D2C

GROWTH
BLUEPRINT

AN ACTIONABLE BLUEPRINT TO
EFFICIENTLY SCALE TO 10,000
ORDERS A MONTH, WITHIN A
YEAR OF STARTING UP

ROHIT UTTAMCHANDANI
Copyright © 2023 by Rohit Uttamchandani.

All Rights Reserved.

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TABLE OF

CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION:. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

PART I: THE NON-NEGOTIABLES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

CHAPTER 1: PRODUCT EFFICACY AND INNOVATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12-24

CHAPTER 2: CUSTOMER SERVICE: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25-30

PART II: THE FUNDAMENTALS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

INTRODUCTION TO PART II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
CHAPTER 3: UNIT ECONOMICS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33-41

CHAPTER 4: AUDIENCE INSIGHTS AND SEGMENTATION. . . . . . . . . . . . . 42-41

CHAPTER 5: BRAND AND PRODUCT COMMUNICATION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52-61

CHAPTER 6: YOUR ONLINE STORE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62-68

CHAPTER 7: SUPPLY CHAIN AND DELIVERY ECOSYSTEM. . . . . . . . . . . . 69-79

CHAPTER 8: PLANNING AND BUDGETING. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80-86

PART III: GROWTH LEVERS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87

INTRODUCTION TO PART III . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
CHAPTER 9: PERFORMANCE MARKETING. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89-119

CHAPTER 10: BRAND AND COMMUNITY BUILDING. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120-146

CHAPTER 11: SCALING AVERAGE ORDER VALUE (AOV) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147-153

CHAPTER 12: OPTIMISING STORE CONVERSION RATES. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154-165

CHAPTER 13: SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION (SEO) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166-175

 CHAPTER 14: RETENTION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176-197

CHAPTER 15: MARKETPLACES GROWTH. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198-230

CHAPTER 16: DATA INFRASTRUCTURE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231-241

CHAPTER 17: OFFLINE EXPANSION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242-247

CHAPTER 18: TALENT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 248-255

BONUS CHAPTER: COMMON MISTAKES EARLY-STAGE

D2C FOUNDERS MAKE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 256-265
CLOSING THOUGHTS/CONCLUSION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 266

4 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

INTRODUCTION

The number of new Direct to Consumer (D2C)

brands launched has grown exponentially over
the last few years. The ease of doing business,
accessibility to cloud infrastructure, and of
course, the game-changer—the internet—have
allowed enterprising folks to build their brands
and sell to a wide audience, irrespective of
geography.

There is a lot that goes into building a D2C brand

from the ground up and not all founders or
prospective founders may have prior experience
in this space. I have seen a lot of D2C founders,
particularly at an early stage, making quite a few
mistakes and missing out on key things they
should be doing, resulting in opportunity loss
and slower growth.
This blueprint has been put together to help
early-stage D2C founders and teams avoid these
common mistakes, simplify their growth journey
and show them the path and the actions they
need to take, to efficiently scale their business.

I have spent the last few years advising multiple

D2C brands on scaling up and often get
approached by quite a few brands to consult
with them. Since I only take on selected ones,
I wanted to find another way to help and advise
early-stage D2C brands at scale. That’s when the
idea of creating this blueprint was born.

This blueprint is a productised version of me! It

contains all the key advice that I have personally
given to early-stage D2C brands on how they can
scale. Though the consulting engagements are a
lot more intensive, involving strategically guiding
the brand team through implementing all the
actions mentioned in the blueprint, this book
comes close. It will help those getting started in
the D2C business to push the right buttons and
accelerate business growth instead of spending
time and energy figuring out what to do.

A good chunk of what you read in this blueprint

may come across as absolute fundamentals, but
whether you like it or not, that’s what works.
Remember, fundamentals and first principles
rarely change, and if at all they do, they change
very slowly. And as Jeff Bezos has said, “…focus
on things that do not change”. Working on
fundamentals and getting them right is a much
better approach than always looking for the newest
shiny object in sales and marketing to go after.

Since each chapter in this blueprint could be a

book in itself, we cannot cover everything in its
entirety. The chapters will guide you on how to
approach an area, what are the key things to
implement, what are the important aspects to
keep in mind and what are the best practices
to follow. There are also useful reference guides
shared in each chapter if you want to explore
those areas on a deeper level.
 How to get the best out of this blueprint?
Remember, this is not a “book”. It’s a blueprint. It’s a
roadmap. To guide you to do the right things.

There is zero random gyaan, only clear actionable items.

Each chapter is filled with things you can implement to

grow your D2C brand, and there is also a summary of key
action items included at the end of each chapter.

The majority of the actions will work for most early-stage

D2C brands (<10,000 overall orders per month (D2C +
­Marketplaces) or less than Rs. one crore overall revenue
per month). However, there are always exceptions to
everything and there could be cases where your brand
could be an exception for a particular concept or action
and it may not work for you.

Remember, you are playing the long game! Building a

large D2C brand takes time and consistent effort. It might
take at least a couple of years if not more, for most brands
to become operationally profitable while continuing to
grow.

Building a successful brand is a wonderful and extremely

fulfilling journey. Wish you all the best for it!

ROHIT UTTAMCHANDANI

8 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rohit Uttamchandani is the

founder of Tacheon, a growth
strategy consulting firm. He
has helped multiple brands
across various sectors craft their
digital strategies, scale their
online presence, and leverage digital media and
technology to achieve their business goals.

He has been recognised as one of the 100

Smartest Digital Marketing Leaders 2020 by
the World Digital Marketing Congress and has
been featured in the exchange4media Digital 40
Under 40 list in 2021.

Owing to his extensive experience and his

passion for speaking and educating, he has
been invited to speak at prestigious conferences
including those hosted by the Confederation
of Indian Industry, has been quoted in The
Economic Times and The Hindu and has also
been featured twice in talks on NDTV.

In the D2C and e-commerce space, he has

played the role of a fractional CMO/CGO at
multiple brands and helped them scale. This
blueprint contains all the key advice he has
personally given early-stage D2C brands on how
they can efficiently accelerate their growth.

Connect with Rohit on LinkedIn

 PART I:

THE
NON-NEGOTIABLES

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 11

 C H A PT E R 1 :

PRODUCT EFFICACY
AND INNOVATION
Without a product that customers love, everything that fol-
lows this blueprint will fail.

STOP, READ THE ABOVE LINE ONCE

AGAIN AND THEN ASK YOURSELF THESE
QUESTIONS:

Is your product the best solution for the customer need

it is trying to fill?

Do they love your product so much that they would

think at least a few times before considering switching
from it?

If you haven’t got your product right, this would be the first
thing you want to fix, before spending money on driving
customer acquisition.

You might have the best performance marketing agency or

team on board and may be able to acquire a good number
of customers, but if they don’t come back, your business will
never take off.

12 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

SO, HOW DO YOU KNOW YOU HAVE A
PRODUCT THAT CUSTOMERS LOVE?
The below two metrics will answer this question for you:

1. Customer Feedback Quality

You have a steady flow of organic (unsolicited and
un-incentivised) feedback and reviews from customers
on how the product has worked for them, how it has
helped them achieve their goals or how it has changed
their lives for the better.
You should have a regular flow of this feedback across
all feedback channels such as - website reviews, Ama-
zon reviews, social media comments and Facebook/In-
stagram Direct Messages (DMs).

2. Repeat Purchase Rate

You have a good repeat purchase rate (called Returning
Customer Rate in Shopify), which measures the sticki-
ness of your customer pool.
The number will vary from product to product and in-
dustry to industry, but generally speaking, if you have a
monthly repeat purchase rate of about 20% to 30% while
continuing to scale new customer acquisition, you are
in good stead.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 13

 A STRONG PRODUCT HAS A DIRECT IMPACT
ON PROFITABILITY

For any D2C business to be profitable at some point,

your Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) or Lifetime Value
(LTV) needs to be a certain multiple of your Customer
Acquisition Cost (CAC).

This multiple will vary from business to business and indus-

try to industry depending on your production and other
costs but generally an LTV to CAC ratio of anywhere between
three to five times is what would help you drive sustainable
growth. We will discuss how to calculate LTV and CAC in de-
tail in the chapter on “Unit Economics”.

The only way you can achieve your target LTV/CAC multiple
and profitability is if you have customers coming back to
buy your product, in the following two key ways:

1. Brand and Product Love

The love for your brand/product and the quality of the
purchase experience brings customers back for another
purchase. This will only happen if your product is really
good, which is why this first chapter on product efficacy
is of prime importance.

14 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

2. Retention Marketing
Retention marketing refers to simple and cost-effective
retention nudges through email/WhatsApp communi-
cation to remind your customers to return to your store
and reorder the product.

For now, let’s elaborate on the first point on improving prod-

uct efficacy to create products customers will love. We will
discuss Retention Marketing in the chapter on “Retention”.

Note: As we go along, you will find multiple terms and ab-

breviations like Repeat Purchase Rate, CAC, LTV, AOV, ROAS,
CPA, CPM, CPC etc. For those of you want a primer on these
terms, please refer to the “Key D2C Terms and Abbreviations
Explained” guide that we have put together.

SO, HOW DO YOU CONSTANTLY IMPROVE

YOUR PRODUCT EFFICACY?
There are various ways in which you can get customer feed-
back on your product and use that for improving product
efficacy:

1. Speak to as many customers as possible

It is important to understand what your customers like
about your product and what they don’t. Trust me, hear-
ing it from the horse’s mouth is better than anything
else you can get, especially when a product has just
been launched. One of the biggest mistakes early-stage
founders make is not speaking to customers enough.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 15

 Note: Please keep in mind that customer feedback does
not apply to friends and family for the following reasons:
(i) they might not be the true target audience for your
product, and (ii) as they might not want to hurt your
feelings, they will not tell you the true problems with
your product.
Customer feedback also does not apply to those to
whom you gave a free sample. A lot of people who have
gotten something for free will also not give the most
honest feedback.

Honest feedback will come from those who don’t know

you and who have paid to purchase your product.

So, it is important to make sure that you speak to cus-

tomers who have bought your product. Ideally, all key
team members should be speaking to at least one or
two customers a week and recording all responses in
a shared Google Sheet. You can assign someone from
the team to summarise the learnings from these cus-
tomer interactions every week or fortnight. These learn-
ings should then be shared and discussed with all rel-
evant teams, including the Product Team, R&D team,
and Marketing team.

Here is a list of a few questions that you can ask your

customers when you speak to them:

How has your experience been with <brand name> so

far?

What do you like the most about <brand> products?

16 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

 Is there anything in the products that you would like us
to improve?

Anything that we could do better as a brand overall?

What are the products that you use from other brands
that you would like us to launch too?

Remember, these are feedback calls, not sales calls. So,

please ensure you do not even attempt to sell anything
during these calls. Just thank the customers for their
time and for sharing valuable feedback with you.

2. Pay attention to customer reviews

Look at customer reviews and understand the good and
the bad of the product. If you have a large number of
reviews to go through, tools like Appbot can help make
the process more efficient.

3. Read customer support messages

Scour through your customer support messages across
all platforms (Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp and
email) and look for common problems, if any, that cus-
tomers are facing with the product.

4. Customer surveys
Use customer surveys to identify any product pain points
and also possible new product ideas (Google Forms are
wonderful for quick and easy surveys. For surveys where
you need advanced features and customization, you
can use tools like SurveyMonkey or TypeForm.)

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 17

 Sometimes, you may not be able to fix a product, or the cost
of fixing the product may not make sense. In this case, it
might make sense to discontinue that particular product
and focus on new product development.

WHY YOU SHOULD CONSTANTLY INVEST

IN PRODUCT INNOVATION (NEW PRODUCT
DEVELOPMENT)
For a D2C business to succeed, New Product Development
(NPD) is another non-negotiable aspect.
So, why are constant product research, innovation and de-
velopment so important?

Having more product options for consumers helps improve

the key metrics for a D2C brand, listed below:

1. More product options improve the AOV and thereby

the ROAS
If a customer has multiple products to shop in one or-
der, it will result in an increased Average Order Value
(AOV). Since you are paying a certain amount to acquire
the customer anyway, an increase in the customer’s or-
der value will directly result in an increased Return On
your Ad Spend (ROAS).
For those of you who are not familiar with ROAS, it is
a key advertising metric to help check the efficiency of
your ad campaigns. It is calculated by dividing the reve-
nue generated from your ad campaigns by the amount
of money invested in them. For more information on this

18 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

 and other terms, please refer to the “Key D2C Terms and
Abbreviations Explained” guide on the Resources page.

2. More product options improve purchase frequency

Once a customer buys a product from your store, they
will only return either when they have used up the prod-
uct or if they want to buy another product. The lesser
the number of products in your store, the lesser their
chances of retuning more frequently.
On the other hand, the more products you have, the
more frequently they will have the need to come back
and make a purchase.
With a large portfolio of efficacious products that cus-
tomers love, you will have them coming back to you
many times over resulting in a higher LTV, higher LTV/
CAC ratio and a quicker road to profitability.

3. More product options increase the opportunities to

cross-sell and upsell
The larger the product portfolio, the higher chances
you have of being able to cross-sell and upsell, which
will help both in improving AOV as well as the repeat
purchase rate.

DATA SOURCES THAT YOU CAN USE TO

GENERATE NEW PRODUCT IDEAS
Here are some data sources you can leverage to help your
R&D team build products that either have strong demand
or are expected to have strong demand in the near future.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 19

 1. Google Keyword Planner data
Google Keyword Planner is one of the most underrat-
ed and underleveraged free (almost) tools for keyword
research. It is a treasure trove of data that can be used
in multiple use cases, from market research to product
ideas to marketing.
Researching what consumers are searching for on Goo-
gle, along with the volume (number) of those searches
can help you gain tremendous insight into the follow-
ing aspects of the R&D related to the new product:

I
s the consumer search interest in a product rising,
falling, or flat over the last few years?

What features in a product are most popular?

W
 hat new variants of a product are consumers
looking for?

Does a product have seasonality?

Google Keyword Planner data can help you answer these

questions and identify products that you can consider
adding to your portfolio.

2. Amazon Product Research Tools

Apart from Google data, Amazon is another treasure
trove of information on what products are consumers
searching for and purchasing the most.

20 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

 Tools like Jungle Scout Opportunity Finder and Helium
10’s Product Research suite are very effective for discov-
ering new product opportunities.

3. Your website search report

Look for queries that users typed in the search box on
your website. Check if there are multiple searches for
any products that you don’t have yet.
If you are using Shopify, this data is readily available in
the Reports section. Just search for the report named,
Top online store searches with no results (This report is
not available in the Basic Shopify plan).
Use data from this report to look for popular products
that you don’t have yet and can consider developing.

4. Ask your customers directly and through surveys

Speaking to and surveying your customers is an excel-
lent way to understand the products they would love to
have you create for them. When you speak to customers
(and you should be doing this often to ensure you know
the pulse of your audience), you could understand what
other products in your segment they use and what im-
provements to the products they would like.
You can also send out incentivised surveys (a discount/
free gift, etc. on completion of the survey) to your exist-
ing customer base through email and WhatsApp to get
an insight into this.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 21

 CREATING PRODUCT ASSORTMENTS:
MAXIMISING YOUR EXISTING PRODUCTS
While you are on your journey to improve the existing prod-
uct range and innovate on new ones, you can maximise the
current set of products by creating assortments like com-
bos, multi-packs and gift packs with them.

How do product assortments help?

1. A larger share of voice on marketplaces

When a customer searches for a query related to your
product name on Amazon, if you have only one product
that satisfies that query, you will have at best only one
organic and paid listing on the page.
Now, think of the page as a supermarket shelf, where a
customer is looking for your product. The shelf has only
a few of your products and the rest of the shelf is filled
with products from other brands. This results in a lower
share of voice for your brand and increases the chances
of you losing your customer to a competitor brand.
When you have multi-packs (a pack of two, three, etc.),
this will give you additional product options which you
can show up for in the listings and improve your visibil-
ity on the shelf.

2. Increased AOV
With combos and multi-packs, which are of a higher
value than your single packs, you can position them as
value packs with larger discounts to make them more

22 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

 attractive. This would help increase the AOV and hence
the ROAS as well.

Use the various bundling strategies below, to help you

increase your product SKUs (Stock-Keeping Units):

1. Combos
Look at all products that you have and see which ones
can be combined together to make combo packs. Make
as many relevant combo pack listings as possible.

2. Multi-packs
Depending on the price of your single pack, create packs
of two, three, or four accordingly and position these as
value packs as well.

3. Gift packs
Would any of your product combos make a great gift?
If yes, then give your combo an attractive gift box pack-
aging and position it as a gift pack. This will help you tap
into audiences looking for items to gift their friends and
family and will help increase AOV as well.

KEY ACTION ITEMS SUMMARY

1. Keep track of unsolicited and un-incentivised consumer
comments and reviews that you are generating. Review
these at least once a month with your team. This will
help you understand if your product is satisfying cus-
tomer needs.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 23

 2. Track your repeat purchase rate month-on-month. En-
sure you are able to maintain or ideally increase this
number every month, even as you scale customer ac-
quisition.
3. Speak to at least a few customers every week. This is the
best feedback on brand, product and new product de-
velopment that you will ever get.
4. Do a deep dive into all your customer reviews across
platforms at least once a month. Draw insights and use
them to improve products, design new products and
improve marketing communication.
5. Ensure constant focus on new product development.
This is key to scaling your brand.
6. Create product assortments, such as combos, multi-
packs and gift packs with your existing products. This
will help increase your share of voice (SOV) on market-
places and will also help increase your Average Order
Value (AOV).

24 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

C H A PT E R 2 :

CUSTOMER SERVICE

Customer service is one of the most crucial yet one

of the most underrated functions in a D2C business.

Customers who have a great experience with your brand

will not only become brand loyalists but can also become
brand advocates.

On the other hand, customers with a negative experience

might never come back or even worse, might turn detrac-
tors, telling their friends and family to stay away from your
brand as well.

The growth of the internet and e-Commerce has changed

customers’ expectations of customer service. A decade or
so ago, when you purchased a product from a brand, there
were very limited ways for customers to reach out to brands
for queries or complaints. And where there were ways, they
were quite convoluted.

Today, customers expect brands to be approachable, listen

to them, answer questions and address any issues.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 25

 You might have a great product, but if that is not combined
with excellent customer service, you will see both a drop in
your conversion rates as well as a drop in your repeat pur-
chase rates; these can result in a strong negative business
impact.

