- With Black Friday and Cyber Monday on the horizon, brands are preparing to enter the busiest quarter of the year.
- Economic uncertainty is prompting cautious spending by consumers.
- What is it that makes a D2C sales strategy truly effective?
Across the globe, but particularly in Europe, multiple economic factors are having a knock-on effect on consumer spending. The continuing energy crisis is one of those, with utility bills expected to hit record highs this winter. Alongside this, rising inflation is causing consumers to tighten their purse strings even further, with growing anxiety translating to limited spending.
Meeting Consumer Demand
McKinsey’s latest European Consumer Pulse Survey, released in October, showed that consumer confidence remains low across the region. At the same time, many brands have reacted to recent supply chain disruptions and have been working to become more resilient, aiming to have warehouses full of stock to reach their customers quickly regardless of geographical location. Within a D2C strategy, brands can work to ease these supply chain challenges, creating revenue streams which are less dependent on third-party marketplaces and more focused on the end customer.
During peak season, when consumers are actively seeking out discounted goods in the run-up to the holidays, brands have an opportunity to regain control. While there are uncertainties in the market, growth is still expected within e-commerce. For brands, it is important to partner with a logistics partner that has the supply chain capabilities, geographical reach, and investment power.
Data Insights
By embracing a D2C strategy, brands can learn much more about the people buying their products and capitalize on the lifetime value of a customer. By acquiring data upon purchase, such as names, physical addresses and email addresses, brands can build more accurate customer profiles and begin to better understand their interests and spending habits. Fundamentally, data insights from D2C e-commerce assist brands in building a customer base, attracting new customers, and driving product development by tailoring their goods to the needs of their current and future customers.
Agility And Resilience
To effectively manage inventory and operate a streamlined D2C sales strategy, brands need to embrace omni-channel fulfillment to maintain agility and resilience within their entire end-to-end supply chain. Omnichannel fulfillment allows brands to set up multiple distribution centers across the supply chain, putting their products closer to market and allowing them to deliver orders to retailers, wholesalers or directly to their customers from one inventory holding position.
This approach, rather than operating separate fulfillment centers for B2B, B2C and D2C sales, allows brands to deliver faster, make decisions quickly about where stock needs to be, and serve multiple channels from one centralized inventory, thus mitigating the risk of overstocking and excessive working capital demand.
Finding The right Partner
As we approach the retail sector’s peak season, against the backdrop of reduced overall consumer spending, brands need to embrace a sales strategy which will allow them to maximize inventory control while building closer relationships with their customers. A robust D2C strategy requires a retailer to have brand awareness and brand value, but also the infrastructure to capture customer data and the right logistics partner to help them deliver on what they promise through streamlined and straightforward logistics.
With Maersk, retailers can harness the power of D2C e-commerce, accelerating their growth strategies and bringing greater agility and resilience to their operations. In the current economic climate, very little is predictable, but retailers are being presented with an opportunity to drive their D2C strategies to meet the current needs of consumers.
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Source: Maersk
