5 Lessons from the Most Successful Direct to Consumer Successes
You have several sales strategies in sales. The most known are B2B and B2C. These appear to only give you two options to sell your product – either you sell to businesses, or you sell to consumers.
If you dig deeper, you’ll learn that you can sell direct to consumer, or D2C. This is a great business model that cuts out the middleman. Plus, in ecommerce, you don’t need to rely on a retail presence to be successful.
It’s only going to grow as 40% of internet consumers believe that D2C will make up at least 40% of their purchases in five years.
Read on to find out what the most successful D2C companies are doing and what you can do to learn from them.
1. It’s OK to Be Geeky
You don’t think that much about your socks. Bombas turned something simple into engineering marvels.
What they did was turned the engineering that went into the socks into a major benefit. They made the geeky parts of socks the focal point of the customer experience.
They bet that people will [pay more for a better experience and higher quality and they were right. The $10 socks have taken off and Bombas now has over $100 million in business.
2. Have One Product (and Do it Well)
Is it possible to have only one product and break $100 million in sales? Mattress maker Casper did just that. They know that shopping for mattresses can be complicated.
Consumers are familiar with mattress brands, not model numbers. They don’t know enough about mattresses to know what a good mattress is.
Casper wanted to simplify the decision-making process by offering only one mattress. They also committed to doing it very well.
3. Be a Disruptor
Before the Dollar Shave Club, we’d spend an exorbitant amount of money on shaving products. Women would have to spend $20 just to replace razor cartridges. A big reason for that is because retailers would mark up prices so much.
Grocery stores operate on razor-thin margins. What they do is markup home cleaning and personal care products to make up for that small profit. You wind up paying more.
That all changed with the Dollar Shave Club. You have affordability, high quality, and convenience wrapped up in one package.
You can find your own way to disrupt the industry that you’re entering to offer something completely different.
4. Make Delivery Part of the Customer Experience
It’s easy to forget about the packaging and delivery of your direct to consumer products. They can be turned into D2C sales tactics.
Glossier designed packages of its beauty products and included stickers. They encouraged customers to use the stickers, snap a picture, and post to Instagram.
Direct to Consumer Works
It wasn’t that long ago that the only way you could sell directly to consumers was through door to door sales and mail-order catalogs.
The internet changed all of that and opened the door for many new businesses to enter direct to consumer sales.
There are lessons that you can learn from successful companies. These are the disruptors that focus on creating quality products and limiting their product lines.
Are you ready to launch your own D2C business? Take a look at the business resources on this site to help you get started.
