How Shopify Marketers are Navigating iOS & Google Privacy Updates

Marketers are used to change. But it doesn’t mean they like it when it happens! Many marketers are in a “doom and gloom” mindset over the new iOS 14 and Google privacy changes. It’s no secret that most D2C brands rely heavily on Facebook, Instagram, and Google Ads as their main acquisition channels. The upcoming changes are leading to major concerns and pressure on marketing teams to understand what this means for their business and determine new opportunities for future growth.

MAL 2021 Guide for D2 C Customer Retention v01 hero

1. The advertising game is changing

App tracking transparency (ATT) is the major area of focus for the privacy changes. Apple and Google understand that users are wary of being tracked and want to opt-out of tracking when they can.

The new iOS 14 privacy feature limits how much information can be collected by third-party tracking scripts. Users now have to manually opt-in when prompted if they’re ok with their data being collected. With more users becoming concerned about online privacy these days, the majority of users are expected to opt-out of tracking.

What Apple ATT changes mean for marketers

Brands are worried because now personalizing ads to iOS users’ behavior is a lot harder with less data. However, these changes don’t mean that digital advertising is dead. It just means that brands have to adapt and leverage other channels to continue growing their company.

Apple’s privacy changes with iOS 14 mean that customers now have to explicitly opt-in and agree to being tracked - unlike before, where apps would track user activity without permission. Data privacy is increasingly becoming a concern for users, so many people are applauding Apple for the changes they’ve made.

This has led to a public battle with Facebook who argues that Apple is just trying to limit data collection to themselves and make it impossible for others to do the same. Before this change, Facebook has been a dominant player in user data collection for personalized advertising and will stand to lose a lot from these changes.

Apple is standing firm in its decision. With the release of iOS 14, it’s going to be harder, but not impossible for brands to personalize ads for their users on Apple devices. Facebook argues that this change will disproportionately hurt small businesses who don’t have as deep of pockets for advertising and where tracking behaviors is essential to reach the right audience.

US Daily Opt-in Rate

Preliminary data from Flurry Analytics with aggregated insights across 2 billion mobile devices is showing that opt-in rates are indeed lower.

World wide rates are hovering between
11-13%
Opt-in
with the US rate even lower, between
2-5%
Opt-in

Preliminary data from Flurry Analytics with aggregated insights across 2 billion mobile devices is showing that opt-in rates are indeed lower.

What Google’s privacy changes mean for marketers

Apple isn’t the only one announcing a win for customers concerned about privacy. Google has announced a change to their privacy policy as well. A future update in Google Chrome will effectively kill third-party cookies - reducing how much individual user activity can be tracked. Chrome will instead anonymize user browser history to cohorts with similar activity.

The good news is that individual activity can still be tracked on a brands website, but brands using tracking technology will need to follow specific guidelines to track these users. They will also be able to target ads to specific cohorts and profiles. “Google is the biggest beneficiary of Chrome’s move from cookies to cohorts. Framed as a privacy boon, Google’s new system only mildly restricts its traditional targeted advertising reach, while adding Facebook’s profiling-based mode of advertising to its repertoire.”3

Advertising & customer acquisition costs were already on the rise

The change in buyers’ purchasing behavior from being split between brick and mortar and being increasingly pushed to online purchases due to COVID-19 restrictions greatly increased the price of digital advertising purely due to the influx of new advertisers trying to reach the same audience.

Gone are the days where you could get a guaranteed low cost per conversion through paid ads. As more brands leverage social media and Google ads, the cost of advertising on those platforms is ever increasing. If you’re selling products at a high price point, then ads can work for you. But for brands selling discount/lower-priced products, ads are becoming increasingly unprofitable.

With the likely increase in acquisition costs for D2C brands advertising on Facebook and Google because of privacy restrictions, it’s going to be even harder to create profitable ad campaigns because of the restricted targeting options. Advertising isn’t dead, but your campaigns and budgets need to be adjusted accordingly.

2. Where do we go from here?

Even with the advertising privacy changes, it doesn’t mean that sales are suddenly going to tank. Consumers are already dealing with advertising fatigue making it more expensive and less successful even before these shifts. Brands need to think outside the box. Consumers are increasingly relying on trust and a meaningful experience with brands to choose where and how they make purchases. Here’s how you can shift away from overly relying on ads to focus on other marketing channels that drive value and engagement to your customers.

