Starting and scaling an ecommerce business requires intensive planning and execution right from launching to scaling a DTC business and more importantly an optimized martech stack. With the sweeping changes brought about by iOS15 updates and the future of the cookie apocalypse it is no longer viable to rely on rented platforms such as Apple, Google, Meta, and Amazon to grow and scale a business.
One of the most critical drivers of profitability and lifetime value is achieved by driving deep personalization efforts by making the right offer, to the right person at the right time. This is driven by acquiring the best customers at the lowest cost, increasing AOV and consistently aiming at gaining a healthy repeat purchase rate with returning customers to your DTC store.
As we know, Shopify has one of the world’s most enviable app ecosystem that is designed to provide an edge to ecommerce stores. While the good news is that there is a lot to choose from, the bad news is that if you choose the wrong tools in your tech stack, you will as an entrepreneur end up with poor insight into your business metrics, poor organic to paid traffic ratio, coupled with both a poor customer experience resulting in high churn and low net profit margins. So, with that lets jump into the martech stack highly recommended by the world’s best DTC entrepreneurs such as Ezra Firestone, Nik Sharma, Cody Pfloker, Jason Wong, and Ron Shah.
After an exhaustive comparative analysis, listening to several DTC leaders and martech founders, this is what we’ve aligned on as the most comprehensive martech stack that would pave the way to build a solid foundation for DTC store growth. These suggestions are basis best in class understanding and hands-on-experience:
1. Shopify:
Depending on the size and stage of your business, you might use Shopify basic, normal, advanced, or plus. But Shopify is the best CMS marketing technology platform to use for your store because it’s cost-effective besides being customer and merchant friendly. Shopify has thousands of engineers working to make it 1% better every day, and it integrates the easiest with almost any other software/ERP/marketplace out there. Further, it boasts of the most holistic app ecosystem that can turn any store into a revenue spinning machine!
Shopify is extremely easy to setup and comes with beautiful templates for the look and feel of your store, tools to sell in multiple places online and in-person, integrated marketing tools for social and SEO management.
Shopify has one of the world’s best CMS app ecosystems, built by third party developers that help you with everything from building your store, to connecting with influencers, managing customer service, returns, creating reviews to driving your stores subscription policy and driving one click cross-sells and upsells. An integral component of your martech stack, hands down!
2. ReBuy:
Rebuy is one of the most incredible personalization platforms that triggers custom recommendations, upsells, cross-sells, AOV growth. It also helps in improving the quality of merchandizing experiences and increase retention.
With ReBuy, we can pre-populate checkouts based on a customer’s last order, add in a free shipping threshold, surface limited-time discounts. Build amazing customer experiences across web, email and mobile with countdown timers, multi-currency support and increase retention and loyalty with one click post-purchase offers. These offers can be triggered using purchased products, product tags, cart value and product quantity.
ReBuy helps you get more products in the cart and uses historical data to recommend what someone might want as a complimentary item to what is in their cart already. ReBuy is hands-down the most founder-friendly Shopify app that exists, $99/month for 1,000 orders. It also integrates nicely with Postscript and Klaviyo to scale those recommendations to other channels.
This is a great way to grow AOV as it does not add to shipping costs. Allows showcasing upto three upsells in a row but enabling the showcase of specific offers is a powerful proposition.
AB testing leveraging this tool is a breeze and can quickly help you tweak bundles and offers that drive more revenue and profit while converting better.
Rebuy can be a powerful martech stack addition in hands of DTC entrepreneurs aspiring to grow AOV quickly.
3. Recharge:
Offering subscriptions is the best way for a store to generate recurring revenue that is predictable and helps grow LTV, AOV as well as profitability for the DTC brand.
The option of choosing recharge as part of your martech stack is a win-win for both the merchant and customer as the subscriber benefit entails customized boxes, substantial monetary savings, and the convenience of delivery of one of the most favorite products when it’s time to replenish them. It has numerous integrations with other best-in-class apps in the Shopify ecosystem.
