Building And Scaling Up A Digital Retail Brand

With the lockdown rules bringing down the shutters on many offline stores, retail brands have been forced to open or scale online stores to reach consumers. With footfall and retail visits expected to remain low for months, a permanent shift in consumer behaviour towards online buying is inevitable. Thus, it is time for retail brands to also embrace the D2C way of life and use online tools to go directly to the consumer!

This guide aims to help brands and offline retailers to build and scale up their digital or D2C brand seamlessly.

The guide will help you understand the various opportunities, options for brands, managing the supply chain, automation across business processes, optimising marketing to maximise reach and more.

Your Ultimate Guide To Going Direct-To-Customer Online

Building your retail D2C online brand
Using digital tools & analytics to accelerate your digital strategy
How to go about digital payments
Introduction to managing your logistics for digital customers
Customer acquisition & marketing strategies to scale up
Legal & compliance knowledge

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Quotes

Email marketing is often under-rated as an acquisition channel. DTC needs a higher conversion rate to ensure CAC is low as you are without platforms that give you traffic. Knowing your ideal customer persona and tailoring your email marketing content appropriately will ensure email is often the highest-converting marketing channel which one can take advantage of.

Building relevance for the brand is generally more important than just reaching more customers. In the end, conversion rations and clicks play more important role than reach and impressions.

The key to online payments is providing a secure and smooth customer experience. Payment platforms that offer easy to integrate, fast, seamless and secure solutions are the ones that have a better chance at earning your customer’s trust for you, ensuring user retention and attracting potential customers to your portal.

Study your customer behaviour around RTO (failed deliveries) and use automated calling and SMS workflows to reduce last-mile order failure for COD orders.

Retention marketing and repeat purchases is the biggest growth hack. Activating your own previous purchasers and turning them into customers that buy regularly and repeatedly is by far the best growth hack for a D2C brand to grow.

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How To Start The Digital Journey Of Your Retail Brand

This chapter talks about the basics of taking the online plunge such as the popular ecommerce software platforms in India that can get you started in a matter of weeks or even days. It also discusses the pros and cons of opting cloud-based subscription models as against an on-premise setup. Additionally, this will also have infographics and tables explaining the pricing, plans, themes, ease of use and others.

How To Go About Payment Gateways For Your Digital Retail Brand

This section aims to help you understand the A-Z of payment gateways, starting from what it means, how current payment gateways work and features to keep in mind while choosing the payment gateway to options offered by ecommerce software platforms and what they are responsible for. The idea is to help our readers make an informed decision on the best payment gateway for their business.

How To Adopt Technology To Simplify D2C Selling Experience

Making the optimum use of technology is the key to any business today. This is all the more important for D2C businesses for whom building a robust supply-chain network and fulfilment strategy is important to have an end-to-end control on the product and customer journey. Thus, in this chapter, we have listed key automation levers through technology for brands to improve business efficiency across different levels of ecommerce operations with anecdotes from brands such as Chumbak and AND.

How To Keep Legal & Compliances In Check For Your Digital Retail Brand

Though legal aspects should be the most important component for any business, it is also often ignored up until situation demands. This section will thus discuss at length the key legislations that are applicable for an online store. This will help you fulfill all the legal requirements and leave no scope for any ambiguity. Additionally, this will touch upon rules pertaining to data protection, foreign direct investment, local laws and sector specific laws.

Marketing 101 For Your Online Retail Brand

While there are multiple options available for marketing today, including free and paid tools and end-to-end automation providers, the key is again to choose the right one after evaluating the best available options. This chapter will delve into every aspect of marketing including key insights from virtual CMOs and the successful campaigns for popular D2C brands, which will help you allocate the marketing budget before you embark on the online journey.

Logistics 101 For Your Digital Retail Brand

Cracking the logistics code will go a long way in building and scaling a D2C business. It won't be incorrect to say that it can make or break any business. And, that is why we have gone deep into the nuances of logistics in this chapter including different models, what an aggregator does and why and when one should choose a 3PL and the distribution channels that are most popular today.

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