Owned marketing is more important than ever

While it has been great leveraging the large audiences paid social media advertising platforms and Amazon’s marketplace can reach, D2C brands need to leverage the channels they own to reduce acquisition costs and improve repeat purchases in order to create an experience, not just hard selling. This is where owned marketing comes into play.

What is owned marketing? At its core, owned marketing focuses on marketing through the channels you own, hence the name. Owned channels include:

  • Email & SMS subscriber lists
  • Website and blog content
  • Content marketing
  • Referral and partner marketing
  • Reviews

Owned marketing has numerous benefits to make it a major focus of your ecommerce strategy.

Here are some of its main advantages:

Lower Your acquisition costs – When you use your owned channels for marketing products, you don’t need to pay for running promotions. So if you make a sale through these channels, the acquisition cost is zero (minus the costs of the software you’re using). If you’re a small business that doesn’t or can’t spend a fortune on advertising, you benefit greatly from owned marketing.

Own your branding and messaging – If you control the brand channels, you can have complete control over what you are promoting, whom you are targeting, when you are promoting, what the experience is, and how long you want the promotion or any other marketing content to stay. Paid channels limit how much of your content is seen, whereas your owned channels keep your content online indefinitely.

Build engagement and relationships with your customers – Besides providing more control over your content, owned marketing also allows you to connect and communicate with your customers more directly. The comments section on your website and your social media channels are perfect examples. If you own the communication channels, you can keep, remove, and respond to comments as you like.

Leverage these communication channels to promote brand loyalty by making the customers feel heard. Take suggestions from customer comments about future product launches and use them to gain insight into your customers’ experience with your current products and services.

Grow LTV – One key metric D2C brands focus on is customer lifetime value (LTV). This metric is vital to success because it determines how well your brand can retain customers. With a high LTV, your customers are likely to stay with your brand and it indicates how happy they are with your brand.

One of the best ways to increase LTV is to build engagement and fans of your product. This will increase the number of repeat purchases by customers. By having them buy more from your brand through specific value added targeted upsells and cross-sells, you can continue to increase LTV without relying on expensive ads that focus mostly on new customer acquisition.

Optimize the customer journey – The customer journey is crucial to get right. It’s not a “one-and-done” setup. You should always look for opportunities to improve the customer experience wherever you can. For example, the post-purchase experience is becoming an area of focus for D2C brands. By improving the post-purchase experience, brands can increase their repeat purchase rate at marginal cost. Keeping customers happy just leads to more sales. Crazy, right?

Reduce reliance on paid ads – Ads are a great way to drive growth. But with growing ad costs, they can take a big chunk out of your profits. Due to the recent privacy changes, targeted ads will be even harder to do well and more expensive to get right, so profits are likely going to keep decreasing. Marketing through your owned channels can reduce your reliance on ads.

While Google ads are convenient, they can be costly. With some search engine optimization (SEO) expertise, you can use your blog posts to attract audiences and acquire customers for free. To achieve great results from owned marketing, you need to deploy the right strategies for each type of media.

3. Brands that are key to marketers’ future success

We work better together. Whether you need help with the post-purchase experience, SMS marketing, web design, messenger marketing, helpdesk operations, or retention, we’ve got you covered. Here are 7 brands you need to know if you want to level up your marketing strategy.

Malomo

Description: Malomo is a shipment tracking platform that drives repeat sales, increases customer satisfaction, educates customers, and lowers support tickets through branded tracking emails and landing pages.

How Malomo improves the post-purchase experience

Ready to improve the post-purchase experience for your customers? Here’s how Malomo makes it easy to improve the post-purchase experience.

Branded tracking pages

Customers check shipment tracking 4.6 times for each order. That’s why it’s crucial to invest in tracking pages that are both functional, offering real-time shipment tracking, and beautiful.

Malomo makes it easy to create elegant, custom-branded tracking pages that integrate seamlessly with Shopify. Malomo also makes it easy to offer product referrals that drive sales directly from your shipment tracking. Kill two birds with one stone — offer your customers the best shipment tracking experience while also turning it into one of your highest-performing marketing channels.