In summary, recharge helps DTC entrepreneurs offer tremendous value to the customer such as subscribe & save, gifting, prepaids, build your own box, a quiz that leads to a subscription recommendation and an intro-offer that turns into an auto-renew option!
4. Octane.ai:
Octane.ai is a powerful zero-party data platform and a quiz builder that allows Shopify stores to build stunning quiz templates, create dynamic quiz experiences and capture critical zero-party data via targeted quiz pop-ups and help stores drive personalized quiz funnels while selling products in store that specifically meet customer needs. By featuring your quiz in your store’s navigation bar, home page, footer, or product pages, you will begin to not only convert sales at a higher AOV, but you will also gain deeper insights into both your visitors and customers preferences, concerns, needs and expectations.
Your martech stack will just get better and more powerful with Octane.ai. It is unquestionably the single most important platform that will have your business protected and help you establish a direct connect with your customers, increase email revenue, SMS revenue and reduce churn rate.
Octane.ai has landed fantastic results for some of the world’s best DTC stores and is the best way to collect your first party data/ zero party data to personalize shopping experience via quizzes and one of the easiest ways to increase AOV and ROAS.
Build engaging quizzes with email and SMS lead capture that provide personalized product recommendations, nurture and segment leads and build email and SMS flows and campaigns to drive first purchases and return purchases.
We also leverage Octane.ai to port data use it in our retention efforts via personalized email/SMS messaging powered by Klaviyo. A no brainer to add to your martech stack given the sweeping changes in the marketing landscape. Know more about how and why building a Zero Party Data marketing strategy is even more important now than before.
5. Klaviyo:
Klaviyo email marketing is the cornerstone of the world’s most successful DTC brands such as Chubbies, Jones Road Beauty, Olipop, Native, BOOM By Cindy Joseph, Dr. Squatch, Magic Spoon, Doe Lashes etc.
Today if any brand needs to own their marketing communications, drive personalization, engage deeply with customers and reduce the risk that iOS updates and the cookiecalypse that Google brings, email marketing is the answer.
Gain more insights on how DTC stores can accelerate personalization strategies with email marketing.
Email marketing serves many benefits, besides reducing customer acquisition cost and increasing marketing efficiency rate – email marketing is the only answer. To ensure you further amplify the power of email marketing and get the highest returns one needs to ensure email and SMS marketing are working together. Klaviyo is literally the swiss-army knife for any DTC martech stack, it has 220+ pre-built integrations that can super charge your entire ecosystem. Klaviyo, is one of the top ten email and SMS marketing platforms for ecommerce stores.
6. Postscript:
Postscript is the SMS platform that has everything you need to build a compliant and engaged SMS subscriber list.
Desktop and mobile pop-ups help collect phone numbers and emails i.e., first party data from your visitors. Postscript allows you to segment and target your users for just about any use case as possible.
Leverage keywords to track opt-ins and revenue generated by channel, collect SMS subscriber details on check-out pages, create a landing page with an SMS opt-in form that can be linked to social posts and emails, create unique QR codes for your product packaging, grow subscriber lists with Postscript’s back-in-stock tool.
Its other features include dynamic coupons, customizing global UTM parameters, customizing a short-link subdomain besides changing default attribution windows. 8000+ Shopify Stores prefer Postscript as the SMS martech choice to add to their martech stack.
Read more about how SMS marketing can be leveraged to scale DTC growth here.
7. Attentive:
Attentive is another complete two-way conversational commerce SMS platform. It offers journey creation, two-way flows, compliance, deliverability and powerful platform capabilities and analytics. It has features such as audience manager, to enable segment audiences and send the right messages to the right person at the right time.
Send targeted personalized two-way messages that convert with Attentive. Leverage the mobile checkout feature such as text to buy to further drive conversions.
