4 Common Challenges Faced By D2C Brands And How To Solve Them?

Once a business sets its sails, there is no telling what storms it will face and when. Though, modern wisdom and keen observation tell us about some challenges and roadblocks that must be anticipated well in advance – specifically in the case of an e-commerce business.

D2C brands, especially the ones in their early stages of traction and growth sprints, face a common spectrum of challenges. From sales conversion to logistics of fulfillment, these challenges can bully e-commerce growth.

In this blog, we will list them all out, and tell you the most effective ways to outgrow them.

Let us get going!

Here are 4 common challenges faced by D2C brands and how to solve them for hypergrowth.

1. Turning Site Traffic Into Customers

‘Build it and they will come’ – this is a common notion amongst those just kicking off their e-commerce business. Once the e-commerce site is up and running, it is time to watch the sales roll in, right?

No. The reality is much different.

Merely bringing in the traffic to an e-commerce site does not mean that they are your customers – until they checkout with actual products and you register a sale!

Turning cold traffic into paying customers is a far too common challenge for growing e-commerce brands. The gap lies in the following reasons;

Your e-commerce site traffic is not aware of your D2C brand by default
Not taking the prospects through an expected journey
Not engaging the traffic enough to direct them in sales funnels
New prospects are often skeptical about making a purchase
Being a new e-commerce site, your brand doesn’t have enough social validation (think reviews!)
Undiscovered and assumed gaps between users and sales conversions

So, the question arises – how to turn the e-commerce site traffic into sales?

You can use the following hints to map out a strategy.

Capture anonymous customers’ data – If you can only discover more information about your anonymous e-store visitors, you can engage them better. For instance, Wigzo helps you capture anonymous customers with automated push notifications and exit intent.
Engage them for conversions – Engaging your traffic with good content, pop-ups, and the right communication is critical for them to make a purchase decision. With Wigzo, you can create custom sales funnels and leverage its full-suite marketing automation to ramp up your sales conversion rate.
Build social proof – Collecting customer reviews from each sale is critical for gathering genuine reviews and feedback about the purchase experience from your brand. Not only will this help fix your Customer Experience issues, but also build social proof that will drive more sales based on trust. Wigzo’s post-purchase email automation campaigns work wonders for collecting reviews and feedback – on 100% autopilot.

Implement the above strategy right away for powerful e-commerce results!

2. Attracting New Customers & Retaining Them

For most growing e-commerce brands, adding new customers to their base and retaining them is a grave challenge.

To set any brand on a sustainable growth path, new customers addition and retention must go hand in hand through a well-aligned strategy.

Let’s break this challenge into two parts – i) Adding new subscribers/customers, and ii) Retaining these customers.

How to add new subscribers continually?

There are many ways to keep growing your subscribers list. This list will eventually yield paying customers who will stick to your brand in the future. You can add new subscribers through the following methods;

Automated push notifications
Magic Link – a patented technology by Wigzo that lets you onboard anonymous customers in just 2-taps
Automated personalized SMS campaigns at scale

Once you’ve accelerated the subscribers’ list, it is time to retain your best customers.

How to retain your best customers?

Customer retention is the ability of an e-commerce store to retain or encourage its customers to purchase at a given time. It is one way of motivating customers to return to your site and frequently make purchases.

A higher customer retention rate can benefit your e-commerce site. That’s because it increases your customer’s lifetime value. Because higher CLV means they have spent a lot to buy your products and services.

In addition, retaining customers can help you save money on buyer acquisition.

There are many ways to retain your customers.

This includes an array of strategies – from lowering the churn rate to analyzing customer reviews. You can read more about 9 such effective strategies to boost your revenue vis-a-vis repeat purchases from retained customers.

3. Building Customer Loyalty

According to a post on Kissmetrics, acquiring a new customer is 7x more expensive than implementing tactics to retain an existing one. This only says how customer retention is the key to growing sustainably in the e-commerce market competition.

Here are a few strategies to help you bolster customer loyalty for your e-commerce brand

Personalized Customer Communication

No online shopper wants a list of features and an attractive price thrown into their face. They want to know more about the product – how it was made, what it can help them with, and how many other customers like them are happy with it.

A few tactics that the store has been using over the years include:

Localization of the store to make it easier for customers to find products in currencies they don’t need to convert
Displaying popular ranges of products that customers from a visitor’s demographics have shown interest in
Including social proof for each of the products to reassure their customers – new and existing, of the quality they assure
Creating contextual up-sell and cross-sell campaigns for their customers to increase the value of purchases they make
Personalizing product recommendations based on previous interactions of existing and returning online shoppers

Ensure Excellent Customer Support

According to a customer experience report by Right now, the number one reason customers stop engaging with a business is poor customer service. Online shoppers are no longer just looking for great deals but also the post-sale services they can leverage.

Apart from that, when you offer excellent post-sale services, you are guaranteed to generate significant online ratings and reviews. The better your social proof is, the more willing is your target audience to engage with your business.

You can use Wigzo’s WhatsApp automation and Conversations app to give your customer support a 360-degree boost and enhanced efficiency through automation.

Launch a Customer Loyalty Program

Loyalty programs offer rewards to customers who frequently make purchases from the business. The customer can use the tips in further purchases on products from the same store, giving him a better deal than what is already offered.

You can launch tailored loyalty programs for your loyal customers to encourage them for more frequent purchases. This will help you drive more repeat purchases, and keep growing a happy band of loyal customers.

4. Order Fulfillment

Fulfilling the orders correctly and timely is an integral part of the e-commerce brand experience. It is critical that you partner with a logistics enterprise or a fulfillment partner like Shiprocket to ensure that your orders are correctly processed and reach buyers on time.

If you choose Wigzo as a driving force behind your e-commerce success, it will also bring to the table immensely valuable e-commerce logistics expertise by Shiprocket. Since Wigzo is a Shiprocket company now, we can offer the best of both worlds – e-commerce marketing automation and slick order fulfillment logistics to enable hyper-growth for your business.

Not only will we help you minimize Return-to-Origin orders (RTOs), but also streamline the process of inventory management and shipment.