Proactive shipping updates

Customers hate when their shipments are delayed. But hate it more when delivery delays aren’t communicated to them. With the rise in shipping delays due to COVID-19 and the Suez Canal blockage, it’s essential to effectively communicate possible shipping delays before and after customers place their orders. Expectation management is vital to improving the customer experience.

Drive repeat sales

Offer product suggestions within high-trafficked order tracking pages and email notifications that integrate flawlessly with your Shopify or Shopify Plus store — without HTML or javascript knowledge.

Deep Shopify integrations

Malomo’s native integration with Shopify and Shopify Plus makes getting started with Malomo a breeze. Additional integrations with apps like Klaviyo and Postscript make it easy to integrate Malomo’s post-purchase communications with your email and SMS workflows.

Postscript

Description: Postscript is a powerful SMS platform for Shopify stores. Postscript helps ecommerce brands design and operate SMS programs by helping them send campaigns, create automations, and drive new revenue with texts, gifs, and more.

One of the greatest benefits to SMS marketing is that it is a completely owned channel. So what does that mean to the modern D2C ecommerce brand? Instead of funneling budget into paid advertising where you are at the whim of set ad costs and have no control over the shopper’s experience after the conversion, SMS lets you manage the entire experience.

The new iOS 14 privacy changes widen this gap even more. Retailers who’ve been historically reliant on paid ads face even more hurdles to overcome and adapt to.

Postscript’s SMS platform for Shopify stores allows brands to completely own their branding and messaging while also connecting with customers in unique and new ways. Through two-way chat and conversational commerce, Postscript opens up empathetic and sincere communication between customers and brands.

Nomatic

"Text is a big part of being able to communicate with our most valuable customers and, thanks to Postscript, it has also become one of our most profitable revenue channels. The culture at Postscript and their philosophy on SMS marketing is much more aligned with ours."

Russell Steed | Online Revenue and Marketing Manager | Nomatic


Fuel Made

Description: Fuel Made helps ecommerce companies grow by creating compelling and personalized customer experiences. Fuel Made focuses on custom design and development on Shopify, growth and optimization strategy consulting, and advanced email marketing with Klaviyo.

Make your owned marketing channels work “harder, better, faster, stronger”

The increased costs and difficulty of advertising are forcing marketers to turn to new creative approaches to obtain and retain customers. As mentioned earlier, a key focus is to rely more heavily on using your owned marketing channels and ensuring they are as robust as possible.

To do so you will need to learn about customers directly in your store, then implement the right personalized systems via email and SMS channels.

Here are three strategies you can start with to make this happen:

1. Ask directly what they want (“what they really, really want”)

When you collect an email address on your store from a visitor, it’s an opportunity to ask them directly about themselves. What type of content do they care about? What products or collections will they want to shop?

With that information you can better tailor your interactions and help visitors find what they came for.

This tells your subscribers that you intend to send them relevant content.

Tomlinson’s Feed—a store for natural, healthy pet products—welcomes first-time visitors with a beautiful and engaging pop up experience. They ask them upfront if they’d prefer a dog treat or cat toy. This offer is appealing to a pet parent and shows them they can expect personalized content.

The mobile and desktop pop up have very successful average capture rates of 11.74% and 7.54% respectively. While the Welcome Flow that follows up from their pop-up responses has an exceptional conversion rate of 23%.

Discount Delivery Welcome Emails:

Dog Version: Subject: Here’s your dog’s new favorite treat!

Cat Version: Subject: Here’s your cat’s new favorite toy!

2. Watch and respond to “every step your customer takes”

You can learn a lot about your customer’s interests simply by paying attention to their actions in your store.

It’s standard practice for brands to send Browse Abandonment emails by tracking when subscribers go to a product page. If the visitor leaves the store without purchasing, they’ll receive an email that usually simply shows the product they viewed and directs them back to that page.

However, you can take this a step further by customizing these emails to different product categories. This personalized information will help inform and convert your potential customer.

Rosita sells wild-caught, raw, and sustainable fish oils. Their Browse Abandonment emails are personalized to both of their best sellers: Cod Liver Oil and Ratfish Liver Oil.

The subject line calls out either product to better grab the customer’s attention. Then the content includes reviews highlighting each product’s specific benefits depending on the visitor’s browsing interest.

Browse Abandonment Emails:

Cod Liver Oil Email 1: Subject: There’s more you need to know about Cod Liver Oil

Cod Liver Oil Email 2: Subject: Notice: Stock is limited

Rosita’s Browse Abandonment flow converts at 2.67%, compared to their industry median rate of 1.91%.