While email marketing is an important component of any retention strategy, SMS marketing isn’t far behind!
8. Okendo:
Okendo is one of the world’s best customer review platforms. Considering the feature sets Okendo boasts of – its pricing is quite competitive and fair. Some of the best features are attributes – a powerful tool that collects actionable data, sequences – enable brands to accelerate review generation and UGC.
Okendo boasts of a range of customizable widgets that beautify the review layout, provide controls to the customer. It also allows for exceptional integration with Google Search, Google Shopping, Facebook and Instagram. Besides Okendo, helps in building best-in-class integrations with Klaviyo, Attentive, Rebuy, Recharge and Gorgias.
Some of the core ways we leverage Okendo is to manage positive and negative review flows in Klaviyo ( email mail marketing platform), source user-generated content and accelerate review generation. and segment customers based on attributes provided in their Okendo reviews.
Learn more about how to collect reviews and optimize the collection process to scale DTC stores.
9. Gorgias:
Gorgias is one of world’s best ecommerce helpdesk or customer service platform. It allows merchants to automate service tickets, drive sales through chat functionality, and offer centralized customer communications across all channels. Gorgias also has a fantastic integration ability that provides a 360 view of a customer providing exceptional insights.
The most powerful features Gorgias has is the ability to centralize one to one interaction across email, social media, live chat, voice media and SMS. Given that customers now treat their social platforms like customer service channels a customer service platform that integrates across email, social and chat is critical.
Additionally, Gorgias greatly enhances agent productivity and strikes the right balance between manual personalization and automation critical for success. We know 78% of brands would take their business to a competitor within a week of poor customer service.
Customers now expect customer support pre and post purchase over social media, chat or email. Gorgias allows DTC entrepreneurs to drive exceptional customer experience across the customer journey.
How do we use Gorgias for our clients?
a) live chats in store
b) to stay in control of centralized messages cross-platforms
c) setup rules to automate the customer service process
d) create pre-made macros to streamline customer service responses
e) improve agent productivity
10. Loop:
Loop is a returns app and is an excellent in the martech stack. It incentivizes exchanges over refunds. Loop will decrease your refunds by providing a personalized customer return experience. that automates exchanges while influencing customers to exchange for higher-priced items on your Shopify store instead of choosing a refund.
By empowering customers to easily exchange a product, you’ll see an increase in customer retention, upsells (from customers exchanging for higher-priced items) and decreased returns that improves ROI and maintains net profit margins.
DTC stores can process returns via Gorgias or use Loop and optimize the entire returns journey. With Loop, a customer can enter their order number, swap their items, change the size, return it entirely, and deal with the process to ship the item back with ease. To know more about Loop click here.
If your stores return rate is higher than 15%, it will net you more revenue to have Loop installed.
11. Enquire Labs (Fairing):
Enquire Labs (Fairing) is a post-purchase survey tool. Enquire Labs allows you to launch surveys to new or repeat customers, as well as build out question streams and logic based on customized requirements.
Their simple one-click integration with Shopify and Recharge allows you to easily tailor questions in your post-purchase (order confirmation) area to better understand how your customers found you and more! As you gain zero-party data you can pass that information to other apps to enhance personalization efforts.
Post-purchase survey data is a goldmine for customer insights and forms the basis for powerful segmentation that can be leveraged for email and SMS personalization to deliver meaningful results and deliver highly profitable campaigns. It is a critical piece of your martech stack that enables your brand to build a tight feedback loop and enhance customer experience for your brand.
12. Malomo:
Malomo gives your customers a premium post-purchase experience. It helps not only dramatically reduce customer support tickets, automates shipping notifications, and generates additional revenue that keeps your customer happy. Customers track their order status on an average of 4.6x times per order. This martech stack technology helps lower WISMO orders enquiries (Where is My Order) by fifty percent. It does this by providing customers the ability to track their orders.