Apart from just solving customer queries, having a strong

customer support team can also help you build a strong rev-
enue channel. A lot of customers may be sitting on the fence
because unlike in the offline world where there is a sales-
person in the store to support you with all the queries and
doubts you have about the product, in the online world, all
the customer has is a page on the website with all the infor-
mation. Having someone accessible to who they can speak,
will help you improve the conversion rate on your online
store and maximise your revenue from your website traffic.

HOW DO YOU GET STARTED WITH

CUSTOMER SERVICE?
For the first few months after you have gotten started or un-
til you hit about 300 orders a month on your website, one of
the founders must handle customer support messages and
calls themselves.

I know a founder has a hundred other things to do and take

care of. Should we add customer support to that list as well?
The answer to that is a resounding yes! And in fact, custom-
er support as a priority should be fairly high up on the list.

26 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

Being close to your customer as a founder will give you a
great grasp on the following:
1. Product feedback, straight from the horse’s mouth
2. Customer pain points that could trigger ideas for new
product development
3. Any other issues in the customer journey from the or-
der placement to unboxing
4. Insights that you can use to improve all customer com-
munication—from product pages to marketing

HANDLING CUSTOMER SERVICE AT SCALE

As the business scales, you as a founder will not be able to
handle customer support yourself (though it is important to
keep track of this function very closely).

Once you have got beyond about 300 orders a month on

your website, you will need to have the below in place:

1. A WhatsApp chatbot:
This will help answer the most common queries that
people have such as Product FAQs and order delivery
status.
Multiple WhatsApp tools can help you with this, with
Wati, Zoko and Quickreply being amongst the best.

2. A customer support team

You will need to start by hiring one or two people, to
begin with, who would be dedicated to the customer
support role. This will not only help elevate the custom-

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 27

 er experience but will also help convert people who
wanted to speak to someone before purchasing, hence
opening up another revenue channel for the business.
This team is at the centre of your customer interac-
tions and is the face of your brand that the customer
sees. Setting up this team right and investing in their
training is an important part of driving customer loyalty
and advocacy. In the chapter on “Talent”, towards the
latter half of this blueprint, there is a brief description
of the customer support role and how you can build
this team.

3. A centralised customer support inbox and ticketing

system
As you scale beyond 3,000-4,000 orders a month on
your website, you will need to add more processes to
ensure you are able to maintain support quality at scale.
One of the first things to do is to unify all your support
channels, such as email, WhatsApp, phone, social plat-
form comments and social platform inboxes, on one
platform.
And the other would be to add a ticketing system that
would assign support tickets to various team members
and track the progress accordingly.
Customer Service Software like Freshdesk or Zoho Desk
can help you accomplish both of the above points.

28 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

CUSTOMER SUPPORT KPIS YOU MUST TRACK
How do you know your customer support team is doing a
great job? Here are KPIs that will help you track this:

1. Average Time to First Response (TTFR)

Aim for a TTFR of one working hour. It may be difficult
in the early stages of a brand, but trust me, it will go a
long way in getting people to trust you and know that if
any problem does come about, there is someone at the
brand to get it resolved.

2. Average Time to Resolution

This will vary depending on the type of problem the
customer is facing. Issues like product returns take time
to completely resolve and issue a refund while other is-
sues can be resolved faster. Ideally, all customer queries
should be resolved (not just responded to) within one
working day. You should track the median time to res-
olution and work on improving this number month on
month.

3. Customer Support Net Promoter Score (NPS)

While the team can work towards responding and re-
solving queries quickly, what truly matters is the cus-
tomer’s experience with the interaction and resolution
process. Did they get a satisfactory, or even better, de-
lightful support and resolution experience?
The best way to measure the quality of customer sup-
port interactions is to automatically trigger a quick NPS

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 29

 customer survey on WhatsApp/email immediately after
the query is resolved. This should be tracked and im-
proved month on month as well. If you are not familiar
with NPS and how it works, here is a quick primer to get
you up to speed.

KEY ACTION ITEMS SUMMARY

1. If you are the founder of a D2C brand with less than 300
orders a month on your website, either you or anoth-
er co-founder should ideally handle customer support
queries directly.
2. Set up a WhatsApp chatbot to quickly answer the most
common queries that people have like Product FAQs
and order delivery status.
3. Once you have got past about 300 orders a month on
your website, set up a customer support team.
4. As you scale beyond 3,000-4,000 orders a month on
your website, set up a centralised customer support in-
box and ticketing system.
5. The customer support function represents the face and
voice of your brand. So, it is important to keep a close
eye on its effectiveness.
6. Track key KPIs, such as time to first response, time to res-
olution and customer support NPS month-on-month.

30 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

 PART II:

THE FUNDAMENTALS
INTRODUCTION

I have seen multiple D2C founders making the

mistake of jumping into and scaling customer
acquisition, without getting some of the key
fundamentals in place, that would drive the best
results from marketing activities and would lay
a strong foundation for rapid growth.

Please ensure you have all the fundamentals in

this section clearly in place before you proceed
to the growth levers in Part III of this blueprint.

For brands that have already started out without

having at least 90% of these fundamentals
in place, this would be a good time to take
a step back and ensure you strengthen your
foundation to build a skyscraper business.
C H A PT E R 3 :

UNIT ECONOMICS

WHILE BUILDING A D2C BRAND, THERE ARE

SOME EXTREMELY IMPORTANT QUESTIONS
THAT YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO ANSWER:

How much can you afford to spend to acquire a cus-

tomer? In other words, what should your target CAC or
target ROAS be?

How many months/years would it take your business to

be operationally profitable, while continuing to grow at
a certain pace?

What are the various cost optimisations that will help

you attain profitability quicker?

Which are your most profitable products?

To answer the above questions (which I have found a lot of

early-stage D2C brand teams struggle to answer), you will
need to have a strong grasp of your unit economics.

WHAT IS UNIT ECONOMICS

Unit economics is the process of calculating the net profit
that you will earn on either selling one unit or acquiring one
customer.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 33

 By understanding and optimising your unit economics,
you can maximise the profitability of your business
and grow it more efficiently.

HOW DO YOU CALCULATE UNIT ECONOMICS

FOR A D2C BRAND?
There are two methods to work out your unit economics de-
pending on how you consider the unit:

A unit as a single product sold: Measured by Contribu-

tion Margin

A unit as a single customer: Measured by LTV/CAC ratio

Both models work fine in different ways for a D2C business.

I would suggest using both models for better clarity and dif-
ferent insights that each model will help uncover.

UNIT ECONOMICS METHOD 1:

Single Product Sold - Calculate your Contribution
Margin (CM)
Contribution Margin (CM) is a metric that tells you how
much revenue you have left over after deducting all the
variable costs that go into selling each product. This rev-
enue will then be used to cover all your fixed costs and
leave a profit for your business.

34 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

How do you calculate the contribution margin?
The Contribution Margin is calculated as Price per unit mi-
nus Total Variable Cost per unit

The Price per unit here is the MRP for your product unit.

The Total Variable Costs for a D2C business would typically

include all of the below:

Discounts

Taxes

Raw material cost and packaging cost

Payment gateway charges (own website only)

Website transaction costs (own website only, where web-

site platforms like Shopify have a cost per transaction)

Marketplace commissions (third-party marketplaces only)

Warehousing costs (own website and marketplaces)

Logistics costs, such as shipping costs and COD fees (own

website only, as long as order fulfilment is taken care of
by the marketplace such as Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA))

Return costs

Customer Acquisition Cost

Any other variable costs such as revenue-linked com-

missions, etc.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 35

 Since you will most likely be selling your product unit on
your website as well as multiple marketplaces, doing the
unit economics calculation at a “unit” level for each prod-
uct is fairly complex. Hence, the quicker and easier way is to
take the above costs for the business overall, for a month,
and calculate the contribution margin.

The below table covers the costs and methodology to help

you calculate your CM at a business level:

Unit Economics - Business Level

Head Monthly Cost
1 Gross Revenue - GMV - (Website + Marketplace) 10,00,000
2 Discount 5,0000
3 Revenue post-discount [1 minus 2] 9,50,000
4 GST 1,44,915
5 Net Revenue [3 minus 4] 8,05,085

6 Raw Material Cost and Packaging Cost 225424

7 Gross Margin (GM) 579661
8 GM1 % 72%

9 Payment Gateway charges 9500

10 Website Transaction costs (Shopify) 7125
11 Marketplaces Commissions 142500
12 Warehousing cost 23750
13 Logistics costs - Shipping costs and COD fees 47500
14 Return Costs 9500
15 Gross Margin 2 (GM2) 339786
16 GM2% 42%

17 Marketing Media Spends and other customer acquisition costs 237500

18 Contribution Margin (CM) 102286
19 CM% 13%

You could also access this table as a Google Sheets template

which you would have received along with the ­purchase of

36 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

this blueprint. You can use the template to help you calcu-
late your contribution margin at a business level month on
month.

Computing and tracking your unit economics at a busi-

ness level will help you with the below insights:

Know your target media spend to either have a positive

contribution margin for the business or to drive a cer-
tain profit number

When you subtract the fixed cost from your contribu-

tion margin, you will know how much more monthly
revenue your business needs to generate to breakeven

When you divide the fixed cost by CM, you will know
how many times more orders you will need to be profit-
able. For example, if your CM for the month is Rs. 1,000
and your fixed costs are Rs. 50,000, then you will need
50 times more orders than your current number, to be
profitable with the current variable costs

Break down the various costs involved and understand

the levers your business has, to maintain profitability
and drive growth

Apart from calculating the CM at a business level, you might

also want to do it for some or all of your products. Since the
product will most likely be sold both on your own site as well
as on marketplaces, you will need to split the website-only
and marketplace-only costs proportionately.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 37

 For example, let’s say your payment gateway charges are 2%
of your sales. For a product selling at say Rs. 1,000, this would
be Rs. 20. If only 40% of your product sales come from your
website, then this cost would be only 40% of Rs. 20, which
is Rs. 8. You would follow the same methodology for all the
other costs, depending on whether they are marketplace
only/website only or for both.

The below table covers the costs and methodology to help

you calculate your CM at a business level:

Unit Economics - Product Level

Head Per Unit Cost
1 Gross Revenue - MRP 800
2 Discount 80
3 Revenue post-discount [1 minus 2] 720
4 GST 110
5 Net Revenue [3 minus 4] 610

6 Raw Material Cost and Packaging Cost 116

7 Gross Margin (GM) 494
8 GM1 % 81%

9 Payment Gateway charges 10.1

10 Website Transaction costs (Shopify) 7.6
11 Marketplaces Commissions 64.8
12 Warehousing cost 18.0
13 Logistics costs - Shipping costs and COD fees 21.6
14 Return Costs 2.2
15 Gross Margin 2 (GM2) 370
16 GM2% 61%

17 Marketing Media Spends 288

18 Contribution Margin (CM) 82
19 CM% 13%

38 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

You could also access this table as a Google Sheets tem-
plate which you would have received along with the pur-
chase of this blueprint. The template will help you calculate
your contribution margin for a specific product.

Analysing the contribution margin at a product level will help

you figure out:

which products are the most profitable and help you

decide whether you should keep them or discontinue
them (You would take other factors into account here
as well such as whether the product, though not prof-
itable standalone, is helping attract audiences to your
site and acquire customers who buy other products as
well)

whether a product should be considered for a price in-

crease or a discount reduction

A caveat
There is no absolute standard on what components should
be included in GM1, GM2, or CM. Some companies, for ex-
ample, might not include certain costs as variable costs and
consider them fixed costs instead. For example, discounts
can be both one-time as well as ongoing. A one-time dis-
count would be a fixed cost and could be considered the
marketing cost of acquiring a customer. Some companies
would not include this in their CM calculation.

What is most important to understand here is that you work

with your finance team/consultant and clearly understand

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 39

 the components included in your margin calculations and
once that is defined, ensure this calculation methodology is
kept constant across periods.

UNIT ECONOMICS METHOD 2:

Unit as a single customer - Measure LTV/CAC ratio

The LTV to CAC ratio is another metric to tell you how ef-
ficiently you can acquire customers.
Customer Lifetime Value (LTV or CLV) is the total gross
profit the business makes from a single customer over a
defined period.

LTV (over a pre-defined period (PDP)) = AOV x GM x Average

Purchase Frequency in PDP
AOV - Average Order Value
GM - Gross Margin
CAC (over a pre-defined Period (PDP)) = Total Marketing Cost
in PDP/Total number of customers acquired in PDP

While a lot of companies consider only the advertising me-

dia spend to calculate CAC, it should ideally be calculated
by including all the costs below, in addition to the media
spend:

- Cost of the marketing and sales teams

- Cost of creative assets
- Agency retainers and media commissions
- Any other marketing costs incurred

40 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

The Pre-Defined Period (PDP) here could be anywhere from
six months to a couple of years depending on what the busi-
ness is selling. If you are selling groceries that a customer
might buy four times a month, you might want to choose
a smaller PDP. If you are selling furniture which a customer
might buy only once or twice a year, then you might want to
choose a longer PDP for calculating the LTV/CAC ratio.

What is a good LTV to CAC ratio?

The higher the LTV to CAC ratio the better. How much this
number should exactly be will vary from business to busi-
ness. However, a one-year LTV to CAC ratio of three is what is
generally considered a benchmark.

As someone growing a D2C business, you must track unit

economics and not just revenue and ROAS month on month.
This will help you keep a close watch on the health of your
business and grow it sustainably.

KEY ACTION ITEMS SUMMARY

1. Track the unit economics numbers for your business, at
an overall level, month-on-month.
2. Keep a close watch for various cost optimisations that
you can make to help you attain profitability quicker.
3. Track the unit economics for specific products as well
to know which are your most profitable products.
4. Ensure you are tracking your LTV to CAC ratio every
month.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 41

 C H A PT E R 4 :

AUDIENCE INSIGHTS
AND SEGMENTATION
WHY HAVING A CLEAR DEFINITION AND
UNDERSTANDING OF YOUR AUDIENCE
SEGMENTS IS IMPORTANT
Having a clear understanding of your audience is extremely
important as it helps:

target your ads better, both for performance marketing

as well as brand marketing;

communicate a message to the audience that is tai-

lored to their needs and pain points; and

know how you as a brand can add value to them through

a combination of valuable information and useful prod-
ucts.

Having the right audience insights are key to the success of

your advertising campaigns (which we will cover in a later
chapter in the “Growth Levers” section).

42 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

SO, HOW DO YOU GO ABOUT DEFINING
YOUR AUDIENCE WELL?
1. Start by defining each audience segment that your
brand could sell to.
For example, for a brand selling nut butter, the poten-
tial audience segments for their almond butter product
could be:

Vegans

People trying to lose weight with a keto diet

Health-conscious foodies


Busy professionals looking for quick and healthy
breakfast and snack ideas

2. Next, for each segment, define the below:


Demographics: Age, Gender, Location, Income
Group


Behaviours: What are the specific behaviours that
they exhibit
For example, they may be frequent international
travellers, may be largely iPhone users, holders of
premium credit cards, etc.


What are their challenges and pain points, needs
and wants?
Identify the pain points and needs of the audience
which can be addressed not just by your products

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 43

 but also through content such as blog posts, vid-
eos, infographics, and social media posts (focussed
on driving awareness and education on areas that
are important to your audience). This can help
build a community and connect with the target
audience, establishing the brand as a trusted and
knowledgeable resource in the space.

Audience Definition Example:

For the almond butter segments above, here’s what this would
look like, as an example. Again, this is not an exhaustive audi-
ence segmentation but is meant to give you an idea of how you
could get thinking in the right direction when defining your
audience segments. Always remember, the more detailed in-
sights you have here, the better your targeting and creative
will be, resulting in more efficient marketing campaigns.

1. Vegans
Demographics: Aged 18+, all genders, countrywide, mid
to high-income group
Interests and behaviours:

Vegan (plant-based) diet

Animal lovers

Environmentally-conscious

Some are lactose intolerant

Prefer natural and organic products

44 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

 Look for dairy substitutes for milk, butter and cheese


Interested in vegan food brands, vegan recipes,
plant-based nutrition

Pain points and needs:


Not enough good vegan substitutes for milk, but-
ter and cheese


Lack of vegan food options in restaurants and while
travelling


On the lookout for good vegan protein sources and
dairy-free alternatives


Keen on knowing everything about plant-based
nutrition - foods and recipes

2. People trying to lose weight with a keto diet

Demographics: 18 to 45, all genders, countrywide, mid
to high-income group
Interests and behaviours:

Highly weight-conscious


Always scan calorie and nutrition information on
food products

Use calorie and weight-tracking apps

Prefer low-sugar/sugar-free products

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 45

 Gym-goers,

In-the-market for weight loss fitness plans


Interested and in-the-market for health and fit-
ness-related wearables like smart watches

Pain points and needs:


Difficulty in holding off cravings and sticking to
diet plans

Getting/making food as per the diet plan


Worried about the impact of being over-weight on
other aspects of their health and well-being


Challenges with adapting to die plans and main-
taining discipline in both diet and exercise


On the lookout for keto-friendly recipes, meal ideas
and meal delivery services including frozen keto
meal options

3. Health-conscious foodies
Demographics: 18 to 45, all genders, countrywide, mid
to high-income group
Interests and behaviours:

Conscious about overall health and wellness

Higher than average levels of personal discipline

46 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

 Fitness/yoga enthusiasts

Always on the lookout for healthy eating options

Calorie-conscious

Consume various superfoods


Prefer organic food products and low-sugar/
no-sugar options


Love to keep educating themselves on health and
nutrition

Pain points and needs:

Not all healthy food options are tasty


How to increase discipline levels and not give in to
cravings


While eating out, not all places have healthy food
options


On the lookout for healthy-food recipes, quick and
easy healthy snacks

4. Busy professionals, looking for quick and healthy

breakfast and snack ideas
Demographics: 22 to 55, all genders, countrywide, mid
to high-income group

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 47

 Interests and behaviours:


Lead or work in high-growth startups/are in mid to
senior roles in large companies


Constantly looking to optimise their time and en-
ergy levels


Focus on productivity and use a lot of productivity
apps and trackers

Generally prefer buying premium brands


Prefer foods that help them maintain high energy
levels through long working hours

Pain points and needs:


Difficult to find the right meals that would help
them maintain high-energy levels throughout


Sometimes, foods that solve the above pain point
are either not tasty enough or are time-consuming
to make


On the lookout for healthy and energising in-­
between-meal snacks

48 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

HOW CAN YOU GET TO KNOW MORE ABOUT
YOUR CUSTOMERS?

1. Speak to them
This is a fundamental and very powerful way to under-
stand your audience. It might be time-consuming and
not scalable but as you scale a D2C brand, there will be
certain things that you will need to do, which do not
scale but are extremely powerful.
As discussed in an earlier section, my recommendation
to every founder/team I speak to is to make at least one
or two calls a week to prospects (pre-sales calls) and
likewise to customers (feedback calls).

