What is direct-to-consumer?

All of the large scale manufacturers, Consumer Packaged Goods brands (CPG) as well as the small scale manufacturers are now looking to get their hands into the Direct-to-Consumer business strategy by eliminating the third party middle-man such as retailers, wholesalers, etc who are ever-present between the manufacturers and the end consumer.

There are many direct to consumer brands that have created a new methodology which has resulted in a large scale success for their e-commerce sales and revenue, they are doing so by taking their products which are hot from the oven right to the consumer by enabling them to shop online without any middle-man. This newly founded methodology is making all of the other brands curious as to what is the direct-to-consumer model.

What is D2C? Why are brands choosing D2C over traditional e-commerce methodologies?

There are quite a few reasons why many global companies and brands are choosing to adopt a direct-to-consumer model, one of the major reasons is that the direct-to-consumer model is giving brands the ability to build strong and authentic relationships with the people who are buying their products. With the middle man in between, it was very difficult for brands to maintain a clear communication with their consumers.

But now, since they are dealing directly with them, it was much easier for them to tell their brand’s story to the consumers, which helped their consumers resonate with the brand much better. Because traditionally if your customer would have chosen your product over your competitor’s product on a retailer’s website then you would have got the sale, but you would have lost the ability to build a relationship with that consumer. This is precisely the gap that brands want to fill when they decide to know more about what is D2C.

The ultimate guide for direct-to-Consumer

• Identify your best product and make it more affordable

One of the best tips that you could get from a guide for d2c is to always make sure that your reason for getting into the d2c market is strong in the first place. By choosing to adopt the d2c model, you would be saving a lot on your retailers or other middle man’s commission and you consumers can directly shop online from your brand. Maybe you would decide to keep the prices the same and get the large chunk of the profit from your product. But an alternative to that strategy is to bring your prices lower than the competition (if the price is what you and your product are competing against), doing so can ensure that even more consumers would opt for your product instead of your competition.

But please note that this method is only applicable for essential consumer goods and not for luxury products who do not compete based on price but rather on quality. If you are a luxury product manufacturer then you could easily get away by not changing your price and getting a much larger profit than before.

• Double down on your marketing efforts for your product and emphasize on your customer’s pain points

Apart from being affordable, you now have the ability to go hardcore and granular on your marketing efforts. You would no longer be bound to your retailer who brings down your potential to tell a story to your customer. Make sure that you focus your marketing efforts to tell a good story and resolve your customer’s pain points. If at all you take away any knowledge from this guide for Direct-to-Consumer it should be that Marketing is the strongest advantage that you have when choosing a d2c business model.

• Try to develop a subscription-based business model

A subscription-based model can help you immensely to save your time as well as your consumer’s time, effort, and also money. Besides, there is nothing that works as good as a subscription model to have a better customer retention rate. A lot of successful D2C brands have created a subscription-based model and it has been doing wonders for their business, companies like Dollar Shave Club, Harry’s, and Honest Company.

• Get rid of clutter and simplify the purchase decision

Nothing is more annoying to a customer than to be flooded with choices, it leads to a form of analysis paralysis. Cut the clutter and promote your best products at the forefront of your website for your customers to see. Quite a lot of famous companies have adopted this model, Amazon has a tag of best-sellers that comes up on top when you search for any product on their website, and generally, people tend to choose the best seller 90 percent of the time.

Casper is another great example of focused customer attention towards their best products, they realized that buying a mattress was an unnecessarily complicated process. By selling only one top of the line product and then adding more products gradually to the website, they managed to scale their e-commerce sales to over a hundred million dollars within the first couple of years.

• The customer is not the only king, take a bow to the new king “Content”.

The internet is driven by content. The guide for D2C would be incomplete without this tip. The very article you are now reading is part of the vast ocean of content on the internet. When your customers are looking to buy your product, the first thing that they would most likely do is a quick google search about the product, say for the sake of argument, they might search for the reviews of the product they want online shopping, or they might look for the prices. When they do that, your website would not show up on the search results if you have not produced content for it online. That is exactly how important content marketing is for your d2c business growth. It could be the difference of you losing thousands of sales to your competitor who has produced content on that product topic.