Context

In a lot of industries, businesses are constantly searching for more context. DTC is unique, though, in that it has the opposite problem: Brands have more context than they can handle. 

Want to know how someone got to your site? Pretty easy. Want to go deeper and know the particular ad that caught a consumer’s attention? Just as easy. Want to know whether they’re an existing customer? Provided they’re signed in or coming from email, that’s straightforward. Want to know what that person has bought before? Lives in Shopify (and in Klaviyo).

And unlike other industries, where context becomes a competitive advantage for a particular vendor, no one is really fighting their “frenemies” over whether that information only gets used by the tool that’s storing the data.

But brands do have a different problem: Since they can do practically anything, the biggest problem is reducing capabilities to something simpler and more usable.

I think this might be one of the most under-appreciated tactics available to brands today. 

I was talking to a brand recently who changes their homepage based on a visitor’s context—someone new to the brand, an existing customer with a high propensity to buy—and they showed me how that homepage changes based on those experiences. 

The changes were simple: 

For consumers who are new to the brand, they go heavy on lifestyle imagery and brand education, and merchandise their best sellers. But for existing customers who are likely to be there to buy again, they focus on new products and collections—a move to increase a customer’s spend across multiple categories. 

The way this brand tells it, it’s a simple change that lifts conversion rates and AOV. 

The lesson, I think, is that they found a bit of context that was easily actionable and made it work for them. If they had continuously thought about how to do something more interesting, they might never have done anything.