The information and insights you can get by speaking

to customers/prospects are priceless and can be used
effectively to supercharge your marketing and
product development strategy.

2. Run surveys
Create a survey with key insights that you would want
from your audience and send it to them on WhatsApp/
email, with a discount code/gift upon completion of the
survey.
The completion rate of the survey will depend on brand
love, survey length, the nature of information asked

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 49

 in the survey (too many questions with personal data
cause people to abandon the survey), and the value of
the discount/gift.
As a benchmark, you will see anywhere between two
per cent to eight per cent survey completion rates. So, if
you send it to a customer database of 1,000, most brands
will get anywhere between 20 and 80 responses.

3. In-store research
If you have an offline presence, speaking to customers
who walk into your store and understanding their ob-
jections and preferences is another great way to gain
insight into your audience.

4. Feedback and reviews

Go through all customer feedback and reviews and draw
qualitative insight from them. When you have a large
volume of reviews, tools like Appbot can help make the
process more efficient.

5. Google Analytics and Google Ads audience insights

data
Once you have achieved a reasonable scale of a few thou-
sand customers a month, you can use the audience in-
sights in Google Ads and Analytics to understand what
else is your audience in-market for and what else they
have an affinity for.

50 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

Here are some resources for how this can be done in Google
Ads and Google Analytics.

It is a good practice to maintain this audience

segmentation document in a drive folder and keep
updating it at least every few months.

When you hire a new team member or a new agency, having

this document ready will be easier for them to understand the
brand and get up to speed faster. It will also help them get a
head start and not go back and try to redo analysis and re-
search. All new research they carry out and insights they find
can be added to this document so it gets sharper over time.

KEY ACTION ITEMS SUMMARY

1. Create a document detailing out the audience defini-
tion and segmentation for your brand.
2. Ensure the document is as detailed as possible, with
demographics, behaviours, psychographics, pain points
and needs detailed for each segment.
3. Constantly invest in building a deeper understanding
of your audience.
4. Revisit the document at least every couple of months
and update it with new audience insights that you have
gained.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 51

 C H A PT E R 5 :

BRAND AND PRODUCT

COMMUNICATION

Driving marketing success for a brand is heavily

dependent on getting your messaging right.

Why should people buy from your brand over another? Why
should they buy a certain product? Having clear pointers,
answering questions like these, documented and shared
with all stakeholders—brand managers, PR team and agen-
cy, creative agency, content agency, performance agency
and others—will help them ensure they are communicating
the right things about the brand and building creative and
content that would drive maximum impact.

I have seen brands spending a ton of money on brand and

performance marketing, without investing enough time
and resources to build messaging and creative that would
drive the best ROI on the marketing money spent.

52 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

 You might have razor-sharp campaigns targeting
the right audience, but what’s the point if you
are not saying the right thing to them to make
them believe that your brand and product are
the best solutions for their needs?

If you have not already done this exercise of building a brand

and product communication document, this would be a
good time to pause, set aside some brainstorming time with
your team, and create one.

Here are the most important areas that this document

should cover:

COMMUNICATION TO MAKE PEOPLE

BELIEVE IN YOUR BRAND
For each audience segment that you have, brainstorm and
document the below, to help you and your team create rel-
evant content, creative and messaging for them:

1. Identify their challenges and pain points, needs and wants

You should have already completed this step as part of
your audience segmentation exercise. If not, now would
be a good time to list down the pain points and needs of
your audience which can be addressed not just by your

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 53

 products but also through content focussed on driving
awareness and education.

2. Define how your brand solves the above challenges/

pain points and/or fulfils the above needs/wants


Which of their needs can be addressed by your
brand products and how do they address them


Which of their needs can be addressed by content
and what content topics should you own to add
value to the audience

3. What should your ads communicate to drive the audi-

ence to believe in the brand


What are the “Reasons to Believe” in your brand?
What would convince customers to pick your brand
over other similar brands in the market?


Brainstorm ways in which you can communicate
these reasons clearly and creatively

COMMUNICATION TO MAKE PEOPLE

BELIEVE IN YOUR PRODUCTS

For each product in your portfolio, brainstorm and docu-

ment the below:

1. What problems does the product solve or prevent for

the intended audience?

54 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

 Most of the time, a product could solve more than one
problem. Make a note of all the problems that your prod-
uct solves for your target audience.

2. How does the product solve those problems?

The focus here is on product ingredients/features and
other product aspects.


Does the product have unique ingredients—ingre-
dients that are better quality/purity, etc.?


How do these features/ingredients help solve the
consumer’s problem?


Are there any industry certifications that the prod-
uct has?

3. What are the core benefits of the product for the in-
tended audience?


While features/ingredients describe the key func-
tions or attributes of a product, benefits describe
how these attributes can add value to the custom-
er and make their life easier or better. Therefore, it
is important to clearly define how your product can
help solve your customer’s problem.


Apart from direct benefits, focus on indirect high-
er-order benefits as well

For example, for a diaper rash prevention cream, the direct

benefit would be no diaper rashes on the baby, more com-

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 55

 fort, undisturbed sleep, etc. An example of a higher-order
benefit would be better sleep and peace of mind for the
parent.

4. What differentiates the product from other products in

the market and key competitors?
Clearly define what your product offers that other simi-
lar products in the market do not.

5. What are the key reasons to believe in the product, that

your brand and performance ads must communicate?


Outline the “Reasons to Believe” in the product—
What would convince customers to pick this prod-
uct over other similar products in the market?


Brainstorm ways in which you can communicate
these reasons clearly and creatively

PRODUCT COMMUNICATION DOCUMENT

EXAMPLE

Here’s an example of what the above would look like for an

Almond Butter product:

Target Audience Segments

Vegans

People trying to lose weight with a keto diet

56 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

 Health-conscious foodies

Busy professionals looking for quick and healthy break-

fast and snack ideas

Problems Solved

Alternative to dairy-based butter for vegans

Ideal for keto gluten-free, dairy-free and plant-based di-

ets

Good source of healthy fat for health-conscious foodies

Can be used to make quick pre-workout snacks

Rich plant-based protein source

Product Features

Made from the highest quality almonds

Made with 100% pure Arabica beans sourced from sus-

tainable sources

Protein-rich, fibre rich, rich in Vitamin E and also a source

of HDL cholesterol (good cholesterol)

No added sugar or preservatives

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 57

 Core Benefits for Each Audience Segment

For all audience segments


A good alternative to regular butter for overall
health and well-being

Contains good cholesterol which is heart-friendly
and helps maintain a healthy heart

Rich in Vitamin E, which can help boost the im-
mune system

Contains antioxidants which help lower cholester-
ol levels

For vegans
Great source of plant-based protein for vegans

Alternative to traditional dairy butter which con-
tains milk, especially for those vegans who are lac-
tose intolerant

For people trying to lose weight with a keto diet

Keto-friendly

Keeps you fuller for a longer time thereby reduc-
ing your craving to eat another in-between-meal
snack that could probably be unhealthy

For health-conscious foodies


Healthy breakfast and in-between-meal snack op-
tion

Keeps you fuller for a longer time thereby reduc-
ing your craving to eat another in-between-meal
snack that could probably be unhealthy

58 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

 For busy professionals looking for quick and healthy
breakfast and snack ideas

Can make a quick breakfast by combining it with
toast, oats or smoothies

Can make a quick healthy snack by using it as a dip
for fresh fruits like apples or banana

Easier and quicker alternative to eating over-
night-soaked almonds

Can be blended with water to make instant almond
milk

Differentiation

Made with only one ingredient: -100% almonds

Free from any additives (like added oils) or preservatives

No protein supplements added

No artificial flavours

Reasons to believe

Premium quality ingredients sourced from sustainable

sources

Been making high-quality nut butter for over five years

Product trusted by over 40,000 customers

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 59

 Marketing message example for each segment

For vegans:
“Looking for a good source of plant-based protein and
also for dairy-free butter? Well, then look no further! Try
out our almond butter made from 100% almonds and
nothing else.”

For people trying to lose weight with a keto diet

“Filled with good fat, fibre antioxidants and rich in Vita-
min E, with no added sugar, additives or preservatives.
That’s our almond butter for you—vegan, gluten-free
and keto-friendly. Try it today!”

For health-conscious foodies

“Stay fuller for longer with breakfast and snacks made
with our sugar-free and preservative-free almond butter”

For busy professionals looking for quick and healthy

breakfast and snack ideas
“Looking for healthy and quick breakfast and snack op-
tions? Our nutritious almond butter can be combined
with toasts, oats and smoothies to give you the energy
you need to be the best version of yourself.”

The above is an example of a single product. You would

brainstorm on similar lines for each of your products as well
as for your brand as a whole.

60 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

Use the PowerPoint slide template, which you would have
received along with the purchase of this blueprint, as a ref-
erence to document all these points once you have brain-
stormed with your team.

KEY ACTION ITEMS SUMMARY

1. Brainstorm with your team and create a document that

covers the needs or problems of your target audience,
how your brand solves these and what you should com-
municate to each audience segment to make them be-
lieve that your brand is the best solution for their need.
2. Create a communication document for each product
covering the core benefits of the product and reasons
for the consumer to believe in it.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 61

 C H A PT E R 6 :

YOUR ONLINE STORE

The store is the most basic thing an e-Commerce company
needs.

For those of you getting started, you might be wondering

which platform to choose to set your store up. The most
common ones that you will find top D2C sites using would
be Shopify, Woocomerce or Magento.

Each of these platforms has its pros and cons and honestly
as long as you have the non-negotiables (Part I), the funda-
mentals (Part II) and the growth levers (Part III) of this blue-
print in place, your choice of platform will not make as much
of a difference to your overall growth.

QUICK SIDE NOTE FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO

ARE PLANNING TO LAUNCH A D2C BUSINESS
For those of you who are about to launch a D2C business
and considering picking a platform, I would suggest saving
time on comparing various platforms and just going ahead
with Shopify. You can stick with it for at least a few years de-
pending on your pace of growth and, if required, consider
shifting to a headless CMS or custom CMS at a later point.

62 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

Reasons to pick Shopify as a platform while getting started

Ease of setting up: Shopify is super easy to setup and

gets started even for those with little to no technical
knowledge.

Intuitive user interface: The interface is user-friendly,

making it easy to get acclimatised and manage.

Massive app ecosystem: Shopify’s app ecosystem has

multiple apps to help you easily and quickly add almost
any additional features and functionality that you would
require in your store.

Payment gateway integration: The payment gateway

integration is quite simple.

Hosting and security: Shopify plans cover hosting and

security of your store, so you don’t have to worry about it.

Knowledge base: Shopify has a massive community

and a large knowledge base of resources that can help
you not just get answers to platform questions but also
learn new ways to scale your business.

Customer support: Shopify has 24/7 customer support

to help you get any of your queries resolved as and when
you need it.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 63

 Shopify has some limitations well, with the major ones being:

Limited customisation: All Shopify plans except Shopify

Plus (which is for businesses that have achieved a very
large scale) have limited customisation options for store
design, checkout flow and functionality as compared to
other e-commerce platforms.
Cost of Apps: Though Shopify apps can be of great help
to add all the features and functionality you need, the
best ones also come at a cost, which can add up over
time.

But the pros of Shopify far outweigh the cons, making it a

good option, out of all the currently available options, for
anyone starting out.

E-COMMERCE WEBSITE FUNDAMENTALS

CHECKLIST
Here is a list of fundamental features and optimisations that
every e-commerce website must have. While not all checks
apply to every site, the majority of them are relevant to most
sites.

Basic technical and SEO checks:

On-page SEO

Good site speed across all the product and category

pages. Aim for Google PageSpeed Insights scores of 70+
on mobile and 90+ on desktop

64 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

 Sitemap is submitted for all the product and category
pages
All key images are optimised and have image alt tags
Meta titles and Meta descriptions have been added for
all key pages
Website is mobile-friendly
Robots.txt file is present
Schema markups have been added to all key pages
No broken internal and outbound links

Technical SEO

Review browser compatibility on Chrome, Firefox and

Safari
No 404 errors (Page Not Found errors)
The site has been crawled and indexed
No duplicate content pages on the website

Tech and Marketing

Setup Google Analytics

Setup Google Search Console
Add all marketing pixels (Meta Ads, Google Ads etc.)
The site is secure and uses HTTPS
Setup a heat mapping tool like Hotjar to understand
user behaviour

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 65

 User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) checks:

Home Page

Clean and intuitive navigation menu

Good search functionality to help users quickly find
what they are looking for
All images are optimised for mobile
Clearly call out on offers and promotions, where appli-
cable
Personalised home page for known users

Collections Page

Have filters to help users find the right product quickly

Have options to sort by relevance and price
Good quality product thumbnails
Optimised product titles
Have bestseller tags for top products
Have “Value Pack”, discount highlights or other relevant
tags for combos and multi-packs to help improve AOV

Product Display Page (PDP)

PDP has at least five high-quality product images

Product images to be optimised for readability on mo-
bile
Product images to include at least one or two lifestyle
images (images with people in them with/using the
product)
At least one product video is added

66 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

 The product information section has sufficient visuals
Product benefits to be detailed with a good mix of visu-
als and text
Highlight any offers available, above the fold
Have at least one customer testimonial
Have an FAQ section answering all common questions
on the product
Have reviews and ratings with verified purchases high-
lighted
Have a related product/frequently bought together sec-
tion for upsell/cross-sell

Cart Flow

Clearly call out the minimum cart value for free ship-
ping
Add a “People Also Bought” section for upsell/cross-sell
Make it easy to add discount coupons
Add an exit intent popup

Checkout Flow

Checkout flow is seamless and as frictionless as possi-

ble, with minimum required steps and form fields
All payment methods are available and clear
Where the volume of Cash on Delivery (COD) orders is
high (over 30% of all orders), call out a discount on pre-
paid orders to ensure a higher volume of prepaid orders
as against COD

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 67

 Use the downloadable version of the above checklist
(which you would have received along with the purchase
of this blueprint) to share with your agency or team to help
you check if your website has all the fundamentals covered
from an SEO and UI/UX perspective.

KEY ACTION ITEMS SUMMARY

Work with your team and implement all the relevant points
in the store fundamentals checklist to improve your store
experience.

68 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

C H A PT E R 7:

SUPPLY CHAIN AND

DELIVERY ECOSYSTEM
An efficient supply chain ecosystem forms the core of build-
ing a successful D2C brand.

WHY IS HAVING AN EFFICIENT SUPPLY

CHAIN AND DELIVERY ECOSYSTEM SO
IMPORTANT

An optimised supply chain helps reduce operational

costs and improve overall profitability.

Quicker deliveries offer a better post-purchase expe-

rience for the customer. This helps improve custom-
er retention rates and hence customer lifetime value
(LTV).

Shorter delivery times increase conversion rates as

people are most likely to buy a product with an Estimat-
ed Time of Delivery (ETD) of three days vs an ETD of sev-
en days (with all other factors such as price, etc., being
similar). Improved conversion rates from the same ac-
quired traffic help reduce customer acquisition costs.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 69

 On the other hand, logistics going awry can have a
strong negative impact on your brand reputation as
when customers do not get their orders on time, it
erodes trust, especially for early-stage businesses.

SUPPLY CHAIN BEST PRACTICES FOR

D2C BRANDS

The kind of logistics supply chain you will need will vary from
D2C brand to brand, depending on the type of products
and the markets serviced. For example, perishable products
will need different warehousing and delivery requirements
as compared to non-perishable ones. Likewise, for fragile
products or for products that require to be maintained at
a certain temperature throughout to maintain quality, the
requirements would be different. Brands selling globally will
require global shipping, as compared to brands selling only
locally.

Nuances aside, managing your supply chain involves four

broad areas namely, procurement, warehousing, inventory
management and shipping. Here are some key best prac-
tices to keep in mind for each area:

70 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

PROCUREMENT

Ensure you have reliable suppliers for the procure-

ment of raw materials/white-label manufacturing. This
is extremely important to make sure you have stock on
hand to fulfil demand even in cases where there are un-
planned spikes.

As far as possible, avoid relying on just one supplier as

it may cause problems with inventory management.

Ensure you build seasonality and promotional fluc-

tuations into your procurement planning so that you
don’t run out of stock when it matters most.

Having your supplier located geographically close to

you is an added advantage as this reduces procurement
shipping costs and also raw material shipping times.

WAREHOUSING
Warehousing efficiency is critical to ensure that products
are packed and packaged in the quickest time, with no er-
rors.

Ideally, the time from receiving an order to handing it over

to the courier partner should not take more than 12 hours.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 71

 Here are a couple of key things that will help you improve
your warehousing efficiency:

Ensure you have optimised slotting

The foundation of an efficient warehouse is ensuring that all

products are well-organised in places best suited for them.
In logistics industry parlance, this is called slotting optimis-
ation and is key to

maximising the allocated space;

making sure the right products are picked without er-

rors;

ensuring products are picked and fulfilled in the least

time and

increasing overall warehouse productivity and through-

put.

How to best organise products is based on multiple factors,

with the key ones being order velocity (best-selling prod-
ucts), product affinity (SKUs frequently bought together)
and product size/weight.

Here are a few examples of optimised slotting:

Placing best-selling products in a way that they require

the minimum time to be picked up

Products that are frequently bought together could be

placed adjacently, for better efficiency

72 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

 Heavy products should always be placed on the bot-
tom/lower racks, to reduce the time it would take to pick
them

Warehouse Management System (WMS)

As you scale your operations, you must consider setting up

a Warehouse Management System (WMS).

Adding a WMS will help you optimise your picking pro-

cess, automatically update your inventory based on stock
“inwarded” and “outwarded” (through bar code scanners),
handle return orders and also map SKUs to the right pack-
aging material. It will also help track item movements and
generate warehouse-specific reports.

Warehousing at Scale

You can manage a lot of the above in-house when your scale
is small.

As your scale grows, you will need to deal with larger vol-
umes which will need more and larger warehouses with a
robust Warehouse Management System (WMS). You will
also need regional warehouses to reduce your delivery time
across the country.

To manage all of this at scale, finding a third-party logistics

(3PL) partner like Shiprocket, WareIQ, Shipway or Goswift is
generally the best way forward. A little later in this chapter,
we will cover how you can pick the right partner.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 73

 INVENTORY MANAGEMENT
Managing inventory is another key part of the supply chain
function.
The goal of inventory management is two-fold

You must always have stock to fulfil demand. The last

thing you want is that you have generated good de-
mand through your customer acquisition and growth
strategies but you don’t have products in stock to fulfil
the demand. You would lose a good chunk of this de-
mand to competition.