3. Allow customers to “do it their way”

When you start sending more newsletters, you should give your audience a chance to refine their interests and only receive what they care about.

Little Sleepies sells adorable bamboo PJs with matching prints for the whole family. All their email footers link to an “email preference” page with content options.

Setting up a process like this helps you collect valuable information about your audience. It also gives readers much-appreciated control over their inbox and an alternative to unsubscribing.

Recart

Description: Recart is a messenger marketing platform that helps ecommerce companies grow their email, SMS, and messenger lists. With Recart, you can send personalized, conversational Messenger messages at every stage of the customer journey including abandoned cart, receipts, shipping notifications, product recommendations, and one-off promotions.

How Recart helps you build owned channels rapidly and increase customer engagement and revenue

1. Turn existing store traffic into brand new email and SMS subscribers

Having a subscriber list is the best owned channel you can have. But however obvious the goal, the means to achieve it is usually not so easy: it requires efficient tactics, persistence, and the same seamless experience online that people would get at a brick and mortar store.

The good news?

Recart makes it as easy as possible for scrollers to subscribe by taking out all the extra hoops that traditional sign-up forms bring. Recart’s mobile-optimized, two-tap popup lets people sign-up in – you guessed it – two simple taps. Once they’ve subscribed to Messenger, you already have your own channel. Given our natural curiosity as humans, scrollers will happily pass over their email and phone number in exchange for a little incentive. In fact, at least 30% of scrollers will join your Messenger + email and SMS lists, and hand over their emails and phone numbers with two single taps - it’s simple as that. Take inspiration from 5 fast-growing brands on engaging incentive triggers and achieve up to a 30-84% visitor to subscriber conversion rate.

Don’t forget, people always have additional questions—as James Denlinger, Digital Strategist of Bulksupplements put it.


Bulksupplements

"Klaviyo just pops up like "Join the VIP and get 10% off." That's nice, but what if they had additional questions? When people sign-up, you hit them with this sign-up message, and even if they know how much the percentage is or who you are, they always have additional questions they want to know. Twenty years ago, if you had these questions, you called the company. In today's world, people say "oh look, there's a little spot here where I can shoot them a quick text with my question." With technology nowadays, people expect to get answers quickly. Recart gives you that ability to have real-time conversations with these consumers instead of simply collecting contact information from them."

James Denlinger | Digital Strategist | Bulksupplements


So let your shoppers learn more about you, and check out key facts and features before committing to a purchase. For visitors that have shown an interest but have not yet taken any action to buy, you can easily build educational sequences that let them proceed through the funnel - see how Peejamas did it.

2. Turn social media audiences into owned channels

Another great way to rapidly grow your subscriber list is to turn your pre-existing channels into owned channels. You already have tons of followers on social media, so why not turn them into email and SMS subscribers? Simply boost one of your giveaway posts or direct shoppers from a Facebook ad for your giveaway to an automated Messenger sequence. Encourage them to join a VIP group, unlock exclusive content, or subscribe them to your email and SMS channels. It’s not just an incredibly powerful way to turn your followers into subscribers, but Recart will automatically enrich customers profiles to make your campaigns more personalized than ever before:


3. Drive engagement and reduce your costs

With recent privacy changes, it’s harder than ever to strategically target customers - but not with Messenger. Once you’ve subscribed people in Messenger, you can easily retarget these people in Messenger to keep the momentum high. Using a highly-engaging sponsored messages ad type, you only pay when a message is opened, delivery is free (unlike SMS). This not only creates an open-message cost between $0.01-$0.015, but Messenger’s 90% open and 30% click rates ensure that your message won’t land in a promotional folder. Additionally, with Recart, you can further segment people based on properties like ‘purchase history,’ to whittle down your audience with precision. Engage the right audience with the right offers (from BOGO, flash-sales to product launches), or improve their post-purchase experience by giving them tips and tricks, or inviting them to your community. See how 19 DTC brands achieve 90% open rates while cementing relationships with their best buyers.

4. Communicate proactively

40% of ecommerce buyers surveyed globally say that Messenger was how they first started shopping online. Slide into customer DMs to confirm their order, nurture the relationship further by offering a discount on their next purchase, or just simply inform them of their shipping without being pushy.