Keep customers informed at every step of the post-purchase experience by automating email and SMS notifications. Drive cross-sell or up-sell during the time your customers are most engaged with your brand.
Control the entire post-purchase experience with Malomo and drive customer experience and retention with your customers. Malomo is an excellent way to educate customers while products are on the way. This most often directly correlates to a decline in inbound question asking when customer orders were arriving or in transit.
13. Triple Whale:
Triple Whale is your ecommerce operating system for everything measurement and insights that you would ever want about your DTC business at the click of a button. Triple Whale is the brain center of your martech stack. Some of its key features include a triple whale dashboard that tracks all store metrics and activity such as sales, refunds, ROAS and expenses from a single feed. It provides insights on which products bundles see faster movement and drive better conversions, to inform your bundling strategy.
Triple Whale includes server-side tracking, multi-device tracking, customer journeys, multi-channel attribution and real time support as well as the ability to land post-purchase surveys to understand attribution accurately and at scale. Another product feature of Triple Whale is the creative cockpit.
This helps you arm your creative team with a powerful creative dashboard powered by first-party data by creative ID which provides for video, image and copy insights on performance and CTR, CPM and CPC benchmarks to understand how your brand fares vs industry averages.
Additionally, with the affluencer hub one can track, manage and analyze all your affluencers, across every platform using a combination of discount codes, triple pixel and the post-purchase survey.
14. Minisocial:
Minisocial UGC is a core driver of organic traffic, besides helping grow social proof, it boosts paid ad performance and aids growing brand trust and accelerates community building. Some of the world’s best DTC brands such as Native, Olipop, imperfect foods, door dash, hydrant, vessi, alala, cookies for kids and SMPL leverage minisocial. Minisocial is a fully managed platform that pairs brands with micro-influencers.
15. Builder.io:
Builder.io is the one tech stack that DTC brands know the importance of building high converting custom landing pages that enhance customer experience and improve conversion rates. Amazing brands leverage Builder.io to customize and optimize high performing pages. Headless CMS helps visually create and seamlessly manage content on any tech stack and build and manage headless storefronts. With Builder.io anyone can create lightning-fast landing pages by a simple drag and drop to build, edit and AB test pages. Know more about how your digital team can benefit from Builder.io here.
Optimized store pages and landing pages are key to driving rich personalized experiences. Easily publish high speed download pages and publish to your store with a single click. Some of the best brands such as Everlane, Chubbies, Harry’s, AloYoga, Rentacrate, AirUp, PetLabCo. rely on builder.io to create highly personalized storefronts that convert visitors to happy customers and superfans !
Builder.io allows non-technical teams to create rich, on brand experiences that seamlessly integrate with the brands personality and positioning. Responsive across all screens it helps create stunning experiences, optimized for SEO, and tells your product story in the most expressive way.
16. Shogun:
Shogun helps create beautifully optimized ecommerce pages using a simple drag and drop builder. It has a robust library of elements that increases conversions by boosting page performance due to lazy loading and image optimisation.
Shogun also allows you to monitor your site metrics such as bounce rates, add to cart, number of sessions and form submissions via a detailed analytics dashboard. Leading brands such as MVMT, Chubbies, Leesa, Beardbrand, K-Swiss that use Shogun tools daily. One of the ace landing page martech stack platforms that aid beautifully optimized landing pages that help you amplify your brand.
17. Tapcart:
We know the power of mobile apps for ecommerce. With 91% of all traffic coming from the mobile device and a 2.3X higher conversion rate on a mobile app vs mobile web, the power of launching a mobile app for your Shopify storefront is a no brainer. Tapcart is a shining martech stack player in your arsenal to reduce customer acquisition costs and lower churn rates. Tapcart has driven 4.2 BN+ in sales for the world’s fastest growing DTC brands.
Some of the key features of Tapcart are a no-code builder, push notifications, one-click checkout, abandoned cart recovery, optimized store search capability, product reviews, free gifts, customer accounts and branded content. With a mobile app, you get the advantage of going live in less than two weeks in the app store.
