Creating frictionless buying journeys

The most modern commerce experiences perfectly blend rich and personalised content with frictionless omnichannel buying journeys. Together, they have the power to elevate your brand, drive higher revenues and increase total customer lifetime value.

A select group of senior brand leaders from Diageo, Depop, Barilla and others, recently joined UNRVLD and our partners Contentful, at Groucho’s in London, to discuss ways to embed and advance this practice in their organisations.

We kicked off the roundtable by looking at recent stats. Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) sales are projected to keep growing as more traditional brands move into the eCommerce space and established DTC players continue to expand their existing market. Digitally native brands were projected to reach $44 billion in sales in 2023, with established DTC brands growing to around $138billion in sales (ref Insider Intelligence). And with 56% of customers expecting personalisation in their shopping experience (ref Salesforce), organisations are increasingly focused on growing their own first party data.

Creating systems to manage your brand’s owned content is therefore becoming increasingly important. And adopting more composable digital content systems is key to building more successful omnichannel commerce solutions. Moreover, brands are adopting direct to consumer (DTC) strategies to increase profit and grow customer loyalty.

Using content in commerce-like compositions to track and personalise digital experiences

Content is a valuable asset that can be used in commerce-like compositions to track and personalise digital experiences. It can improve the quality of lead generation through the use of tailored recommendations for every unique persona accessing your digital channels. From point-of-sale information to product SKUs, to the emotive brand experience that wraps itself around a brand or product, content has become a wide reaching and powerful ecosystem of assets and communications that support the purchase journey, end to end and omnichannel. Powerful yet complex, in the right hands it is commerce’s best neighbour, enabling you to:

• Expand reach
• Build loyalty
• Improve conversions
• Increase ROI
• Reduce operational costs

The rise of DTC, is no longer limited to digitally native brands. Traditional retailers are also increasingly adopting the same strategies to compete. DTC allows you to control your messaging and how your products are presented to consumers. Gathering and managing first party customer data within your DTC channels also helps you refine and personalise the experiences and recommendations you make.

We cited some of the most successful brands operating today in this field – amongst them On, Igniting the Human Spirit Through Movement; Huel, Fast Nutritious, Plant-based Food; and Burberry, the global luxury brand with a British heritage. All of these brands align seamless product stories that engage emotionally and sell personally by adopting compelling creative, personalised user experiences, pertinent storylines and smart community building tactics to build loyalty, all aligned to a seamless purchase journey.

Designing highly-crafted DTC commerce experiences

We also shared UNRVLD’s approach to building highly performant experiences with our clients, underpinned by best of need composable solutions to unleash the potential they provide for exponential growth. These included a look at UNRVLD’s methods to design highly-crafted DTC commerce experiences for our clients from traditional enterprises like SMEG and New Era Cap, to digital native start up brands like Chilly’s.

We explained how we increase the value of their content, often aligned to an ongoing experimentation practice, to improve engagement and drive higher conversions. She also explained how we have delivered a global presence for LIV Golf that makes every sporting moment merchandisable. Commerce-based storytelling is fundamental principle of this team-based league. Personality and emotive content are paramount to building brand passion and team loyalty. The same content that is fuelling the fan engagement is also fuelling the commerce – so an article will be created once and published everywhere, from livgolf.com to the native app, online store and out further into social channels; making every moment count.

How composable content platforms underpin success

Charlie Bell, Snr Director, Solution Engineering EMEA, Contentful, joined the conversation and gave insight into ways that their composable platform helps many organisations rethink their approach to content management and delivery of commerce across the digital ecosystem, with a flexible composable architecture and the integration with powerful commerce partners such as Shopify+.

The ensuing lively table discussion enabled our guests to share their own experiences and ambitions. These ranged from the challenge of evolving a complex multi-seller marketplace to a community-driven proposition; building a new DTC  channel for a single high value product; to developing a DTC  channel for a world-famous product with higher impact storytelling; to the evolution from a third-party aggregator model to a first party, data-driven business.

Join our next roundtable discussion in Unleashing the Power of Content-Driven Commerce, Amsterdam, Feb 8, to share in the debate or contact us to find out more.