Gorgias

Description: Gorgias is a leading helpdesk for Shopify, Magento and BigCommerce merchants where retailers can manage all of their customer communication and tickets in one platform (email, social media, SMS, phone). It’s powered with machine learning to automate up to 25% of commonly asked questions and seamlessly integrates into your existing tech stack to deliver better customer support.

With continual, restrictive changes taking place in areas of privacy, marketers need every possible tool at their disposal. By providing a customer service platform to interact with more users, Gorgias affords brands a tremendous opportunity to engage, foster awareness and conduct business via all of their channels.

Gorgias is the ecommerce helpdesk that turns your customer service into a profit center. It assists independent ecommerce brands by centralizing customer interactions and automating responses to repetitive questions, so your support agents will become sales associates who spend more time on meaningful, profitable interactions with customers.

OK. But, what does this have to do with marketing?

Superior customer service is its own form of marketing. Customers who have a great experience with your brand are more likely to come back in the future, provide a referral to a friend and write customer reviews to increase awareness.

Gorgias organizes any customer request received from a variety of communication channels, and collects it to be addressed by you. Having the ability to engage with all comments and inquiries in an organized, time-efficient manner is key to tapping the explosive power of social commerce.

Case Study: Shinesty

Shinesty is a clothing and accessories brand specializing in all things colorful, retro, and bizarre (and more). Their designs are tailor-made for likes and shares on social media, but they found themselves overwhelmed by the sheer volume of questions being asked on Facebook and Instagram, and their resultant inability to keep up. Shinesty identified that, if they could find the right solution to this problem, a potentially massive source of business would be unlocked.

Through Gorgias’ social integrations, Shinesty is now able to respond to social ad comments and interact with their buyers in a way they never had before. Engagement is through the roof, and the ability to communicate with customers in real-time has dramatically increased the number of sales.

Gorgias also allowed Shinesty to set auto-responses for frequently asked questions that would otherwise dominate an agent’s valuable time. As a result, agents are now able to concentrate on pre-sale actions and chat to convert potential buyers into actual customers.



Shinesty

"We've been using Gorgias for two months now, and our marketing department has noticed a large spike in our engagement already. The Facebook ad commenting has been very, very interesting. People have been converting right there thanks to a simple social interaction."

Cody Szymanski | Customer Experience Manager | Shinesty


Octane AI

Description: Octane AI is an all-in-one platform for quizzes, Facebook Messenger and SMS automation, and opt-in tools. With Octane AI, merchants can connect, convert, and retain customers by creating personalized cross-channel experiences.

How to maintain personalization within owned marketing channels using zero-party data

With the recent data and privacy changes, marketers are recognizing the importance of owned marketing. However, a critical piece of owned marketing is proper segmentation and personalization on channels like email and SMS, which occurs from collecting what is called “zero-party data.”

Using zero-party data, brands can continue the same amount of personalization that was possible prior to recent data and privacy changes.

So what is it?

Zero-party data is data that a customer intentionally and proactively shares with a brand (Salesforce). Data can include a customer’s preferences, needs, their name, their size, or any information they choose to provide.

But, how do brands actually collect data intentionally from customers? Simple: through an amazing on-site experience that encourages customers to share information in order to improve their shopping experience.

Keep your marketing superpowers—while providing a better shopping experience

Customers who share zero-party data expect a better, more personalized experience in return. But this data doesn’t just fall in the hands of marketers without any effort (no matter how much they wish it did). In order to reap the benefits of personalization, brands have to have the technology to collect zero-party data to begin with.

The best way to collect zero-party customer data is with an on-site quiz experience (at Octane AI, we call it the Shop Quiz).

At face value, a Shop Quiz provides a great experience for customers. It allows someone to select different answers, opt-in to marketing, and then receive personalized product recommendations.

Luckily, there are benefits on the brand’s side as well, which is that a quiz allows marketers and founders to collect zero-party data that organizes customers into buyer profiles and syncs directly to their owned marketing channels.

Phew—that was a lot of info. We’ll outline some key ways brands can leverage this customer data:

  • Over time, more zero-party data collected through a Shop Quiz means more targeted personalization in owned marketing channels.
  • When a new product launches, you can send an early access link over SMS to customers who have taken a product quiz and expressed interest before.
  • Near the holidays, send an email to those who have taken a gift finder quiz and purchased a gift previously. Or, invite them to take your gift finder quiz for the first time to make gift shopping easier.

