I wrote a piece in the industry trade Total Retail titled: D2C Brands Use of the Email Address is the Canary in the Coal Mine. Here’s the basic idea:
D2C brands are famous for their ability to adapt trends in marketing before the rest of the industry. They’ve been trend-setters when it came to content marketing, leading the way with fun and engaging videos like the Squatty Potty video, which was the ship that launched a thousand “wacky” corporate infographics.
Smart brands pay attention to what D2Cs are doing, because D2Cs are nimble and can give a good idea of what’s hot. And D2Cs are now into People-based marketing, and making the most of the email address.
D2Cs are flocking to solutions that offer People-based marketing that are outside the confines of the walled gardens like Facebook and Google. In plain English, that means us.
LiveIntent is seeing incredible growth in its D2C clients because we represent a logged-in audience (you have to log in to your email, after all) where the Direct to Consumer brands can take the ancillary benefits of running the campaign (all the data that’s produced in pursuit of optimizing the campaign that represents consumer intent) and do whatever they want with it.
Conversations with D2Cs have led us to understand that D2Cs are using data created in people-based marketing campaigns to do everything from bringing personalization to environments that were previously anonymous (mobile) to simply creating their building blocks of Identity for a future where the cookie doesn’t play as significant a role. It’s part of the reason why our recently launched onboarding business has become so buzzy.
The point is: D2Cs have been at the marketing vanguard so many times before. If D2C brands are doubling down on their email investment and exploring onboarding solutions, it may make sense for brands of all sizes to do so as well.