Installing Tapcart for many DTC brands has resulted in a 40% increase in conversion rate and 90% open rate of push notifications that are absolutely free!
18. Elevar:
Elevar Post iOS 15, we know that browsers are no longer sending accurate data back to ad or data management platforms. As a DTC business one wants to have the best shot at getting any data to Meta, Snap, Quantcast or Google, Elevar tag management helps marketers and Shopify DTC owners to drive accurate conversion tracking. This would help 100% of your conversions get tracked and delivered to Facebook, TikTok, Google Ads, 40+ channels with Elevar’s server-side tracking.
19. Northbeam:
If you’re running paid media on multiple channels, maybe you have retail in place or you even sell on Amazon, and more then you need to be using an attribution platform Northbeam. They’ve been at it the longest, and their tech is the most developed. If you wondered how brands like Hexclad, Ridge wallet, Jones Road Beauty, and others continued to scale media buying after losing signals from iOS 14, it was thanks to the tech at Northbeam. Northbeam is one of the most trusted martech stack attribution platforms by the world’s best DTC entrepreneurs like Nik Sharma and Ronak Shah.
20. PostPilot:
It may seem to many that direct mail is dead or a strategy of old school marketing, but surprisingly it has made a comeback with proven success. This direct mail marketing martech stack is one of the proven ways brands are achieving both reduced acquisition cost and improving retention more recently.
Fierce competition coupled with accelerating customer acquisition costs, jacked up CPCs and iOS updates are a reality. For DTC brands to survive, ecommerce businesses need to drive profits, higher conversions and repeat purchases.
PostPilot is proven to create stronger relationships with your brand and keep your customers coming back again and again. Handwritten catalogues and postcards build a personalized experience for the brand that delivers a highly engaging, premium and unforgettable experience for the brand.
PostPilot is the new arsenal to combat constantly rising customer acquisition costs to stay top of mind with our customers and increase LTV. A martech stack addition that will never fail to amaze you!
Here are some reasons why DTC brands increasingly love direct mail marketing with PostPilot – less competition, cheaper than AdWords or facebook with an extremely high ROI, besides its super easy to create postcard marketing campaigns leveraging your existing Klaviyo, MailChimp or facebook campaigns to mailers.
PostPilot helps in winback and engage with unreachable customers, acquire high AOV customers, generate more repeat customers and keep them coming back. Read about how DTC stores have utilized PostPilot to scale their revenue and retention strategies here
How does one think of setting up the Martech Stack?
This really depends on which stage of maturity your ecommerce store is at and is really upto you. A 1-5M+ store perhaps needs to focus on getting its ecommerce store building fundamentals right and in general focus on the most critical must have elements first that drive retention such as customer service, review management, logistics management, metrics and measurement, conversion rate optimisation and search engine optimisation for store discoverability and traffic.
Outside of this, these stores could begin to focus on other elements of the core tech stack, focusing on retention marketing efforts such as email marketing, SMS marketing, direct mail marketing, cross-sells and upsells to minimize cart abandonment and get to a healthy first-time purchase rate, repeat purchase rates and AOV with the goal to increase 60-90-day LTV and cash flow.
A good tip when choosing an app or a martech stack is to have a clear goal and purpose as well as KPIs and the ROI you are looking to achieve. Second, be sure that you are measuring what matters and know the attribution method and window for each tool you use. If the tool you use has a 30-day attribution window, conversions will always look inflated and hence it will appear that it generates a massive ROI.
Finally, all of these tools in your martech stack require an accurate setup process and support to ensure you are successful in your ecommerce journey. Considering these tools are launched – it will not mean anything unless you integrate this tightly with your core ecommerce strategy and operations, include it in your marketing materials and streamline the end-to-end customer journey. That’s why you hire folks at Smarte Digital!
Check out the services we offer.