You must have minimal to zero stock wastage due to

expired products.

You must build an inventory forecasting process or system to

ensure that:

you have 30 to 45 days of stock, at any point in time. This

could vary slightly based on your business and product,
but 30 days on average works for most brands;

you can track the sales history of products and predict

future demand, to ensure you are prepared with enough
inventory; and

you can plan marketing activities around inventory to

help drive demand for products with high inventory lev-
els that need to be sold.

74 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

SHIPPING
Shipping is a critical part of your order fulfilment process.
You get every part of the process right

but if your product doesn’t reach the customer when they

need it, it causes a bad experience.

Since almost all D2C brands cannot have a delivery fleet of

their own, spread across the country, you have to be depen-
dent on either independent courier companies like Blue
Dart and Delhivery or third-party logistics (3PL) aggregators
who are partnered with various courier facilities.

Hence picking the right partner is crucial (see the section

below on points to keep in mind to pick the right one).

The one thing you can control

Though you cannot control most of what happens during

the shipping stage with a 3PL, what you can control is how
early you dispatch the product from your end (applicable
when you are shipping from your warehouses or a cen-
tralised warehouse). It is important to ensure that you dis-
patch the product as soon as possible.

SELECTING THE RIGHT 3PL PARTNER FOR

ALL OF THE ABOVE AREAS
Hiring the right e-commerce fulfilment partner is a key de-
cision to make. Here are a few points to keep in mind when
choosing a third-party logistics (3PL) partner:

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 75

 Serviceability: Ensure that the logistics provider has
maximum pin code coverage, particularly in pin codes
where you get your sales from

Delivery speed and costing: Look for companies which

offer same day/next day/hyperlocal delivery at competi-
tive prices

Returns management: A good chunk of returns of or-

ders happen due to delayed deliveries and deliveries
which are not followed up well enough by the delivery
partner. Therefore, look for a partner that has all the
checks in place to manage and minimise RTO (Return
to Origin, logistics industry parlance for returned orders)
that happens due to these reasons.

Tracking updates and ease of tracking: Check if it is

easy to track packages as required. Also, check if they
send out auto order status updates to customers on the
status of their order shipment.

Customer support: Check if the 3PL partner would be

able to support you in case issues arise. Also, check for
support channels (email/phone/WhatsApp) and tim-
ings (certain hours of the day, or 24x7, etc.)

Warehouse locations and scalability: Do they have

warehouses located close to your target customer loca-
tions and are these warehouses scalable to accommo-
date increased inventory storage as demand rises?

76 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

 Multiple courier partners: Are they partnered with
most of the top courier services? This will ensure high
pin code serviceability and speed.

Feedback from other brands: Check if the 3PL partner

is currently servicing reputed D2C brands and how long
they have been working with those brands

Insurance coverage: Check if they provide sufficient in-

surance coverage for inventory in case of damages

LOGISTICS MANAGEMENT WHILE SELLING

ON MARKETPLACES
Most top third-party (3P) marketplaces take care of ware-
housing, fulfilment and delivery.

However, here you need to ensure two things:

You are always in stock on the marketplace. Ideally, you

should have 30 to 45 days of inventory at any point in
time, as a best practice.

You have satellite warehouses which bring you closer to

your customer and reduce your time to delivery. In the
case of Amazon, this would mean having stock in Ful-
filed by Amazon (FBA) fulfilment centres spread across
various regions, to ensure quick delivery to customers
across the country. This will need you to have GST reg-
istration in specific states where the warehouse will be

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 77

 located. You can either get this done yourself or in the
case of Amazon, sign up for the Amazon Go Local pro-
gram, which helps with this.

WHAT TO DO WHEN YOUR PRODUCT RUNS

OUT OF STOCK?
Despite all your best efforts on the supply chain, sometimes
you might just end up running out of stock on a product.
Here are the key actions you must take when this happens:

Follow up with your suppliers to check when the stock

is expected to arrive and if they can do anything to ex-
pedite it

Stop all marketing spend for that product

Ensure the product is marked as Out of Stock on the

website/Amazon, to prevent any new orders from com-
ing in

Add a “Notify Me” on email/WhatsApp button so the

customer can opt to get notified when the product is
back in stock

Never bring the stock of a product down to absolute zero

This is a mistake I have seen a lot of early-stage brands

make—when a product is out of stock the inventory in the
warehouse is zero.

78 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

This is not ideal. Consider this scenario: A customer who was
shipped your product a few days back has received it being
damaged in transit. They have raised a complaint and asked
for a replacement. How will you fulfil this if you have zero
stock left?

Always have a base cut-off quantity at which you will mark your
product as out of stock and initiate the actions listed above.

How much should that base quantity be? This will depend
on your last 30 days’ units sold for that product and your re-
placement rate. As a thumb rule, depending on the nature
of your product and sale volume, this would be anywhere
between one per cent and five per cent of your last 30 day’s
units, for an early-stage business.

KEY ACTION ITEMS SUMMARY

1. Ensure you have all the best practices in place for opti-
mised procurement, warehousing, inventory manage-
ment and shipping.
2. Pick the right third-party logistics partner. Re-evaluate
your current partner if required.
3. Ensure you have all your top products always in stock
across platforms.
4. Create a checklist based on actions shared in this blue-
print to ensure your team takes the right actions imme-
diately, in the rare event of a stock-out.
5. Never bring the stock of a product down to absolute
zero.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 79

 C H A PT E R 8 :

PLANNING AND
­B UDGETING
As a fast-growing business, you want to scale—acquire more
new customers, and grow orders and revenue month-on-
month.

You will also want efficiency in terms of reducing your cus-

tomer acquisition cost over time.

Which one to prioritise—scale vs efficiency—depends on

the state of your business and business goals.

Some companies go after scale at any cost and end up burn-

ing large amounts of cash in the process. The hope here is
that they will capture the market fast and then focus on
driving profitability from the acquired customer pool.

Other companies prefer focusing on improving efficiency all

the way, keeping ROAS in control and growing, even if that
means growing at a very slow pace.

The ideal approach, though, that I have seen work well, is a

balance of both—driving scale while maintaining or slightly
improving efficiency along the way. This generally results in
more sustainable growth.

80 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

KEY COMPONENTS OF YOUR
MARKETING BUDGET

1. Media Deployment Costs (sometimes called working

spend)
These are the ad spends that you will be paying to ad
platforms like Google and Meta to deliver your ads to
your target audience.
This will include two main components:

Brand marketing

Performance marketing

How much to allocate between brand and performance

marketing?

For most early-stage D2C brands, doing less than 10,000

orders a month, I have seen a 20-80 split between brand
and performance work well, provided of course that
both of these (particularly bard marketing) are execut-
ed right.

How to execute both brand and performance market-

ing right is covered in depth in Chapters 9 and 10.

2. Media Development Costs (sometimes called

non-working spend)
These are all the costs that go into making your ad cre-
atives, marketing content, planning your campaigns
and executing them.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 81

 These include but are not fully limited to the below:

Content creation costs


User-Generated Content (UGC) and influenc-
er-driven content creation
Product video shoots

Agency retainers
Creative agency
Performance agency
SEO agency
Website maintenance agency

IF YOU ARE JUST STARTING OUT, HOW MUCH

MEDIA SPEND SHOULD YOU START WITH?
There are two approaches to deciding on a media budget to
start with :

Approach 1
Start with a small performance marketing budget

This could depend on your business but would recommend

starting with at least Rs. 1.5 lakh for the first month, divid-
ed across all top-performance marketing platforms (Google,
Meta and Amazon). The reason for this being a bare min-
imum amount is that most ad platform algorithms today
work on machine learning. For smaller spends, the algo-
rithms take longer to “learn” and you will lose time, espe-
cially when the speed of operations and speed of customer
acquisition is of prime importance in new-age businesses.

82 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

Once you start running ads, you will start getting orders
(which ideally you start getting within a few days of your
campaigns going live. If you do not see any conversions at
all after about three to four days, go back and recheck if you
have got your targeting and messaging right). If you have no
prior experience with performance marketing, ensure you
have a good performance marketing team member/consul-
tant/agency who is running these campaigns for you.
After a month, you will have all key data points on your cam-
paigns such as your Cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM),
cost-per-click (CPC), conversion rate and cost-per-acquisi-
tion (CPA) for each platform.

You can use this data to plan from the second month on-
wards.
For example, if the Rs. 1.5 lakh you spent in the first month,
you acquired 150 total customers (D2C + Amazon), then your
overall CPA is Rs. 1,000.

If you want to acquire 250 customers in the second month,

then your approximate budget required would be Rs.
2,50,000. Ideally, you would work with your team and agen-
cy to optimise your CPA as you scale. If your goal is to opti-
mise CPA to 900, then for the same 2,50,000 budget, you
will have a target of 278 orders for the second month.

Approach 2
Pick a target number of orders you want to achieve in the
first month. Let’s say this is 100 orders.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 83

 Ask your agency for a media plan to achieve the 100 orders.
Your agency will look at CPMs, CPCs and conversion rate
benchmarks across platforms for other similar players they
have worked with and give you an estimated CPA. Let’s say
this CPA is Rs. 1200. You will now allocate a budget of Rs.
1,20,000 to achieve the 100-order target.

Once the campaigns go live, you will start seeing real data on
your campaigns, as mentioned in the first approach above.
You can then proceed similarly to the first approach to opti-
mise campaigns and plan ahead.

PLANNING FOR GROWTH

Once your campaigns are up and running, you will have a
large number of metrics and data points to help you further
optimisation and planning for growth.

As an ambitious early-stage brand, you would want to get

to 500 total orders a month (D2C + Amazon) in the first cou-
ple of months and then aim for a 40% to 60% monthly or-
der growth till you get to about 5,000 orders. Post that you
should work towards a 30% to 50% monthly order growth till
you get to 10,000 to 15,000 orders.

To scale orders and revenue, you will have three key levers
you control, assuming you have got all the non-negotiables
and fundamentals covered in earlier chapters at least 90%
right:

84 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

 Your budget

Your CPA

Your AOV

Of these three, the last two—CPA and AOV—are what you

should focus on improving month-on-month as you scale.

As you do this, you will need to increase your spend at a low-

er rate to grow your orders at a certain rate. For example,
increasing spending by 35% should suffice to drive an order
growth of 40%.

As a thumb rule, when you set targets every month, you

should work with your team on all the strategic and tactical
actions you can take every month to constantly:

bring down your CPA; and

increase your AOV.

Both of the above will take considerable effort and the fol-
lowing chapters will cover how you work on efficiency while
you continue to scale rapidly.

You can use the Google Sheets budget plan template which
you would have received along with the purchase of this
blueprint as a base template to work on, to help you plan
your media spend budgets and targets.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 85

 KEY ACTION ITEMS SUMMARY
Work with your team to put together a growth roadmap for
the next six months, with spends and targets.

86 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

 PART III:

GROWTH LEVERS

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 87

INTRODUCTION

Now that we have the non-negotiables and the

fundamentals in place, let’s look at the various
growth levers that can help accelerate growth
for your D2C brand.
C H A PT E R 9 :

PERFORMANCE
­M ARKETING
Once you have the non-negotiables and the fundamentals
in place, the key driver that will help you drive customer ac-
quisition for your brand is performance marketing.

Performance marketing is an area of digital marketing that

focuses the entire allocated budget on driving immediate
or near-term sales goals for the business.

Done right, performance marketing can be the

catalyst to spur your brand to dizzy heights.
Done wrong, it can be the biggest area of cash burn.

Before we deep dive into the key factors that would make
performance marketing work wonders for you, I would like
to point out that performance marketing works best when
it is done in sync with brand marketing (covered in the next
chapter). Both together are generally referred to as full-fun-
nel marketing or the full-funnel approach.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 89

 Also, performance marketing is a fairly deep domain with
a lot that goes into it. Though I have tried to cover all the
key aspects here in this chapter, getting into any more de-
tail will warrant writing a book dedicated to just this topic. If
you would like to go into further depth and understand per-
formance marketing in detail, particularly Google Ads and
Meta Ads, there are multiple guides and courses available
on the internet which you can refer to. In this chapter of this
blueprint, we will focus on the fundamentals and key areas
that will help you move the needle on growth the most.

STEP 0: HIRE A PERFORMANCE MARKETER

As mentioned above, performance marketing as a field has
a lot of depth and a lot more nuance. It is a perfect example
of the adage “the devil is in the details”.

If you are a founder with little to no digital marketing expe-

rience or exposure, it would be ideal for you to hire a perfor-
mance marketer (in addition to your digital agency) right
from the beginning.

The rest of this Chapter will help you get a hold of the key
aspects of performance marketing which will help you work
better with your team and agency and get the best result
for your brand.

90 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

PLATFORM MIX: ALLOCATING YOUR
PERFORMANCE MARKETING BUDGET
How should you allocate your performance marketing bud-
get?

For most D2C brands, Google Ads and Meta Ads are where
you would be spending most of your media budget.

The actual mix will vary for every brand based on brand-spe-
cific factors.

However, for most D2C brands in the first year or two when
you are trying to get your brand in front of as many new
customers as possible, your allocation to Meta Ads will be
about 70% to 80% of your total working media spend, with
the balance being allocated to Google Ads and a few other
channels that might be relevant to you.

For Google Ads, you will further split this performance bud-
get largely across Google Search and Google Performance
Max campaign types.

You will track the performance of each channel every month

and reallocate budgets accordingly to channels that are giv-
ing the best results in terms of effectiveness (revenue and
the number of orders) and efficiency (Return on Ad Spend
(ROAS) and Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA)).

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 91

 KEY LEVERS TO GET THE BEST OUT OF
PERFORMANCE MARKETING
Five key levers will help you get the best out of your perfor-
mance marketing campaigns:
1. Creative: The creative should grab the attention of the
target audience and convey the offer’s value proposition.
2. Targeting: It is essential to understand the target audi-
ence’s needs, interests, and preferences.
3. Testing: Constant testing helps uncover learnings and
insights and improve performance faster
4. Landing Pages: Landing pages should be optimised for
conversion and provide a seamless experience for the
target audience.
5. Monitoring, Analysis and Optimisation: Utilise analyt-
ics to monitor campaign performance and make da-
ta-driven decisions
Let’s dive into each one of these five, starting with Creative.

PERFORMANCE MARKETING LEVER 1:

CREATIVE
When it comes to performance marketing, a lot of perfor-
mance agencies and performance marketers pay a lot more
attention to media factors like targeting, placement, cam-
paign structures, etc.

Though these factors play a role in driving results, a perfor-

mance campaign’s output is largely dependent on the cre-
ative, messaging and copy.

92 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

So, your priority is to get your creative right.

Start by making a creative plan

If you have got your brand and product communication ex-
ercise done well, then this is more than half of your job done.

Now all you got to do is share this document, along with

your audience segments definition with your creative or
performance agency and ask them to make a creative plan,
covering creatives in various formats—statics, carousels and
videos—for each audience segment that you want to start
marketing to.

You can use the creative plan template received along with
the purchase of this blueprint (with a sample creative plan
made for the Almond Butter example we took for the brand
and product communication exercise) as a reference.

When your team/agency sends you creatives for approv-

al, these are the key things you should be checking for:

Put yourself in the shoes of your target audience and

assume that you are browsing Facebook/Instagram/
YouTube and you were shown this ad. Would it catch
your attention? Does it have a hook that will keep you
there?

As you go through the ad, does the message come

across clearly? Do you get it easily or is it too cryptic or
complex that you would have to read it a few times and
still not get it?

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 93

 Note: Remember, that unlike you who are eating and sleep-
ing your brand, your audience has much less context when
they see your ad.

Straightforward messaging that is easy to understand

works better in most cases.

Most of the time, the complex cryptic messages

look good and get wowed and appreciated largely by
creative directors, marketing folks and award juries.
Whereas, the actual customers, for whom the creative is
intended, just stay blank and move on!

It is important to ensure that you always check cre-

atives on your mobile as your audience is most likely
going to see them on their phones. The text should be
clearly readable on mobile and easy to understand.

While the above checks will apply to all creative types, here
are a few things specific to video creatives:

Ensure the video makes sense even when played sounds

off. A good chunk of videos (especially those that do
not have a human face speaking in them) are watched

94 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

 sound off. Ensure the video has relevant and readable
supers and subtitles.

To cater to the sound-on viewers, ensure the video has

relevant music, dialogue, and sound effects to comple-
ment and reinforce the visuals on the screen

Ensure there is an audio mention of the brand or prod-

uct in the video, and not just on the end screen. Audio
mentions of a brand generally correlate with increased
brand recall and better performance.

Where we have on-screen actors in the video, ensure

they mention the brand/product name. Audio mentions
of the brand by on-screen actors correlate with better
results for ad recall and consideration, than audio men-
tions by voiceover.

Creative Experimentation is Crucial

Ensure you are spending at least five per cent of your bud-
get every month on testing creatives for a specific audience
to see which creative is working.

Meta has a great split-testing feature where you can test

different creative variants for a specific audience and know
which creative is working best. The winning creative can
then be scaled.

Draw Inspiration from Competitor Creatives

Both Meta and Google have ad libraries that allow you to see
all the ads that your competitor is running.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 95

 For Meta, this can be accessed through the Meta Ads Library.

For Google, you can view competitors’ ads on the Google

Ads transparency platform. Here’s a reference link with the
steps for this.

Please note though that drawing creative inspiration does

not mean copying.

PERFORMANCE MARKETING LEVER 2:

TARGETING
Once you have got your messaging and creative right, you
need to ensure you are putting it in front of the right audi-
ence. And when it comes to performance marketing, this
audience needs to be ready to buy in the near future.

Every irrelevant person you show your ad to is a waste of

your performance marketing budget. Though you would
never be able to ensure that your targeting is 100% efficient
as no platform can guarantee that, you should ensure your
targeting is as sharp as possible from your end.

You would use your audience segmentation and definition

document, which you should have created by now, as a base
for your targeting.

The next step would be finding all the available targeting

options on each of the ad platforms that will help you reach
your audience segments.

96 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

You would then test each of these options and scale the
ones that work best.

