Bring Your D2C Team Together
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Identify ways to help your team plan for D2C.
- Apply fundamental strategies for a seamless D2C experience.
Plan for D2C
Teamwork makes the dream work, right? Let’s take a look at how to help your team, including both employees and partners, plan for D2C.
First, plan your team structure. There isn’t a standard structure to execute a D2C strategy. Some companies have a dedicated ecommerce team while others fold responsibilities into existing roles. When growth is the main priority, separate digital and wholesale operations make sense. An independent D2C team can own channel revenue targets, marketing conversation metrics, and digital operations.
Consider the following questions as you define your team’s roles and responsibilities.
- How will you measure success?
- How will you make decisions?
- How will you prioritize activities?
- Who decides final outputs?
- Who owns which responsibilities?
- What will the hand-over process look like between team members?
Next, map it out by focusing on the workflows that will drive outcomes. This takes otherwise complex organizational planning tasks and clarifies them in order to best allocate resources and activities.
Find your internal advocates. Show your future advocates what’s in it for them! Start with the teams that will benefit most from going D2C, then focus on the collaborators needed to build out this channel, like IT and finance. Communication is key for employees to understand your plans and commit to the change.
Select the right technology partners. The right partners are an extension of your team and will acquire a deep understanding of your business to help you succeed. As part of your transition to D2C, you’ll need to identify a core commerce solution to build out your site.
Ask the following questions when you evaluate vendors.
- Is the commerce solution flexible and agile enough to build on for the unique needs of my business?
- Does the solution guarantee speed to market for a quick implementation?
- Does the solution ensure trust and security?
- Does the solution give a 360-degree view with access to data across touchpoints?
- Will business managers understand how to use the platform without ongoing IT support?
- Is educational support and training available?
- Are there regular evaluations and business reviews to optimize performance?
The right partnership will help you scale and succeed both before and after the site launch.
Salesforce gives you access to solution integrators and certified partners, and the ability to extend your brand across third-party platforms with a partner ecosystem—all critical to meeting consumers across channels. This approach helps you further your business goals, proactively adopt and provide recommendations that drive business value, and navigate the entire ecosystem.
Make It Simple for Customers
Plan a seamless experience to make shopping simple for your customers. Going D2C requires a plan for operations, production, and service that gives consumers options—from how they find your site to preferred payment, checkout, and customer service.
Here are a few tips for a seamless customer experience.
Optimize the site experience for the end consumer.
- Create a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy that ensures site findability.
- Implement merchandising to surface the right products.
- Add transactional elements with flexible payment methods.
- Account for an order management system and fulfillment that gives consumers the choice to ship and return online or in store (if applicable).
- Adjust your infrastructure and operations to handle individual orders by working with third-party fulfillment partners.
Create engaging, informative, and relevant messaging.
- Reach brand advocates through paid advertising campaigns, social media, partnerships, and more.
- Establish a consistent content development cadence. Use audience targeting to develop creative plans for digital ads, social media, and email channels.
- Evolve consumer journeys through awareness, engagement, retargeting, purchase, and loyalty.
Enable “white-glove” service experiences on every channel.
- Empower consumers with self-service and community portals.
- Embed service into onsite chat, SMS, and social messenger.
- Train service agents to resolve cases quickly and improve customer satisfaction.
D2C is all about the consumer, and our 360-degree view of understanding them. Now that we’ve covered ways to prepare on the business end, let’s consider ways to better understand our consumers in the next unit.
