10 Insights to Accelerate Your DTC Journey

A huge part of innovation is learning from your own experiences—as well as the successes and failures of others. So, after years of helping big brands innovate, we’re sharing insights that can help propel your DTC strategy forward. Here are 10 quick hits that we've gathered from our partnerships with Christie Cookie Co., Mars, Verizon, and more:

1. Challenge your assumptions. Before you pour time and money into a product or feature you think your customers want, create a prototype and test. Trust us, we’ve saved companies like Verizon millions with this approach.
   
   
2. Get to know your customers and the different ways they want to shop. Do they search or filter by certain criterion? Make sure your site accounts for their path to purchase.
   
   
3. Sell WITH your influencers—incentivize them to create full looks or posts that show off your product (and use this as shoppable content on your site).
   
   
4. Be proactive! Leverage data to anticipate the needs of your consumers and guide them to your product before they even know they need it. Bonus points for incorporating this idea into your CRM.
   
   
5. Don't be afraid to be more human. Stay true to your brand's voice, but leverage tools like natural language AI and gifs to interact with your customers in a way that feels authentic (especially if you're targeting Gen Z and Millennials).
   
   
6. Personalize but dial in. If you're customizing a product or shopping experience, ask your consumers enough questions to make them feel that personalization, but not too many to overwhelm them.
   
   
7. Learn from your retail experience. Ask yourself, "What has worked in stores that we can adapt for ecommerce?" After testing over 40 different solutions, we helped Mars Petcare bring sampling into their digital environment.
   
   
8. Reserve a % of your media budget for experimentation (a new platform, a new ad type, or out-of-the-box creative). Whether your experiments are successful or not, you're guaranteed to learn something new—and that's priceless.
   
   
9. Don't keep your data in a silo. When working with Christie Cookie Co., we had greater success and efficiency when the person creating their emails had direct access to all of the brand's data. We also saw lower ad costs and higher campaign performance when email insights were applied to paid media efforts.
   
   
10. Treat your email list like your most valuable asset...because in a third-party cookie-free world, it just might be. But the work doesn't stop there. Nurturing customers to prevent churn is just as important as getting them to sign up.