Here are some key points you should keep in mind for tar-
geting Meta and Google Ads:

Meta Ads Targeting: Some Key Aspects

1. In the first few months, ensure you are testing out at
least a few new audience segments each month to fig-
ure out what is working
2. Check the overlap between the various segments that
you have chosen to test. Here’s how you can do this.
For segments which overlap more than 30 to 40%, you
might want to consider combining them for better effi-
ciency.
3. Meta Ads’ custom audiences are extremely powerful.
For those of you who are not familiar with Custom Audi-
ences, these are people who have interacted with your
brand in the past in multiple ways, both on Meta (such as
page and post engagements) and off Meta (those who
have visited your website, purchased from you, etc.)
Here is an exhaustive guide covering the various types
of custom audiences that can be leveraged by a D2C
brand.
4. Lookalike audiences are another great way to leverage
Meta’s machine-learning algorithms to find people sim-
ilar to those who have interacted with, or bought from,
you in the past. When creating lookalike audiences, re-
member that the quality of the seed custom audience

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 97

 (a seed audience of purchasers generally works better
than a seed audience of engagers) and the size of the
seed custom audience (the larger the audience the bet-
ter) used to create the lookalike audience, will define
how well it will work for you.
5. After the ad sets have been set up on the Meta ads plat-
form, go through that target audience definition with
your team and agency to check that there are no errors
in the way the audience has been defined. Check for
some of the most common targeting mistakes below:
a.  When the audience definition includes a large
number of interest segments, go through all the
interests to check if any irrelevant interest segment
has crept in while the audience was being created.
Ensure all interest segments selected are relevant
to your target audience.
b.  Check the location targeting setting. Meta Ads cur-
rently has four settings:
i. People living in or recently in this location
(People whose home or most recent location
is within the selected area)
ii. People living in this location (People whose
home is within the selected area)
iii. People recently in this location (People whose
most recent location is within the selected area)
iv. People travelling in this location (People whose
most recent location is within the selected area
but whose home is more than 200 km away)

98 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

 Of these four, the first one—people living in or
recently in this location—is the default. In a lot
of cases, especially if you are doing country-
wide targeting, you will see some seepage of
traffic from outside the country in your Google
Analytics reports, which in a lot of cases would
not be relevant to you. Though this percent-
age of irrelevant traffic will be less than five per
cent in a lot of cases, it can still help you opti-
mise your campaigns by that five per cent. The
most relevant setting for most brands would
be “People living in this location”. Therefore,
check for this as well.
c. 
Another common mistake with Facebook ads is
mixing up AND vs OR while selecting targeting
options. Let’s say you sell premium baby products
and you want to target a segment of people who
are interested in baby products but also have an
affinity for high-value goods.
If this is setup like the one below, you will also be in-
cluding people who have an interest in baby prod-
uct brands but do not necessarily have an affinity
for high-value goods. This is because it is targeting
people with either interest in the baby brand OR
an affinity for high-value goods.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 99

 In the example above, targeting India, all genders, aged 21
to 38, the audience size is 80 to 95 million (not shown in the
image).

The correct way to target this audience would be to tar-

get people with an interest in baby brands AND an affinity
for high-value goods. You would do this by clicking on the
“Define Further” in the image above and then adding the
high-value goods affinity, as shown below:

100 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

This audience size is about four to five million (not shown in
the image), which is more in sync with the audience you set
out to target.

Google Ads Targeting: Some Key Aspects

Here are some key aspects that you should keep in mind for
audience targeting on Google Ads:

1. Just like Meta Ads, Google Ads has multiple targeting

options that you can choose from, to build relevant au-
dience segments. These include in-market and affinity
audience segments, demographics, life events (recent-

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 101

 ly married, moving to a new home, etc.), parental status
and household income. Apart from this, you can also tar-
get specific website and YouTube channel placements.
It is imperative to ensure you are using all of these op-
tions to their fullest potential when building audience
segments (as per your audience definition and insights),
to target the platform.
2. Just like custom audiences on Meta ads, ensure you
are using your first-party data to the fullest, by creat-
ing audience segments from all your data sources such
as website, app, YouTube and your customer lists. These
audience segments can be used not just for retargeting,
but also to give Google’s machine learning algorithm in-
sight into who your audience is, so it can expand target-
ing and find more customers. Google also shares data
insights for each of these audience segments, so you
can understand which in-market and affinity segments
they fall into and sharpen your targeting further.
3. Leveraging Custom Segments will help you build rel-
evant audiences by adding what they search for, what
websites they might visit and what apps they might
use. This is quite a powerful feature to help you improve
the relevance of your targeting.
4. You should also be leveraging Combined Segments,
which is another effective targeting option that allows
you to intersect different affinity, in-market, custom and
first-party segments to create segments that match
your audience persona definition.

102 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

5. In Google Ads as well, similar to Meta, there are two set-
tings for targeting your location:
a.  Presence or interest: People in, regularly in or
who’ve shown interest in your targeted locations
b.  Presence: People in or regularly in your targeted lo-
cations
Though the default setting and the Google recommend-
ed setting is “Presence or Interest”, what works best for
most D2C brands, is just “Presence”. You should check
this and test this out for your brand as well to see what
is giving you better results.
6. 
For Google Search ads, since here the primary target-
ing is keywords, ensure:
a.  all keywords are relevant to your business and tar-
get audience;
b.  negative keywords are added at regular intervals to
exclude irrelevant searches and prevent your ads
from being shown to unqualified or uninterested
users, and
c.  Keyword quality scores are being checked and op-
timised. These have a direct impact on search cam-
paign performance.

PERFORMANCE MARKETING LEVER 3:

TESTING
If you have been paying attention to the chapter so far (which
hopefully you should have), you would have observed the

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 103

 words “test” and “testing” have come up multiple times in
this Chapter already.

Experimentation and testing are key not just to performance

marketing success but to overall business growth as well.

To succeed on most ad platforms today, where machine

learning algorithms power almost everything, testing is key.

If you want to see the performance of your

performance marketing campaigns constantly
improve over time, you must always be testing!

Here are some of the most pressing questions on experi-

mentation and testing, answered for you:

1. What are some of the experiments in performance market-

ing I should be running?

There are hundreds of hypotheses you can test when you

run performance marketing campaigns.

You can run experiments across multiple areas of your cam-

paigns such as audience segments, placements, creatives,
campaign structures, and bid strategies.

104 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

Here are just a few examples to guide you to start thinking
in the right direction:

Testing Audiences

Broad open audiences (age, gender, location targeting

only) vs audiences narrowed down with interests/be-
haviours/affinities

Interests/behaviour audience segments vs custom au-

diences vs lookalike audiences on Meta Ads

Meta Ad Lookalikes from various sources. For example,

a lookalike of a purchaser audience vs a lookalike of an
added-to-cart audience

Testing Creatives

Ad formats (static vs carousel vs video, etc.)

Creative messaging variants

Ad copy variants

Visuals/design elements in the creative

Video aspect ratios (16:9 vs 2:3 vs 9:16 etc.)

Video durations (15 seconds vs 30 seconds vs 60 sec-

onds, etc.)

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 105

 Bid Strategies

Test various bid strategies on both Google Ads and Meta Ads
to see what works best for a specific campaign. Here are the
various bid strategies available for Google and Meta.

Other Test Examples

Testing campaign-level vs ad set level budgets on Meta

Ads

Testing keyword match types on Google Search Ads

Testing automatic placements vs manual placements

on Meta Ads

Testing location settings on both Google and Meta ads

which we have discussed earlier in this Chapter

2. How much of my performance media budget should I allo-

cate to testing?
This will depend on how big your budget is in absolute num-
bers, but as a thumb rule for early-stage brands, you should
ensure that at least 10% of your monthly performance me-
dia spend is allocated to running tests and experiments.

The reasons behind allocating 10% of your monthly perfor-

mance media spend to running tests and experiments are
as follows:
1. It is high enough for you to get statistically significant test
results for tests you run, provided you don’t spread this bud-
get too thin across too many experiments in a single month.

106 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

2. It is low enough to not hamper your overall campaign per-
formance, thereby ensuring you are still able to use the oth-
er 90% of your budget to hit the revenue targets you have
set.
If you are allocating less than this percentage to experimen-
tation currently, you are missing out on a lot of new growth
avenues this process can help you uncover.

3. Is there a process I should follow when running experi-

ments? How long should I run them and when should I stop?

Here’s a basic testing framework that you can follow, to get

started:

Step 1 - Have a clear goal and KPI for the test

What do you expect the experiment to accomplish for
you? For example, will it increase traffic, increase engage-
ment, increase sales, increase the conversion rate or reduce
cost-per-acquisition?

Clearly define your goal. For example, you expect that the
change you are planning would help you reduce your acqui-
sition cost by 20%.

Based on the goal, define the KPI that will help you define
the winner. For example, if you want to reduce acquisition
costs, your KPI for the winning version would be CPA.

Step 2: Create your hypothesis

Your hypothesis is the outcome you expect from the exper-
iment.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 107

 Let’s say, you are testing two creative variants A and B. Cre-
ative A has a different key message from Creative B. You pre-
dict that Creative A will help you get a lower CPA than cre-
ative B because you believe that the key message in Creative
A is more convincing. This prediction is your hypothesis.
You will now run the test to see if your hypothesis is validat-
ed or disproved.

Step 3: Setup and run the experiment

For performance marketing experiments, both Meta and
Google have in-built testing functionality to quickly setup
and run your experiments.

One key point to keep in mind is that the target audience

you use for the test must be large enough to support the
test. Avoid narrow audiences (size less than a couple of mil-
lion) when it comes to experiments. Also, ensure that, as far
as possible, the audience used in the test is not used in any
other campaign. This will help prevent contamination of test
results.

How long should you run the experiment?

This will depend on the conversion cycle for the product you
are selling. However, as a thumb rule, ensure tests are run
for at least seven days to account for delayed attribution of
results as per the attribution window of that platform.

How much budget should you set?

The budget should be enough to drive a sufficient volume of
results for the test to be statistically significant. This will vary

108 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

from business to business and as you start running some
tests, you will get an idea of the budget you should be allo-
cating for the duration of a test for you to get results with a
high confidence percentage.

Step 4: Learn from the result of the test

Did the test yield a result with a high confidence percent-
age (a percentage of 95% or more is ideal)?

If yes, then was your hypothesis validated or disproved?

Either way, you have a learning.

In the example hypothesis we took, if Creative A helped get a

lower CPA compared to creative B, you now have a winning
key message. You would then deep dive into what made the
key message work and see if you can sharpen it further, or
apply it to other creatives to try and improve their perfor-
mance as well.

Step 5: Repeat the process

You would repeat the above process for other new experi-
ments as well as for follow-on experiments to your current
one.

For example, you might want to run a follow-on experiment

where you take the winning Creative A with the new key
message, change another variable (let’s say the ad copy)
and then see if that reduces the CPA further.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 109

 Build a culture of experimentation

The faster you test, the faster you learn new things and opti-
mise. This “Test and Learn” approach is critical to not just per-
formance marketing results but to overall business growth.

As an early-stage brand, it is important to sow the seeds of

experimentation in the team from the very beginning so
that the culture of experimentation becomes embedded
into the DNA of the brand as it grows. And this will be one
of the key differentiators that will help your brand do much
better than most other brands out there.

PERFORMANCE MARKETING LEVER 4:

LANDING PAGES
You may have the best creative with super-sharp targeting
and a perfect campaign structure but what if the product or
category page on your store, where your customer lands, is
suboptimal?

All the effort you would have put in will go to waste.

Having an optimised store is key to performance marketing

success.

This is so important that we have a whole chapter dedicat-

ed to optimising your store and maximising your conversion
rates.

You can either skip to Chapter 12 and come back here or

continue reading until you get there.

110 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

PERFORMANCE MARKETING LEVER 5:
MONITORING, ANALYSIS AND OPTIMISATION
Performance marketing campaigns require constant atten-
tion to ensure they continue to get better at delivering re-
sults.

To optimise your campaigns right, you need to ensure that

you have reliable campaign data that you can analyse to
make the right optimisation decisions.

Here are a couple of key points to keep in mind from that

perspective:

1. Ensure all your ad campaigns on Google and Meta are

tracking your purchase data correctly.

For multiple reasons (that are beyond the scope of this blue-
print document), there will always be discrepancies between
the purchases tracked on your ad campaign dashboards
(Google Ads and Meta Ads), and the actual purchases that
you have received on your website.

However, ensure that this discrepancy is less than 20% on

average. For anything more than 20%, work with your team
to investigate the cause of the reporting discrepancy and fix
the same. This is extremely important for two reasons:

Only when you have accurate order data on your cam-

paign dashboards will you be able to optimise your cam-
paign well, to maximise business results?

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 111

 Incorrect reporting will also negatively impact the ma-
chine learning algorithms on the platform. For exam-
ple, if Meta Ads is reporting 10 purchases when only five
have actually happened, the algorithms will be optimis-
ing assuming there are 10, resulting in suboptimal cam-
paign performance.

Check this discrepancy today and fix it on priority, if it is large.

2. Ensure Standardisation of UTM Parameters

Any good performance marketer will use UTM parameters
in their campaigns to track and analyse data in Google An-
alytics later. If you are unsure if this is being done at all, it
would be good to recheck with your team/agency on this.

One step beyond just using UTM parameters is to ensure

that they are standardised so that it becomes easy for data
analysis at a later point.

For example, if you want to compare campaign, ad set or

ad level data reported by the ad platform with the data on
Google Analytics or e-commerce store marketing reports,
having standardised UTMs will make it much easier.
Here is a standardisation table you can share with your team
for all UTM parameters.

Note: Please feel free to modify it if required, but ensure that

once modified it is followed as is.

112 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

Platform Source Medium Campaign Content Term
{{site_source_ {{campaign.
Facebook {{placement}} {{adset.name}} {{ad.name}}
name}} name}}
campaign_
Google Search search paid adgroup_name keyword
name
Google Dis- campaign_
gdn paid adgroup_name
play (GDN) name
Google campaign_
shopping paid adgroup_name
­Shopping name
campaign_ asset_group_
Google P-max pmax paid
name name
Google campaign_
discovery paid adgroup_name
­Discovery name
campaign_
YouTube YouTube paid adgroup_name
name

Please note that the parameters for FB are dynamic UTM

parameters.

Monitoring Performance
On a daily and weekly basis, your team and agency would
need to make tactical changes to optimise campaigns and
improve performance. While doing monthly reviews, you
will also have to look at strategic changes that you can im-
plement.

Here’s how you can ensure you are monitoring your cam-
paigns right:

Daily:
On a daily basis, ensure you or someone from your team is
keeping an eye out for any abnormal dips in order volume.

Let’s say in the morning at 10 am when you check your order

count, you usually see 10 orders. One day, you see only three.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 113

 You should immediately have the team check for these fun-
damentals:

Is the site working fine?

Is the checkout process fine?

Have any ad campaigns stopped running all of a sud-

den?

Are the ad campaigns spending their allocated budget?

Were any changes made to the site in the previous 24

hours that could have affected the conversion rate?

Were any changes made to the campaigns in the pre-

vious 24 hours that could have affected the campaign
performance?

If your investigation on all the above shows everything is

fine from your end, then it could just be factors beyond your
control such as a temporary increase in auction competi-
tion or a public holiday for example. Give the campaigns
some time, maybe a day or a maximum of two to three days.
Things should return to normal. If they do not, then you have
missed something in the investigation of the above points.
Go back and do a detailed investigation. Do not stop until
you have found possible causes and fixed them.

114 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

The rest of the daily monitoring and campaign optimisa-
tion should be done by the performance team/agency, and
as founders or business heads, you would want to focus on
other areas in this blueprint, that would help you move the
needle in the long term.

Another key point to keep in mind when it comes to mon-

itoring is to not fret over daily ups and downs. Some days,
orders will be low and some days they will be high. As long
as this variance is +/- 30 to 40% within the last seven days on
average, it is fine. Getting into details on why daily orders are
down 20% to 30% every time they are down, will only make
you and the team inefficient. I have seen quite a few found-
ers and business heads making this mistake.

Just to clarify the above, here are two screenshots of a D2C

brand’s orders from their own website over a period of time.
The first chart shows the daily orders and the second chart
shows monthly orders.

Daily Order Volume

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 115

 Monthly Order Volume

If you look at the daily order count, you will see that there
are daily ups and downs.

However, if you zoom out and look at the monthly orders,

the brand has been growing considerably well almost every
month.

So, don’t fret too much about minor daily variances in order
numbers. Just focus on getting all the high-level inputs in
this blueprint right. In the long term, the brand will grow
and achieve its growth goals month-on-month.

Weekly:
Weekly catch-ups with your performance marketing team
and agency must include reviewing the overall performance,
week-on-week, with key metrics covered:

Spend

Orders

Revenue

116 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

 Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)

Cost Per Order (CPO)

Average Order Value (AOV)

Conversion Rate

If any of these have dipped in the last week, they should be

investigated to check if it was a routine dip or if something
went wrong.

Apart from this, it would be good to look at specific cam-

paigns that were performing but now have stopped and
discuss optimisations for those:

Should we add fresh creatives as the current active ones

are not working well anymore?

Should we increase budgets on the campaigns that are

performing better and reduce on those that are not?

Should we test newer audience segments?

Monthly:
In monthly reviews, focus on the big picture. Check if
you have achieved your monthly targets. Use the simple
Start-Stop-Continue framework here.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 117

 Start:
Brainstorm strategic initiatives that you can start which will
help you take your campaigns to the next level.

For example, this could be starting to target a new audience

segment (based on your campaign audience insights) that
you haven’t tried yet, or exploring a new performance mar-
keting channel to scale revenue.

Stop:
Make a list of all the things that did not work well in the pre-
vious month. Look at which of these you need to stop doing.

Continue:
Have a clear insight into what has been working so you can
continue to do more of it. While deciding on what’s working,
ensure you are tracking not just the cost-per-purchase and
ROAS, but also the new customer acquisition cost (perfor-
mance spend divided by new customer orders) and the acqui-
sition-ROAS (new customer revenue divided by performance
spend). This will help you get a better picture of what’s work-
ing and driving incrementality, especially as your brand scales.

A good way to do this is to ask your team and agency to

include the Start-Stop-Continue recommendations (with
data backing them of course), in your monthly report. This
will help structure your monthly review meetings well and
ensure your performance marketing campaigns are con-
stantly getting you more bang for your buck.

118 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

KEY ACTION ITEMS SUMMARY
1. Hire a performance marketer as early as possible, espe-
cially if neither of the founders has experience in this
area.
2. Invest in effective creative. Have a creative plan for each
month. Check each creative for best practices.
3. Follow all the best practices for targeting and check
your campaigns for common targeting errors.
4. Experimentation is key to success for not just perfor-
mance marketing but other aspects of the business as
well. Build a culture of testing and learning. Have a clear
experimentation plan, with a list of hypotheses you want
to test.
5. Optimise your store pages to maximise conversion rates.
6. Follow all the measurement best practices mentioned
in this chapter and ensure that your campaigns are be-
ing monitored daily
7. Focus monthly performance marketing reviews on
strategy and the big picture. Ensure you are using data
effectively to draw insights and take actions to drive fur-
ther growth.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 119

 C H A PT E R 1 0 :

BRAND AND
­C OMMUNITY
­B UILDING
Performance marketing helps you drive sales from those
people who are aware of the problem your product is solv-
ing and are ready for it.

