing budgets, localizing retention issues, and identifying the most engaged audience and influencers.
90% of DTC brands just lack the resources and expertise to manage Customer Journey mapping, Discovery, and conversion insights research. That is why we, at Insightarc, created a solution that provides DTC and eCommerce organizations in general with automatic conversion insights to accelerate revenue in the context of a changing eCommerce environment. If you like the idea, let's talk about with Insightarc automated conversion rate insights in the context of the customer journey.