We know the pandemic brought unprecedented growth in eCommerce! With a 27% CAGR over 2019-24, India’s e-commerce market will reach US$ 99 billion by 2024.
Among these, D2C segment has gone all out and embraced digital first approach. Being digital native, most D2C brands and startups have internal marketing analytics capabilities and campaign teams to drive user acquisition.
Then why still, D2C startups are unable to realise their full revenue potential?
Could this be that the D2C analytics implementations aren’t optimal enough to drive cost-efficient marketing campaigns and generate valuable insights. The remarketing efforts aren’t categorically focused on high-intent users. There’s no prioritization or measure to engage high lifetime-value customers and drive sustainable growth.
The answers to above question can lead the way forward. These information can actually bridge the gap between stages of a customer journey:
Attention-Interest-Desire-Action-Retention (AIDAR)
Reaching the highest level of digital maturity is a long term roadmap, blueprint of which begins with setting up marketing analytics framework for D2C.
Analytical frameworks help in organizing data: that is, to place it in a context that can be interpreted. These frameworks allow marketers to make sense of marketing data, and, subsequently, to diagnose and define strategic marketing problems.
Analytics forms the very basis of delivering two major business KPIs for eCommerce. Here’s how!
1. Optimize Marketing Spends: Right spends for the right audience using right message through the right channel at the right time
2. Increase Conversion Rate: Make digital conversion funnel efficient and increase funnel inflow, hence the outflow.
The marketing analytics tool drives D2C ROI in 3 ways.
1. It gives in-depth insights on website/app audiences – Who they are, Where they are coming from, What are they doing on the website or app and How they are getting converted.
You may need a partner to collaborate and guide you through this implementation. The analytics partner should experience in Google Analytics implementation across industry verticals with enterprises as well as D2C startups. Because the expert partner can help you identify key sets of most relevant audiences called Segments in Google Analytics. The segments can be created based on behavior, geography, lifetime value and such.
A few of the most relevant behavior segments can be utilised to trigger automation and increase engagement and conversion. The set segment can be directly exported to respective marketing channels like Display & Video 360 by Google to drive specific targeted communication strategy.
These includes, for example,
– visitors on the website who added the product to the cart but didn’t make a purchase,
– visitors who couldn’t complete a transaction,
– visitors who didn’t add a product to the cart from the product details page,
– categorizing visitors as per their affinity etc.
This helps not only in making non-converters come back to the website to transact but also in helping look for more of the top converters, lookalikes, from the larger target audience. The major benefit here is the improvement in the Attention, Interest and Desire steps of the conversion funnel.
Analytics tool gives insights to identify root causes of conversion funnel drop off from D2C online store and/or app. It provides product management and design teams an overview on what UX changes they initiate to reduce the drop-off.
2. As a D2C business owner you should also ask your analytics partner, if they have developed and implemented the Vision of Conversion (VOC) Framework to drive Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). It is based on 3 major scientifically proven principles. (Tatvic Case Study link)
Given the premise that the website or app is the platform where value exchange happens, the UX gains prominence in driving conversions. Tatvic’s VOC framework is focused on data analytics and UX heuristics to deliver UX improvements. It is optimised to drive more conversions from incoming traffic on websites or apps. The benchmark for conversion is anywhere in the range of 3% to 32%, and you too should aim for such conversion KPIs.
3. The Retention step of the conversion funnel is what defines sustainable growth. Retention is heavily dependent on the lifetime value (LTV) of existing customer base. Analytics plays an important role here. It captures enough of behavioural data points of the conversion journey which can be used to drive ML-based predictive analysis to identify high LTV customers.
D2C brands can leverage this by engaging these customers to achieve their purchase potential. And use their audience persona in the brand-reach campaigns to find a lookalike audiences which boosts top of the funnel inflow and conversion rates.
Effectively we see analytics as the core foundation to make AIDAR funnel efficient. The idea is to set up this foundation to its fullest potential. Use insights generated from it to make bottom of the funnel efficient by increasing conversion rate. Use audience persona to bring in more traffic into already-efficient funnel to get even more conversions than before. And lastly using behavioural insights collectively to predict purchase intent or exit intent which can be used to optimize engagement and campaign performance.
Summing up
All of this data can be consolidated and filtered using data analytics tools to derive the most relevant insights to improve efficiency, profitability, and productivity. D2C brands can adjust their marketing strategies and recommendations to push certain products in advance and thus improve conversion rates. Also, increase their chance at scaling and business success.