Brand marketing, on the other hand, helps you reach out to

those who are either completely unaware of the problem
or those who are aware of the problem but either haven’t
thought of purchasing a solution yet or are not convinced
about a solution yet.

Brand marketing helps:

reach out to your target audience and make them

aware of the problem your products solve and why it is
the best solution for that problem;

differentiate your brand from others in the market and

help your audience remember the differentiating ben-
efits that your brand offers; and

build credibility and trust for the brand, thereby increas-

ing conversion rates from performance campaigns and
other marketing activities.

120 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

The objective of your brand marketing is to get your con-
sumers to believe that your brand is the forever best choice
for a particular purpose. When done right, brand marketing
helps you build a strong competitive advantage over time.
The earlier you start brand marketing activities, the better it
would be for long-term growth.

ACTIVITIES TO BUILD BRAND VISIBILITY AND

RECALL
Here are some brand marketing activities that you can con-
sider implementing, to build visibility and recall for your
brand:

Brand marketing campaigns on platforms like Google

Ads and Meta Ads

PR activities

Influencer collaborations, where the objective of the

collaboration is to leverage the influencer’s reach and
following

Offline marketing activities and customer connect ini-

tiatives

Content Marketing and SEO to drive organic visibility

While the last two activities are covered in detail in other

areas of this blueprint, we will cover the first three in this
Chapter.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 121

 BRAND MARKETING CAMPAIGNS ON META/
GOOGLE: BEST PRACTICES

Brand marketing campaigns on Google Ads and

Meta Ads, executed sub-optimally, are the easiest
way to burn money.

This is because it is quite challenging and complex to mea-

sure the true impact of brand marketing (more on this later
in this Chapter). Due to this, it is easy to continue spend-
ing on brand marketing campaigns assuming that they are
working, when they actually aren’t.

While we will get to measurement later, here are some cru-

cial aspects that you should keep in mind when designing
brand campaigns that will maximise your possibilities of
success in the long run:

1. Have a clear goal for the campaign

Why are you running this brand marketing campaign? What
do you intend to achieve? Do you want to increase aware-
ness (unaided), consideration or purchase intent? Having a
clearly defined goal for the campaign will help you measure
the impact better and also ensure your creative is in sync
with your objective.

122 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

2. Invest in strong creative
One of the biggest reasons for brand campaigns failing to
deliver results is poor creative.
Most of what we have already covered when talking about
creative for performance marketing—the creative planning
process, creative checks and the importance of creative ex-
perimentation—apply here as well.

Apart from this, it is important to ensure that your creative

is in sync with your brand marketing objective. If your objec-
tive is to build brand recall with the target audience, then
is the creative strong enough for people to remember the
brand days or weeks after they have been exposed a reason-
able number of times? If the objective is to drive purchase
intent, does the creative bring the product early on and cre-
atively explain the reasons to believe in it?

I have seen brand creatives where the objective is purchase

intent but the product is covered only for three seconds in
the 30-second video. This creative is not in sync with the ob-
jective of the campaign and is unlikely to make an impact.

3. Set a target frequency

It is highly unlikely that people will see your ad once and
have a top-of-mind recall of your brand. They will have to
be exposed multiple times for this to happen. This number
of exposures per person, which is called frequency in me-
dia buying parlance, is one of the most important factors for
brand campaign success.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 123

 The most pressing question that you would hear is, “What is
an ideal frequency to maintain?”

Well, there is unfortunately no one-size-fits-all answer to

that question. The ideal frequency will vary widely from
campaign to campaign and will depend on multiple factors
that will be needed to be accounted for to plan your optimal
frequency.

Joseph W. Ostrow has defined various factors that should

be considered to plan the most effective frequency. Here’s
a summary of the key factors that help determine whether
the campaign frequency should be increased or decreased:

Factors Lower Frequency Higher Frequency

Brand salience Established brand New brand
Market share High market share Low market share
Marketing
Targeting an existing/loy- Targeting a new audi-
Factors Existing/new audience
al audience segment ence segment
Purchase cycle Long purchase cycle Short purchase cycle

Message complexity Simple copy Complex copy

Unique differentiated Messaging similar to
Message Message uniqueness
message competitors
Factors
Pre-exposed campaign/ Fresh new campaign/
Message freshness
message message

Multiple channels in the Single channel/lesser

Number of channels
mix channels in the mix
Media Fac-
Seasonality Non-peak season Peak season
tors
Campaign duration and Ongoing continuous Pulse or flighted cam-
pacing campaigns paigns

Summary of factors to determine optimal frequency; based

on “”Setting Effective Frequency Levels”, Ostrow, Joseph W.
(1982), Effective Frequency: The State of the Art. New York: Ad-
vertising Research Foundation, Key Issues Workshop, 89–102”

124 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

For most early-stage brands (new brands with a low market
share), what I have seen work well is a frequency of at least
three to four exposures per week with the right target audi-
ence.

However, this will have to be fine-tuned based on the media

and message factors above.

For example, if you have an innovative product which a user

will take longer to understand the benefits of, you will need
to plan for a higher frequency as compared to an existing
product that users are quite familiar with.

Likewise, if you are running a continuous brand awareness

campaign, you could plan for a lower frequency than what
you would if you were running a short burst campaign.

The approach I use to plan frequency for brand campaigns

for early-stage D2C brands is to increase the base frequency
of three per week by about 0.4 to 0.5 for every factor which
calls for a higher frequency and reduce the frequency by
0.4 to 0.5 for every factor that calls for a lower frequency. The
net value of these additions and subtractions is then added
to the base value of three to arrive at the planned frequency.

This approach is illustrated in the table below, with an exam-

ple of a sustenance brand campaign on YouTube and Meta
ads for an early-stage D2C brand in a non-peak season, with
a short purchase cycle and new creative copy that is simple
yet differentiated.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 125

 Base Frequen-
Factors Lower Frequency Higher Frequency
cy Correction
Brand salience Established Brand New brand 0.5
Market share High market share Low market share 0.5
Marketing Targeting an existing/
Existing/new Targeting a new audi-
Factors loyal audience seg- 0.5
audience ence segment
ment
Purchase cycle Long purchase cycle Short purchase cycle 0.5

Message com-
Simple copy Complex copy -0.5
plexity
Message Message Unique differentiated Messaging similar to
-0.5
Factors uniqueness message competitors
Message fresh- Pre-exposed cam- Fresh new campaign/
0.5
ness paign/message message

Number of Multiple channels in Single channel/lesser

0.5
channels the mix channels in the mix
Media Seasonality Non-peak season Peak season -0.5
­Factors Campaign
Ongoing continuous Pulse or flighted cam-
duration and 0.5
campaigns paigns
pacing
Net Base Frequency
2
Correction

So, for this campaign, the planned weekly frequency would

be the base (three) plus the additional frequency of two to
account for the other factors, resulting in a planned frequen-
cy of five. You would then test this frequency cap and see if it
is helping you meet the desired objective of the campaign.

Planning for the right frequency that would help you meet
your brand marketing objectives is crucial to the success
of your brand marketing campaign and the growth of your
brand. It is important to ensure you take into account all the
above factors and plan your frequency well. In addition, test
various frequencies over time and see which levels are work-
ing best to drive results for your brand.

126 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

4. Ensure your targeting is spot on
We have so far covered two aspects out of the three that I
like calling the “holy trinity” of brand advertising — Cre-
ative, Frequency and Reach.

Let’s look at Reach now.

You have great the creative. You have figured out how many
times you would like your creative to be shown to your audi-
ence. Now, you need to define the right audience.

The general perception for a long time has been that you
should target narrow for your “bottom-funnel” (performance
marketing) campaigns and target broad for your “top-fun-
nel” (brand marketing) campaigns. However, this strategy
does not work anymore, especially for early-stage brands.

For performance campaigns, as ad platform algorithms have

become stronger, targeting broad now works just as well as
targeting narrow in a lot of cases. The algorithms learn and
figure out who to cherry-pick and show your ad to in that
broad pool as well and get you results.

For brand campaigns, if you go broad—especially as an ear-

ly-stage brand—you will face the following two big challenges:
1. Your budget will be spread too thin on your audience
and you will never meet your frequency targets, result-
ing in minimal impact and your brand marketing bud-
get going down the drain.
2. In a broad pool, you will be reaching audiences who
may not be relevant to you at all, at least in the medium

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 127

 term. You’d rather focus on the group that you want to
build recall with first, build recall with them and then
expand to a larger group later.

Hence, it is all the more important for brand campaigns that

you have defined your audience as sharply as possible. It is
better to start narrow and see if you can achieve your target
frequency and then expand the audience a little more if re-
quired, rather than the reverse approach.

Note:

When you target the same narrow audience with a brand

awareness objective campaign and with a performance ob-
jective campaign, you will see that the performance cam-
paign will reach a smaller chunk of the defined audience as
compared to the brand awareness campaign. Try this out
on any platform, Meta Ads for example, and see the num-
bers for yourself.
This is because ad platform algorithms, for conversion-fo-
cused campaigns, are designed to find customers who are
ready to convert, from within the audience you have de-
fined. There could be audiences who are relevant but not
ready to convert soon and these people tend to get left out.

When you run a brand awareness objective campaign, you

tend to reach these relevant audiences as well, which your
performance campaign would not reach.

128 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

5. Run campaigns across platforms
The more channels you run your brand campaigns on the
better. This holds good as long as the channel allows you to
target your audience sharply and as long as you are able to
maintain consistency of creative and messaging across all
your brand marketing channels.

Why is this recommended? This is because when users see

ads in different environments, they are in different states of
mind and hence react differently. For example, a user on In-
stagram stories vs a user reading a news article on a news
app vs a user watching an informative YouTube video—is in
different states of mind in each instance. And each exposure
has a different effect on their brain as compared to seeing
your ad only in one environment.

Multiple research studies have proven the impact of

cross-channel advertising on brand recall. Hence, it is im-
portant to ensure you are running brand campaigns across
various social, display and video platforms, to drive maxi-
mum impact. However, here as well, it is important to en-
sure that you are not compromising on the frequency on
each platform.

One challenge that you will face with this approach is that
you will not be able to accurately measure your net frequen-
cy across all platforms. Though there are ways and means
to do this, those will not fit into the budgets of early-stage
brands and may not be value for money at this stage either.
You will have to best estimate this number and focus on

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 129

 other aspects of effective measurement, which we will cov-
er later in this chapter.

6. Ensure you have a sustenance brand campaign at all times

I have seen brands running a massive brand campaign for a
few months and then doing nothing for a few months after
that. This approach generally is less effective than having
sustenance brand campaigns in the period between large-
scale campaigns.

As leading Digital Marketing Evangelist Avinash Kaushik

puts it, a Spike and Sustain approach for brand marketing
generally works better than a Spike and Silence approach.

For sustenance campaigns, allocate at least 15% to 20% of

your monthly media spend to them.

7. Invest in effective measurement

Brand campaigns are annoyingly difficult to measure. How-
ever, you cannot manage what you cannot measure. Hence,
you need to do the best you can to assess the impact of your
brand campaigns.

Since this is of prime importance, we have a separate sec-

tion devoted to measurement towards the end of this chap-
ter. You can either skip to it now and come back or continue
reading until you get there.

130 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

USING PUBLIC RELATIONS (PR) FOR BRAND
VISIBILITY
Getting started with planning and executing a PR strategy
early on in your brand journey will give you the following
benefits:

1. Enhanced brand awareness and visibility

A robust PR strategy will help you scale your reach and
put your brand in front of the right audience, thereby
generating buzz and visibility for your brand.

2. Establish thought leadership, build credibility and in-

crease brand trust
Getting covered in leading media publications will help
increase brand trust and will also have a positive impact
on your store conversion rates in the long term

3. Positively impact Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

A well-executed digital PR strategy will help in gener-
ating backlinks to your site from multiple high-quality
sites, which will have a strong impact on your SEO (SEO
is covered in detail in a later chapter on this blueprint).

Apart from this, your PR efforts will also generate men-

tions of your brand on multiple sites, blogs and publi-
cations across the internet. In SEO parlance, these are
called “unlinked brand mentions” and though they
don’t have a direct impact on SEO, they do help as well.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 131

 4. Build a competitive advantage
All the above outcomes of an effective PR strategy will
help you position your brand as unique and trusted and
build a competitive advantage.

Your PR efforts should include a good mix of the below:

Media coverage through press releases, media pitches,

and media outreach

Thought leadership initiatives, such as articles and in-

terviews in leading industry publications and channels,
speaking opportunities at top industry events, etc.

Participation in key offline events

Influencer engagement

High-Impact Creative PR Campaigns

A great way to generate great PR is to create innovative cam-
paigns and stories that journalists and publications would
love to cover, as it would help them engage their own audi-
ence better. You would want to brainstorm campaign ideas
that would work for your brand, along with your team and
agency.

A classic example of a creative campaign generating great

PR is sleep-solutions company Wakefit’s Sleep Internship
Program, where they launched a programme to hire interns
to sleep nine hours a day for 100 days and earn up to Rs. 10
lakhs. The company would then study their sleep patterns

132 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

and use them to build better products and solutions to help
people sleep better.

The programme, owing to it being out-of-the-box, helped

Wakefit get coverage in multiple leading publications in-
cluding Business Insider, NDTV, News18, Times of India and
India Today.

Apart from this, the Sleep Internship page also generated

nearly 500 backlinks from over 200 linking domains (Source:
Backlinks analysis of the page using Ahrefs tool), which is
great for SEO.

Overall, PR efforts are very helpful in getting your brand out

there and building your brand image. If you haven’t start-
ed out on your PR journey yet, hire a good PR agency early
on and work with them to plan and execute a robust PR
­strategy.

INFLUENCER MARKETING: BEST PRACTICES

You can leverage influencers in two different ways, as part of
your brand-building campaigns:

1. Leverage their creative content capabilities through

User Generated Creatives (UGC)

Most influencers are passionate content creators. They have

honed the skill of creating engaging content for their audi-
ence. Leveraging influencers to create video content for you
is a great and cost-effective way of generating creatives at

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 133

 scale. You can then use those creatives in your brand/perfor-
mance advertising campaigns.

2. Leverage their reach and credibility

Influencers also have a good number of followers who watch
their content and trust their recommendations. Getting an
influencer to talk about a brand and its products helps reach
the right audience and also adds some amount of credibili-
ty, especially if the influencer believes in the product them-
selves.

As part of your brand-building activities, you should be us-

ing both of the above approaches.

For the first approach, the final creative you receive from
the influencer might not tick all the creative best practices
we discussed earlier. In this case, ensure your team/agency
gives the finishing touches to it to spruce it up before you
take it live in your campaigns.

For the second approach, when it comes to leveraging the

influencers’ reach, follow the three R’s—Relevance, Reach
and Resonance.

Relevance
First, ensure the influencer is relevant to your category and
product and their content is in sync with your brand image
and ethos.

134 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

Reach
Next, for reach, ensure you analyse the influencer’s follow-
ing to check that their following is authentic.

This is because influencer marketing as an industry is

fraught with fraud. This Economic Times report (How Indi-
an influencers end up buying fake followers on Instagram)
on influencer fraud puts the percentage of Indian influenc-
ers impacted by fraud in some way or the other at over 40%!

Hence, when you shortlist influencers whose following you

want to engage with, ensure you check for what percentage
of the influencer’s followers are real, relevant humans.

Tools like Upfluence, Modash and Hypeauditor are very use-

ful in finding influencers with the maximum percentage of
authentic followers. While Upfluence’s chrome extension
currently does give follower analytics for free with a limited
number of reports per day (example below, with influenc-
er name blurred), you will need the paid version of Modash
and Hypeauditor to get the best out of them.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 135

 Influencer follower and engagement report generated us-
ing Upfluence’s chrome extension

Resonance

Ensure that the influencer’s content resonates with their

audience. Is their audience engaging with them meaning-
fully? The best way to check this is to check the quality and
authenticity of the comments. The Economic Times report
shared earlier states that over 30% of Indian influencers have
more than 30% inauthentic comments on their posts.

The influencer analytics tools mentioned above will also help

you check for engagement rates and engagement authen-
ticity and you should consider this when picking influencers
to work with.

136 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

In conclusion, influencer marketing can work well, if done
right. Ensure you follow all these best practices when work-
ing with influencers, especially when leveraging their reach
to drive awareness for your brand.

MEASURING THE IMPACT OF YOUR BRAND

CAMPAIGNS
With performance campaigns, where the “performance” is
directly linked to business results, you will know when they
are not working or dipping in efficiency.

However, with brand campaigns, where the only immedi-

ate metrics you get are activity metrics (like reach, frequen-
cy, impressions and CPM) and not outcome metrics how do
you know if they are doing well? How do you know they will
help drive the long-term impact that you are hoping the in-
vestment in them will bring?

For example, let’s say you ran a brand marketing campaign

for a month on an ad platform, to increase awareness. At the
end of the month, your agency comes back with a report
with the below KPIs:

Amount Spent Reach Impressions Frequency CPM

500,000 3,086,420 5,555,556 1.8 90

The above report says that your campaign reached three

million people about two times each on average.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 137

 Stop here for a minute and ask yourself, “Is this good or bad?
Was this campaign a success?”

Here are a few more examples of questions you should be

asking:

Out of the three million people you reached, how many

of them were real people?
This might sound like an absurd question to the unin-
formed, but ad fraud (where your ads are shown to bots
and not humans) is a massive problem in digital adver-
tising. If you just google “digital ad fraud”, you will un-
derstand how big an issue this is.

Out of the 5.5 million impressions of your ad, how many

of them were actually “seen”?
Impressions refer to the number of times your ad is
“served”. It does not mean that it has been “seen”. For
impressions that have a higher chance of being seen,
there is another digital advertising metric called “view-
able impressions”, which not every platform reports.

I could go on and on with questions like these, but you get

the drift.

Hence, you should never be satisfied with just Reach

and Frequency metrics or even click, view and traffic
metrics, as a true measure of brand campaign success.

138 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

That said, brand campaigns are intended to drive long-term
impact. Hence measuring the true impact in a short period
like a month will not be ideal or even practically possible.

However, some lead indicators will help you understand if

brand marketing is possibly working.

Brand Measurement Lead Indicators

1. Increase in brand search volume month-on-month

You can track your brand search volume data using ei-
ther Google Keyword Planner or your brand’s Google
Search Console Performance Report.