Now that you’ve learned what zero-party data is and its benefits, let’s dive into an example of a brand who’s crushing it with its Shop Quiz and data synchronization.

Doe Lashes: How to drive 3X more email opt-ins and personalize every flow

A great example of a brand taking advantage of zero-party data collection through a Shop Quiz is the fast-growing eyelash brand Doe Lashes.

Since launching their Lash Quiz, they’ve seen 24% of all revenue move through their quiz, 3x more email opt-ins than through a pop-up, plus 11%+ higher average order value in a quiz taker—all while collecting zero-party data that syncs directly into their owned marketing channels like Octane AI, Klaviyo, and Facebook Advertising.


Doe Lashes

"One of the best parts about Octane AI's Shop Quiz is the ability to tag our customers within Klaviyo to create different segments that we can in turn build new automated drip campaigns and personalize our messaging towards."

Jacob Sappington | Doe Lashes


Beyond personalization within their owned marketing channels, Doe Lashes is also able to learn more about customers, which informs their overall strategy. Jacon explains this simply:

“One really incredible takeaway is that the Octane AI Quiz has allowed us to learn a key insight about our prospective customer that is informing a lot of our future customer acquisition strategy. We are seeing that over 35% of quiz takers have NEVER worn false eyelashes before. This is new information to us and shows that much of our new customers are experiencing false eyelashes for the very first time. We can lean into this insight and become a trusted source of education and information for a more timid, less-informed customer with the ultimate goal of Doe Lashes being their first and only lash brand.”

The truth is, the world of online shopping consists of multiple channels that influence buying behaviors. From emails, to Instagram ads, and text messages, brands have the power to reach their target audience in more ways and at any moment.

But rather than guessing what products or messages customers enjoy, learn who your customers are by collecting zero-party data on their demographics, behaviors, likes, dislikes, pain points, and preferences.

Using this data, brands can segment every email, SMS and paid ad to ensure every message, recommendation, and event is extremely targeted and relevant to every individual—no matter what stage of the buyer’s journey they’re at.



Key Takeaway: Setting up a strong system for collecting zero-party data is vital to protect against the current and future data or privacy restrictions.

Repeat

Description: Repeat is a SaaS platform that enables CPG brands to turn one-time buyers into repeat customers. Repeat’s Smart Replenishment software learns the unique consumption habits of consumers and drives repeat sales through a combination of automation, personalized reminders, and a cart purpose-built for replenishment.

While building an owned marketing strategy is wise in a post iOS 14.5 world, the trick to doing it correctly is timing.

Consider: To tackle retention, you’ll likely rethink your one-off email campaigns and your flows, and you’ll dip your toes into SMS—if you haven’t already. If you have a replenishable good, you’ll probably test subscription, too, and we’re even willing to bet that you’ll allocate a little more ad spend to retargeting existing customers, since you’ll end up seeing your retention efforts paying off.

Each of these channels can be highly performant, but, as with everything in marketing, timing is everything. Especially for retention efforts: Get the timing wrong? You’ll miss a significant number of sales and churn a high percentage of subscription customers.

This is why, by the way, a bunch of brands send you emails every day: They don’t know when to send, so they just always send.

So, what to do?

Retention marketers need more than channels and automation tools to make it go. They need data. Specifically, they need data that gives them a strong understanding of when customers return to make a repeat purchase—and they need that data to make those other channels work better.

That data is really hard to get.

Repeat gives marketers easy access to the most critical data points here—like product-level replenishment intervals and customer-level time-between-purchase data, so that marketers can better understand when their customers are most likely to reorder. Here’s an example:

Repeat gives marketers easy access to the most critical data points here—like product-level replenishment intervals and customer-level time-between-purchase data, so that marketers can better understand when their customers are most likely to reorder. Here’s an example:

And while this data is useful on its own, Repeat’s magic is in automatically tying that data to shopping experiences for consumers.

Brands like Huron, byHumankind and Mid-Day Squares are using Repeat to power faster, easier reordering experiences.