2. Increase in sales from direct traffic month-on-month

You can find this data on Google Analytics.

3. Improvement in Amazon Search Frequency Rank (SFR)

Amazon shares this data as part of the Brand Analytics
on Amazon Seller Central.

Note: Though these lead indicators will indicate your brand

is growing, it will be difficult to prove they are improving
due to a direct impact of certain brand marketing activities.
This will especially be the case if you are running multiple
brand marketing campaigns simultaneously. However, the
lead indicators can be used to check that your brand aware-
ness is moving in the right direction. And for an early-stage
brand, you should be aiming for a good positive movement
in these metrics month-on-month.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 139

 Share of Search for overall brand growth measurement
Though an increase in brand search volume in a month
where you ran a specific brand campaign can be an indica-
tor that your brand campaign had an impact, what you will
not know is your growth relative to the competition.

Share of search is a great metric that helps you track the

growth of your brand relative to all other brands in the cat-
egory. It is calculated by taking the total volume of all your
brand searches and dividing it by the total number of brand
searches for all brands in your category (including yours).

Where do you get this data from? Google Keyword Plan-

ner currently gives you monthly keyword volume data for
the last 48 months. And this data is super valuable not
just for calculating the share of search but for other as-
pects like new product development as well, which we
have covered earlier, in the chapter on product efficacy and
innovation.

How do you build a Share of Search dashboard?

1. Conduct detailed keyword research to find all the rel-

evant brand keywords for your brand and competitor
brands in that specific category
2. Export the historic monthly volume for these keywords
from Google Keyword Planner. The period for this data
will depend on how old your brand is. As mentioned,
you can export data for up to four years.
3. Sum up the volume of all your brand keywords (1)

140 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

4. Sum up the volume of all brand keywords in the cate-
gory, including yours (2)
5. Divide (1) by (2) to get your monthly share of the search

Share of Search as a lead indicator of market share

In his research study on Share of Search - a new way to track

brands & advertising, Les Binet, Group Head of Effectiveness,
adam&eveDDB has found Share of Search to be a leading
indicator of market share:

Source: Share of Search - a new way to track brands & ad-

vertising by Les Binet, 2020

If you would want to use Share of Search to estimate your

market share, you would need to use a 12-month Moving
Average (MA) of your total brand search volume.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 141

 The Share of Search formula in this case would be the
12-month MA of your brand, divided by the 12-month MA
of the total volume of all brands in the category. Using a
12-month MA helps smoothen out spikes that different
brands might have in their brand search volumes, in specif-
ic months, owing to various activities.

You can use the Share of Search, without the MA applied, to

check for correlation with brand campaigns you ran, while
you can use the Share of Search with the 12-month MA ap-
plied, for getting insight into your brand’s market share.

A couple of caveats to keep in mind while tracking the share

of search

If you are in a category, where you have a large num-

ber of brands with a strong offline presence, their on-
line searches might not be a fair representation of their
brand strength and market share. Hence, basing your
Share of Search on their data, especially since you are a
digital-first brand, may not be accurate and could mis-
lead.

You will need to update the brand search terms that

you have used in your calculations, every few months
as your brand and other brands in the category could
have launched new products, which users would start
searching for.

142 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

How to measure the causal impact of brand marketing?
Avinash Kaushik in one of his weekly newsletters, The Mar-
keting Analytics Intersect (TMAI) (which is probably the best
newsletter on marketing analytics) beautifully sums up two
broad approaches that are used to measure the causal im-
pact of brand marketing:
1. Survey-based
2. Quant-based

Let’s understand each one of these.

1. Survey-based
These are commonly called Brand Lift Studies or BLS and
are offered to brands by platforms like Google and Meta Ads
for campaigns that have met certain budget criteria (at the
time of publishing this blueprint, it is approximately Rs. four
lakhs per 10 days for a YouTube video campaign and about
Rs. 12 lakhs total account budget for the duration of the test
on Meta, though these numbers keep changing over time).

A simple overview of how a BLS works

The platform splits your target audience into two groups
namely, a control group and an exposed group. The exposed
group is shown your ads, while the control group is not. Later,
both groups are shown a survey to check brand recall. If, for
example, eight per cent of the exposed group recalled your
brand, while only five per cent of the control group did, that
would mean that your campaign drove an absolute brand
lift of three percentage points.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 143

 Brand lift studies will give you multiple outcome metrics—
absolute lift, relative lift, headroom lift, number of lifted us-
ers and cost-per-lifted-user. You can read more about these
metrics here to understand them better and be more in-
formed. As a result, you will be able to analyse your agency’s
brand measurement reports better and ask more relevant
questions.

For example, in a lot of agency brand campaign impact re-

ports, I have seen them report a lift as just an “18% lift in
consideration as an impact of the campaign”, with no men-
tion of whether it is absolute or relative. Now that you know
these metrics better, you will be able to ask them this ques-
tion, as an 18% absolute lift is totally different from an 18%
relative lift.

Overall, these brand lift study results are only platform-spe-

cific though and cannot measure cross-platform impact on
brand lift overall. Nevertheless, these results are better than
just going by activity metrics like reach and CPM to assess
the impact of the campaign.

2. Quant-based

Here, there are two broad frameworks:

Geo tests (also called Matched Market tests)

Media Mix Models

144 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

Geo Tests

Let’s say you are running brand marketing campaigns on

both YouTube and Meta and you want to know which one
is driving true brand impact. What you would do here is
you would pick two identical markets (matched markets).
You would take into account multiple factors here includ-
ing, market size, current revenue scale, possible competitor
activity, etc. That is because if the markets are not correct-
ly matched, the resulting comparison will not be apples to
­apples.

Next, in one market you would run only YouTube ads, while
in the other you would run YouTube + Meta. Now, you would
measure if the markets where Meta was running in addi-
tion to YouTube showed any incremental impact in terms
of revenue growth, over markets where only YouTube was
running.

That would give you a measure of the incremental impact

Meta brand ads were having.

Media Mix Models

These require a large volume of data points and consider-

able investment and may not be applicable to an early-stage
D2C brand. Hence, we will skip talking about it as part of this
blueprint.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 145

 KEY ACTION ITEMS SUMMARY
1. Brand marketing, when done right, helps you build a
strong competitive advantage over time. Therefore,
start investing in it as early as possible.
2. Creative plays a major role in brand campaign success.
Invest in strong creative and check each creative for
best practices.
3. Ensure your campaigns are achieving an optimal fre-
quency for maximum impact.
4. Ensure that you have defined your audience as sharply
as possible. It is better to start narrow and to help you
achieve your target frequency within your budget.
5. Run brand campaigns across channels to drive better
recall.
6. Invest in building a PR strategy early on. This will have mul-
tiple long-term benefits for the brand as well as for SEO.
7. When working with influencers to engage with their
following, ensure you use the three R’s namely, Reach,
Relevance and Resonance to shortlist the best options.
8. Measure the impact of brand marketing campaigns
with outcome metrics rather than activity metrics like
reach, frequency and traffic.
9. Build a Share of Search dashboard to correlate the im-
pact of your brand marketing activities as well as to es-
timate your market share.
10. Wherever possible, invest in measuring the causal im-
pact of brand campaigns through surveys, matched
market tests or media mix models.

146 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

C H A PT E R 1 1 :

SCALING AVERAGE
ORDER VALUE (AOV)
WHAT MAKES AOV A SUPER IMPORTANT
METRIC
Customer Acquisition Cost or CAC is largely a function of two
key factors:

Cost of advertising on a platform (platform CPM) and

The conversion rate on your site

Platform CPMs are almost completely beyond your control.

They rise with increased competition and with more and
more brands using these platforms to advertise, this is high-
ly unlikely to go down much anytime soon.

Conversion rates can only be optimised to a point (check

Chapter 12 of this blueprint for all that you can do to opti-
mise conversion rate), beyond which further optimisation
becomes slower.

Given this scenario, the CAC for most brands, in similar cat-
egories, lies in a similar range.

One of the most important ways then, that you can grow
revenue and maximise profit is by ensuring you are able to

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 147

 sell the most to the customer once you have acquired them.
In other words, the only way you can scale your brand sus-
tainably is by maximising your Lifetime Value (LTV).

We have covered LTV and its importance in the Chapter

on Unit Economics. To recap, LTV has three components—
Gross Margin, AOV and Repeat Rate. We will cover how to
scale retention (repeat purchase rate) in a later chapter. In
this chapter, we will focus on the most important actions
that will help you increase your AOV.

WHAT ACTIONS CAN YOU TAKE TO

SCALE YOUR AOV?
Based on all our experience with D2C brands, below are ac-
tions that we have seen work really well to increase AOV:

1. Scale your product portfolio

By adding more products and product categories to your
product portfolio, you are giving your customers multiple
product options to add to their cart, thereby increasing cart
value. Having more products also increases opportunities
for you to upsell and cross-sell during checkout, which also
helps scale AOV.

148 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

2. Increase the number of repeat customers
For most D2C brands, the AOV from repeat customers is
higher than the AOV from one-time customers. This is be-
cause repeat customers trust the brand and product more
and are open to buying more products and also higher-val-
ue products. Focusing on all the steps in a later chapter on
scaling retention will help you maximise your returning cus-
tomer rate and will have a positive impact on your overall
AOV.

3. Freebies/offers on minimum order value

Adding a Gift with Purchase (GWP) when the cart value
crosses a certain amount is a tried and tested strategy in
the offline retail world and works wonders to increase AOV.

When presented with the option to get a freebie or a dis-

count on a certain value, a good chunk of customers tries
to increase their cart value to avail the offer, thereby help-
ing you increase your AOV. Here’s an example of a site using
this strategy on their cart page, with a progress bar showing
them that they are only Rs. 126 away from getting a ‘buy-
one-get-one-free’ offer.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 149

150 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT
What you will have to keep in mind while planning this and
also ensuring it works in your favour is that the increase in
the cart value should more than offset the cost of the free-
bie or discount that you are offering.

While setting this up on your store, you can even consider a

tiered GWP structure, where the value of the free gift goes
up with the cart value

Apart from helping increase AOV, adding freebies also helps

increase the conversion rate in quite a few cases, thereby
having a positive impact on your CAC as well. Ensure you
take this into account when deciding whether the GWP
strategy is helping the business or not.

As a bonus, branded freebies that are utilitarian and attrac-

tive can also serve as a great way to drive brand visibility
amongst the target audience. For example, if you sell protein
supplements and you give out a cool branded gym bottle as
a freebie, you are getting additional visibility amongst the
right target audience, when your customer takes the free-
bie with them to the gym. Hence, strategically choosing the
right freebies that strike a chord can serve as a great growth
hack as well.

4. Bundle products and offer discounts on them

If you do not have multi-packs and combo packs on your
site, then as mentioned in the first chapter on the product,
you must add these as soon as you can.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 151

 Once added, offer discounts on high-value packs and high-
light them so they are clearly visible. When customers see
they are getting more value from a multi-pack/combo-pack
the chances of them going with it are higher, thereby in-
creasing AOV.

5. Add upsell and cross-sell product recommendations

Adding relevant product recommendations on the product

page as well as the cart page can help customers quickly
find relevant products that they have missed out on, and
add them to the cart.

Irrespective of which e-commerce platform (Shopify, Woo-

commerce, etc.) you are on, there are apps and plugins avail-
able to help you build this functionality. You can also choose
to build this in-house if you have a strong tech person or
agency.

These are five tactics that we have tried, tested and seen
work well for most D2C brands. Apart from these, there are
other tactics as well such as having a minimum AOV for free
shipping and having a loyalty rewards program that incen-
tivises higher-value purchases with more rewards/cashback,
which you can try out.

Ensure you are constantly working on AOV improvement as

that will put you on the path to profitability faster.

152 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

KEY ACTION ITEMS SUMMARY
1. Average Order Value is one of the key components of
your customer’s Lifetime Value (LTV). Hence maximis-
ing AOV is key to scaling your brand sustainably.
2. Implement as many of the actions discussed in this
chapter to increase the AOV on your store.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 153

 C H A PT E R 1 2 :

OPTIMISING STORE
CONVERSION RATES
WHY IS CONVERSION RATE OPTIMISATION
(CRO) A KEY SUCCESS FACTOR FOR A
D2C BRAND?

Conversion Rate is a key success factor for a

D2C brand as it has a direct impact on your CAC.

To explain this importance with an example, let’s say your

cost of advertising to bring 1,00,000 visitors to your site in a
month is Rs. 12 lakhs. Now, let’s take two scenarios:

Scenario 1: Three Per cent Conversion Rate

With a three per cent conversion rate, you will acquire 3,000
customers. (three per cent of 1,00,000 visitors)

Hence your CAC is 400 (Rs. 12L divided by 3,000)

154 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

Scenario 2: Four Per cent Conversion Rate
With a four per cent conversion rate, you will acquire 4,000
customers.

Hence your CAC here is 300 (Rs. 12 lakhs divided by 4,000)

Increasing your conversion rate by just one percentage point

from three per cent to four per cent can help reduce your
CAC by 25%. So you are getting 25% more returns from the
same number of visitors and the same budget. This makes
conversion rate optimisation a key growth lever.

WHAT ARE THE KEY FACTORS INFLUENCING

CONVERSION RATE?
There are two key elements that would impact your conver-
sion rate:

Your store

The audience in the store

This whole chapter in the blueprint is devoted to the first el-

ement, which is how you can improve the conversion rate in
your store. However, what a lot of people miss out on when
analysing conversion rate trends is the “audience” factor.
Let’s understand this with an example.

Let’s say your e-commerce conversion rate for your website

has been constantly in the range of three to 3.5% month-on-
month, over the past year.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 155

 In the most recent month, you ran a brand awareness campaign
which brought in a large number of new visitors who came to
your site to check your brand out, but with no clear intention to
buy. Your conversion rate this month dropped to 2.4%.

Does this mean that something has gone wrong with your
store this month? Well, most likely no. You should segment
your traffic data by campaign and see if the conversion
rates for all campaigns excluding brand awareness are in-
tact. And also if the conversion rate for the brand awareness
campaigns is quite low (which will most likely be the case).

Hence in the example above, the conversion rate dipped,

but not due to the store. It dipped due to a part of the audi-
ence in the store not being primed to buy yet.

Let’s look at one more example.

When you have a larger percentage of repeat vs new cus-
tomers in a certain month, you will see the conversion rate
rise. This is because repeat customers generally convert bet-
ter than first-timers and need not have anything to do with
store optimization as such.

Key learning
Whenever you see changes in your conversion rate, deep
dive into your campaigns and various traffic sources to un-
derstand what is causing the change. This will help you un-
derstand if the problem is with the audience from a specific
campaign or with the store itself, so you can take corrective
action accordingly.

156 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

With this concept clear, we will focus on what you can do to
turbocharge conversions from your store.

WHAT STORE OPTIMISATIONS CAN HELP

YOU INCREASE YOUR CONVERSION RATE?

1. Optimise (and keep optimising) your Product Display P

­ ages
(PDP)
In an offline store, there are sales people to guide you on
the benefits of a product and help you make a purchase de-
cision. In your online store, your product page is your sales
person and has to do its job really well. How you structure
this page and communicate product benefits will directly
impact how many visitors purchase your product.

Here are a few key best practices to ensure your PDPs con-
vert well:

Use high-quality images and videos to help users better

visualise the product

Give detailed product descriptions, with clearly articu-

lated product features/ingredients and benefits

Focus more on benefits (emotional reasons to buy) vs

just features (logical/rational reasons to buy)

Ensure the content is simple, easy to understand and

helps users understand what’s in it for them and how
the product is the best solution for their current need

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 157

 Check if all the variants of the product, such as colour,
size, etc. are easy to view and access

If you are in the apparel and footwear space, ensure you

have an easy-to-access size chart/size guide

Keep the layout clean and simple and avoid clutter

Ensure your Call to Action (CTA) is visible on the first fold

on mobile

Add an FAQs section to ensure customers can get com-

mon questions answered

Ensure you have customer reviews and testimonials in-

cluded. This builds trust

Optimise your PDP for mobile. Most brand teams tend

to check sites on their laptops while they are at work.
This is not how consumers access the site. For most D2C
brands, over 90% of consumers access the site from mo-
bile devices. Hence, ensure that all the information on
your PDP is easy to consume on mobile.

2. Improve the loading speed of all your pages

No one likes to wait for a slow-loading page, and research

has shown that even a one-second delay in page load time
can lead to a 7% reduction in conversions.

You might ask, “So, what’s a good load time?” Well, the best
way to check if your site is loading fast enough is to use Goo-
gle’s Page Speed Insights tool to check the speed of all your

158 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

top pages (particularly all your top PDPs) and benchmark
the results with the product pages of the best websites in
your industry. Then work with your tech team/agency to op-
timise your pages to beat the benchmark.

Another thing you will want to check here is if you have too
many apps or plugins on your site that you don’t use any-
more. These contribute to slowing down your site and can
be removed. In fact, it is good to do plugins check at least
once every three months and remove unnecessary ones.

You might also have some plugins that are extremely use-
ful yet slow down your site. In this scenario, you might want
to work with your developer/agency and do a cost-benefit
analysis to see if replacing the plug-in by coding the func-
tionality on your site would be more advantageous in the
long term.

3. Make it easy and quick for consumers to find what they want

The quicker a customer can find the product they want, the
better your conversion rate.

We live in a world where attention spans are small and dis-

tractions are many. You want your customer to find what
they want and checkout as soon as possible before distrac-
tions come in the way.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 159

 Here are some simple points to implement on your site:

Make your navigation simple and intuitive.

Ensure the search bar/button is prominent and easy to

find

Enhance your website search experience to help cus-

tomers find the right product quickly

4. Avoid deviating from the norm

Over the course of time, some items of navigation in an on-
line store have become somewhat standardised. For exam-
ple, the menu button on mobile is usually on the top left,
the search bar is usually somewhere on the top right, and
the cart button is usually on the top right or bottom right.

Most people intuitively navigate websites looking for these

buttons in their usual places. Deviating from the norm usu-
ally breaks the flow, adds more friction and makes the user
interface less intuitive, thereby negatively impacting con-
version rates.

You might argue that we could test these and see if it works
better, but there are so many other things that you should
test before getting to this. If you have tested all of those and
super-optimised your conversion rates, you can get to test
this as well. Until then, stick to what others have already
tried and tested.

160 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

5. Ensure you have a WhatsApp chatbot and customer sup-
port agent
The e-commerce conversion rate for most online stores is
just about three per cent to four per cent. Compare this
with conversion rates in offline stores which are much high-
er. Though there are multiple reasons for this, one of the
key reasons is the lack of a person to guide the customer to
quickly find what they are looking for.