Repeat works because it looks at a brand’s entire store history, understands replenishment cycles, and creates personalized, headless carts for customers. Those carts are anchored in a customer’s previous purchase history, and prepopulated with items due for replenishment. Repeat can even automate replenishment notifications, so marketers don’t need to dig too deeply into the data.

While the channels may be set, your investment isn’t—at least not until you better understand when your customer is most likely to repeat.


While the upcoming advertising changes for Google and Apple are changing the environment that marketers are used to, it doesn’t mean that D2C brands are going to see a massive drop in sales. There are so many unique channels marketers can add to their strategy that focus on improving the customer journey to increase sales.

Contributors

Sarah Leitz – Sarah has spent her entire career in strategic marketing. She’s worked with large Fortune 500 brands and small companies to build their marketing, customer success and inbound programs. She’s currently working as the Head of Marketing for Malomo, a branded order tracking solution for ecommerce merchants to improve customer retention and LTV.

Malomo is a shipment tracking platform that drives repeat sales, increases customer satisfaction, educates customers, and lowers support tickets through branded tracking emails and landing pages.

Corinne Watson – Corinne Watson is a researcher and writer at Postscript. Prior to Postscript, she was on the team at a fin-tech startup, then led partner content marketing at BigCommerce. When she’s not content-ing, she is cooking, gardening, or diving into a new book. Keep up with her on Twitter.

Postscript is trusted by thousands of growing Shopify and Shopify plus stores to manage their SMS Marketing. Using Postscript, your team will be able to grow a TCPA compliant subscriber list, use your Shopify data to create targeted text marketing campaigns, have two-way conversations with customers, and unlock a brand new marketing channel that drives big-time ROI for your store.

Lisa Oberst | Director of Email Marketing – Lisa heads up the Fuel Made Email Marketing department. Always on the move, Lisa is a lover of languages and currently studies Portuguese, dancing, and painting in her spare time. Fuel Made is an ecommerce growth agency, helping companies grow by creating compelling customer experiences through custom design and development on Shopify, growth and optimization strategy (including CRO), and email marketing with Klaviyo.

Brigitta Ruha – Brigitta Ruha is in charge of product marketing and partner marketing activities at Recart. She has 5+ yrs experience in successfully developing and executing go-to-market plans, marketing strategies, and tactics. At Recart, she’s helping thousands of DTC brands grow their business through actionable tips and insights. When not working with brands and partners, Brigi is reading up on the latest in digital marketing, ecommerce, and B2B marketing trends. Obsessed with golden retrievers. Powered by coffee. Fast presentation maker.

Recart manages 13k+ fast-growing, innovative DTC brands. Having leveraged Messenger marketing, brands can build 1:1 conversations at scale and engage customers and motivate them to spend more. Turn 3x more scrollers into buyers, grow your SMS and email lists 20X faster and cheaper, make the shopping experience exceptional, seamless, and personalized.

Chris Lavoie – Chris Lavoie works closely with Gorgias’ amazing tech partners to scope, facilitate, and promote integrations, so customers can leverage all the benefits that come with using each other’s platforms.

Gorgias is a leading helpdesk for Shopify, Magento and BigCommerce merchants where retailers can manage all of their customer communication and tickets in one platform (email, social media, SMS, phone). It’s powered with machine learning to automate up to 25% of commonly asked questions and seamlessly integrates into your existing tech stack to deliver better customer support.

Katie Krische – Katie Krische is Marketing and Strategic Partnerships Manager at Octane AI. Previously, she worked with merchants at Shopify Plus and Smile.io, helping them strategize to improve their ecommerce experience and increase revenue.

Octane AI provides an all-in-one platform for engaging quizzes, data collection, and personalized Facebook Messenger and SMS automation.

Thousands of Shopify and Shopify Plus merchants use Octane AI to connect, convert, and retain customers by personalizing the customer journey and giving customers the confidence to purchase. Our vision is to build a more humanized and personalized shopping experience for all.

Leo Strupczewski – Leo Strupczewski is the head of marketing at Repeat. He has nearly 10 years of DTC experience—working both with brands and software vendors. CPG brands use Repeat to give consumers faster reordering experiences and just-in-time notifications—so customers can reorder their favorite products faster and brands can watch their repeat purchase rates climb.

Repeat is the easiest way to reorder everyday goods online. CPG brands use Repeat to give their customers faster, personalized reordering experiences and get deeper insights into how their customers are using those products.

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