This is where WhatsApp chatbots and customer support

agents make a whale of a difference, giving the customer
the option to ask a question or get help during a purchase,
which adds a conversational element to your store and helps
improve conversion rates.

While the chatbot can be programmed to answer the most

common questions, the customer support agent can help
answer more complex or personalised questions. The agent
could also get on a quick call with the customer, where re-
quired, to clarify their doubts and close the sale.

The massive improvement in conversions generated through

this conversational marketing generally offsets the addition-
al cost of having a larger customer support and sales team.
There are many tools such as Wati, Zoko and QuickReply
that can help you get this up and running pretty quickly.

6. Offer free shipping and free returns

Free shipping and free returns are two of the most effec-
tive ways to increase conversions, as they eliminate a major

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 161

 barrier to purchase for many consumers. If you can’t offer
free shipping, consider offering it for orders over a certain
amount or certain products.

7. Optimise and simplify your checkout process

A complicated or lengthy checkout process can be a major
deterrent for shoppers. Make sure to streamline your check-
out process as much as possible:

Ensure the checkout process is optimised for mobile

devices

Reduce the number of steps in the process. Go through

your flow and look for steps that you can skip. For exam-
ple, there may be an additional form field to fill that is
either redundant or information that you can afford to
let go of to increase purchases.

Ensure you have all popular payment options available

Avoid any hidden costs that customers get to know of

only on the checkout page

Having a social login/OTP login helps

Using one-click checkout tools like Gokwik or Zecpe or

Shopflo has a marked impact on conversion rates. These
tools autofill customer data such as addresses based on
information in their database and make the checkout
princess absolutely seamless and super quick.

162 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

8. Add reviews and testimonials
Apart from adding reviews to your product pages, it is good
to have a testimonials section or testimonials page on your
site where you can keep adding all your video customer tes-
timonials. This page could also be used as a landing page
for search ad campaigns targeting people searching for
keywords like “<your brand> reviews” or “<your product> re-
views”.

9. Always be testing
Building a culture of constant testing and experimentation
in the organisation is key to the success of any business to-
day. Though we are talking about testing various elements
of your store in this particular section, you should ensure
that you are experimenting across all possible areas such as
audiences, creatives, communication, marketing channels,
etc. to find the best option to drive better results.

We have covered the importance of testing and how you

can go about it from a performance marketing standpoint,
in an earlier chapter, along with a basic testing framework
that you can apply here as well.

A combination of heat mapping and behaviour analytics

tools like Microsoft Clarity or Hotjar with A/B testing and
multivariate testing tools like VWO can help you set yourself
up for testing success. Use the heat mapping tools to un-
derstand user behaviour in your store and identify testing
opportunities. Here are some examples to give you an idea

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 163

 of what you could test:

Rearrange certain sections of your product page. For

example, move the customer testimonial videos section
slightly higher up and see if this helps the page convert
better

Test introducing scarcity on the PDP with “Only 5 left in

stock” and see if it boosts conversions

Test adding a Search icon vs a Search bar

Test various CTA button placements, sizes and colours

Experiment with different sets of product videos, imag-

es and titles to see what converts best

These are just a small sample of all that you can ideate and
test. You can start by making a list of what is most relevant
to your store.

Next, you need to prioritise the tests based on what would

possibly drive the highest business impact. For that, you can
use the AB testing tools to set up these tests and find win-
ners.

Rinse and Repeat this process and you will see your con-
version rate grow over time, with a corresponding positive
impact on ROI.

164 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

KEY ACTION ITEMS SUMMARY
1. Conversion rate has a direct impact on your custom-
er acquisition cost (CAC) and is a key growth lever. You
need to ensure you are paying attention to this metric
and working to increase it.
2. Apart from your store, another key factor impacting
conversion rate is the quality of the audience coming
to the store. When troubleshooting conversion rates,
never do so at the aggregate level, instead always break
down the data by channel, source, etc. to figure out the
cause.
3. To maximise your conversion rate, it is important to im-
plement all the relevant optimisations mentioned in
this Chapter.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 165

 C H A PT E R 1 3 :

SEARCH ENGINE
­O PTIMISATION (SEO)
Let’s start with being honest here, Search Engine Optimis-
ation (SEO) is not going to play a major role in helping you
ramp up to 10,000 orders a month within a year of starting
up. Instead, SEO is a long-term activity that takes time to
show results.

However, if you are a brand that aspires to go from 10,000

to 1,00,000 to 5,00,000 orders a month, then you must start
investing in SEO as early on as possible. For that purpose,
you may hire an SEO freelancer or an SEO agency and get
work started on all three key areas of SEO, which are On-
page SEO, technical SEO and off-page SEO.

Getting into the details on each aspect of SEO will require

a dedicated blueprint just for SEO, and is beyond the scope
of this work. However, below are some key areas in SEO for
you to work on. I have also included links to resources and
checklists to help you get into the detail of each.

ENSURE YOU HAVE GOT YOUR KEYWORD

RESEARCH RIGHT AS A FIRST STEP
Work with your SEO team or agency and create a detailed
keyword research document for the brand overall and for
each product.

166 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

1. Brainstorm keywords:
Brainstorm all possible relevant keywords to include, across
three types of customer intent, namely, informational, inves-
tigational/commercial and transactional.

Informational intent keywords are people looking for infor-

mation about your product or information related to the
category to which your product belongs. Let’s say you are
selling headphones. Some examples of informational intent
keywords here would be the following:

Do headphones impact hearing?

How long should you wear headphones daily?

Headphones or earphones, which are safer?

What are noise-cancelling headphones?

Investigational/commercial intent keywords indicate a us-

er’s interest in purchasing a product belonging to a partic-
ular category. Some examples of investigational intent key-
words are as follows:

Brand A headphone reviews

Brand A headphones vs Brand B headphones

wireless headphones vs wired headphones

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 167

 Transactional intent keywords are queries with a clear intent
to make a purchase. Some examples of the same are as fol-
lows::

“buy headphones online”

“headphones on sale”

“headphones under 500”

2. Analyze the keywords:

Next, analyse the keywords by their

search volume

competition/ranking difficulty

traffic potential (this is different from search volume.

Not all high-volume searches result in high traffic. For
example, searches like “weather in London” are high vol-
ume but will result in very little traffic to the listings the
answer can be found on the search result page itself).

Keyword value (average Cost-Per-Click for that keyword,

if you had to rank for it in paid search)

This data is available in most SEO tools like Ahrefs, Moz or

SEMRush.

3. Prioritise keywords to target:

Prioritise your target keywords based on a combination of

the above metrics, keeping your short and long-term ob-

168 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

jectives in mind, and work towards ranking in the top three
positions for these keywords.

Though you might want to focus only on transactional intent

keywords, optimising for informational intent and commer-
cial intent as well would help you build relevant links and in-
crease your authority and trust in the category, which will in
turn help with getting your transactional keywords to rank.

For a more detailed understanding of the keywords research

process and how you can find the right keywords to priori-
tise and target, you will find this guide useful.

COMPLETE ALL BASIC ON-PAGE AND

TECHNICAL SEO OPTIMISATION
Implement all on-page optimisations listed below:

Optimise your page titles, with relevant priority key-

words from your keyword research document. It is im-
portant to make your title unique and compelling, to
improve your click-through-rate (CTR) on the search
page.

Ensure you have a compelling keyword-optimised de-

scription as well

Keep your URLs short and include your target keyword

here as well

Include target keywords in your heading tags, particu-

larly the h1 tag

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 169

 Optimise your image sizes and include relevant key-
words in the image alt tags

Improve the user experience on all top pages:

Ensure mobile-friendliness and quick load time
Work on intuitive navigation
Ensure the search functionality is good and users
can quickly find what they are looking for in your
store

Follow this on-page SEO actions checklist to help you en-

sure you have it all covered. Also, ensure that you have cov-
ered all your SEO basics as per this checklist and also have
your technical SEO in place as per this checklist.

HAVE A ROBUST BLOG CONTENT PLAN

Start investing in high-quality long-form content that com-
prehensively answers questions your users could have
throughout their purchase journey. It is important to ensure
your content caters to all three types of search intent cov-
ered above and helps guide the consumer from being prob-
lem unaware to problem aware to solution aware.

For that purpose, you can use tools like AnswerThePublic

and AlsoAsked to find questions that your customers have
on multiple related topics and create content that answers
these questions in-depth. If you want to be successful at
SEO, make sure that the content you put out is 10 times bet-
ter than the best answer to that question that is currently
there on the internet. Anything else will not cut it.

170 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

This article will give you more information on what 10x con-
tent is and what are the best practices for it. And here’s a
content checklist for other key points to keep in mind.

How do you win the content game amidst an ava-

lanche of AI-generated content?
With the massive growing adoption of ChatGPT and so
many other AI-content writing tools out there, the volume
of content that is being created is increasing exponential-
ly. For centuries, we have always needed a good amount of
input effort to create content. AI tools today create content
output with near-zero effort, resulting in a flood of content,
mostly rehashing the same information in different ways.

To win in an age of AI-generated content, you have to cre-

ate content that is of much higher quality than what AI can
generate today.

Here’s what you should be asking yourself for

every content piece you put out on your website:
what additional value is your content adding to
the user, and what new information is it providing?

If you are just researching the internet and collating infor-

mation in one place, that is something an AI tool can do in
a few minutes. Here are three possible ways you can add

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 171

 ­ dditional value through your content that AI-generated
a
content cannot do (yet):
1. Write research-backed content. This should ideally be
credible and concrete primary or secondary research
which is exclusive and cannot be accessed by an AI-tool.
2. Write thoughtful content, sharing personal opinions
and practical experiences. This blueprint, for example,
is content that is a sharing of rich practical experiences,
which an AI cannot generate, at least at the moment.
3. Build unique interactive experiences into your content

INITIATE AND SCALE LINK BUILDING

Link building is still key to SEO success. It is important to fo-
cus on the quality of links and not just quality.

How to go about building quality links is a massive topic and

cannot be covered in full in this chapter on SEO. Here are
some great articles that you could use to get you and your
team started on this:

Guide to Link Building for SEO

How to Get Backlinks (15 Quick and Simple Strategies)

GET YOUR DIGITAL PR ENGINE RUNNING

We have covered digital PR activities in the chapter on brand
building and talked about how it helps build credibility and
trust for the brand. A robust digital PR strategy helps work
wonders for SEO as well.

172 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

To reiterate what we have already covered, here’s how digi-
tal PR helps SEO and why it is so important to get this going
right away:

1. Digital PR helps build brand authority and trust

Getting coverage in various online publications generates

a large number of unlinked brand mentions. The more the
brand mentions that Google finds when crawling the web,
the more authority and trust the brand garners which does
have a positive indirect impact on your SEO in the long-term.

2. Digital PR helps build links and improve domain authority

A good number of your PR coverages will also result in links

from publications in your category as well as from news
sites. These sites generally have high domain authority and
these links help a lot with building the link profile and au-
thority for your site.

A CHECKLIST TO SUM UP ALL KEY ACTIONS

FOR SEO SUCCESS
If you are looking for an SEO checklist that beautifully sums
up all you would need to do, here’s a great consolidated one
from the team at Ahrefs.

How to track improvement in your SEO efforts?

There are multiple metrics that you can track when it comes
to SEO, however, as a business leader, you only need to track
the most important Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that
matter to the business:

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 173

 1. Growth in revenue from organic search
2. Growth in traffic from organic search
3. Growth in non-branded traffic from organic search:

This is one of the most neglected SEO KPIs. As you build your
brand, your brand search volumes will grow, resulting in a
steady growth in your organic traffic. This growth is driven
largely by your overall brand-building efforts, and not much
from your SEO efforts.

Most SEO agencies will show you the growth in overall organ-
ic traffic, without discounting the impact of branded search-
es. Measuring the growth in your traffic from non-branded
queries (this data can be estimated from your Google Search
Console) will show you the true impact of your SEO efforts.

4. Improvement in keyword rankings for all your target

keywords, month-on-month

While the four metrics above would be your primary KPIs or

north-star metrics, you will also need to track secondary met-
rics like your number of high-quality backlinks, high-quality
referring domains and domain authority.

You would have received an SEO dashboard template along

with the purchase of this blueprint which will help you get
started with your SEO measurement. You can then tweak
and customise the dashboard for yourself as you go along.

SEO is a slow long-term process. While revenue and traffic

numbers might show slower growth month-on-month, you
should see at least some positive movement in the rankings

174 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

for most of your target keywords month-on-month. This,
combined with improvement in your backlink profile, are
leading indicators and once they start to move in the right
direction, your traffic and revenue will follow as well.

You must review these metrics and KPIs at least once a

month to ensure your SEO efforts are moving in the right
direction. In case these KPIs are not showing desired move-
ment, you will need to work with your SEO team and agency
and deep-dive into your SEO efforts to analyse what’s not
working and take corrective steps.

KEY ACTION ITEMS SUMMARY

1. SEO is a long-term growth activity that takes time to
show results. Start investing in SEO as early as possible,
ideally in the first few months of the business.
2. Keyword research is crucial for SEO. Ensure your team
has done this exercise right.
3. Do an on-page and technical SEO audit of your site and
make a list of things to fix.
4. Invest in a content strategy and create 10x content. In-
clude elements in your content that will help you add
more value to your customer and help stay ahead of
AI-generated content.
5. Initiate link-building efforts and scale them.
6. Initiate digital PR campaigns to help with links and
brand mentions.
7. Monitor your SEO progress every month and track KPIs
that matter to business.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 175

 C H A PT E R 1 4 :

RETENTION
Customer retention is the lifeblood of a D2C business.

For most D2C businesses, especially those with AOV < Rs.
2,000, you will not be able to sustain the business and drive
profitability if you are not able to generate repeat purchases.

The cost of retaining a customer for a D2C brand is much

lower than acquiring a new customer.

Your Lifetime Value (LTV) is a direct function of your repeat

rate. The higher the repeat rate, the higher the LTV and the
higher your LTV to CAC ratio, resulting in a quicker road to
profitability.

HOW DO YOU MEASURE RETENTION?

The most common metric to measure retention is the repeat
purchase rate—the number of repeat purchase customers
divided by the total number of customers in that time peri-
od. This number is reported by most e-commerce analytics
platforms.

The ideal monthly repeat purchase rate would vary from

category to category but on average, a repeat purchase rate
of 20 to 25% would be considered good (as long as you are
in the growth phase and are growing your new (first-time)
customers by at least 25% to 40% m/m).

176 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

One challenge with tracking only the repeat purchase rate
as a retention metric is that it will fluctuate depending on
your new customer acquisition growth rate. For example, if
in a certain month, you had to slow down on new customer
acquisition while keeping the repeat users intact, your re-
peat rate for that month will shoot up.

To overcome this, it is always good to also measure the growth

in your absolute number of repeat customers, month-on-
month. If you are doing well on retention, this metric should
be growing at least at the same pace if not faster than your
monthly new customer growth.

So, what can you do to ensure a large chunk of your custom-

ers keeps coming back?

D2C RETENTION: KEY PILLARS

There are three key pillars that help drive retention for D2C
brands:

1. Product
2. Customer Experience (CX)
3. Retention Marketing

Let’s look at each one of these in detail.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 177

 RETENTION PILLAR 1: PRODUCT-LED
RETENTION
The biggest pull for a customer to come back to you is a
great product—a product they love so much that they want
more of it.

The more awesome your product, the lesser effort

you will have to put into retention marketing.

You will still need effort. Just that if your product does the
biggest part of the job, you will not need to push too hard
on retention tactics.

And of course, it goes without saying, as mentioned in the

non-negotiables section of the blueprint, if your product is
not up to the mark, no amount of retention tactics will
help!

So, as a D2C brand, what do you do?

1. Focus on getting constant customer feedback

Keep getting customer feedback on your products.
Read customer reviews, talk to customers, tap into cus-
tomer support chats—know the pulse of the customers
and what they feel about your product. Then, you can
use the feedback to improve your product efficacy.

178 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

2. Do not overpromise and under deliver
A lot of brands over promise in marketing communica-
tion to drive customer acquisition. Though this might
help get more new customers, it will have a negative im-
pact on retention as the customer’s expectations were
much higher based on what they were promised. But
since the product does not meet those expectations, it
will result in disappointment and lower chances of re-
peat purchases. Therefore, it is crucial to ensure that you
communicate the benefits clearly but don’t over-prom-
ise on them.

3. Innovate, innovate, innovate

Invest in product innovation and portfolio expansion to
facilitate effective upselling and cross-selling to existing
customers. Some of the most successful D2C brands
have been sharply focussing on new product research
and development and have expanded their product
catalogues at a rapid pace. You should set up your R&D
engine to launch at least one or two new products
that your customers need and will love, every couple of
months. The pace of innovation will vary depending on
your category, but you get the idea.

The faster you grow your product portfolio, the more op-
tions your customers will have to choose from and they will
have reason to come back to you more than once. With only
a handful of products, they will have to wait till the product
is exhausted before they come back. Hence, adding more
products improves the chances of repeat purchases.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 179

 Go back to the first Chapter of this blueprint, re-read it and
implement all the action items on product efficacy and in-
novation, if you have not already done so. That will put you
on track to getting the most out of your product-led cus-
tomer retention strategy.

RETENTION PILLAR 2: CUSTOMER

EXPERIENCE (CX) LED RETENTION
Your opportunity to wow your customers does not end with
your product. Customers come back not only for the prod-
uct but also for the end-to-end shopping experience associ-
ated with the product—right from shopping in your store to
delivery to unboxing to customer support.

In fact, a great customer experience not only helps retain a

customer but can also convert customers into brand loyal-
ists and advocates.

Think of every touch point between you and the

customer on their purchase journey. How can you
enhance their experience throughout?

180 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

Here are some key action items for each stage:

Store experience
1. Make it quick and easy for the customer to find what
they want and complete their purchase
2. Do your product pages make it super easy for custom-
ers to find answers to all queries they might have about
the product?
3. Is the checkout process smooth, with as few steps as
practically possible?
4. Is there an option to chat or speak to a customer sup-
port representative if they have any further queries on
the product which the PDP does not clarify?

Go back to the Chapter on CRO and implement all the ac-

tion items there, to enhance your store experience.

Delivery experience
1. Does your customer get notified across email, SMS and
WhatsApp for each step of the delivery process—order
confirmed, order delivered, order shipped?
2. Are the above messages that you sent just plain-Jane
templates with information or do they have some cre-
ativity built into them that sets your message apart
from all the other similar notification messages that
your customers must be receiving?

For example, you can make your order confirmation mes-

sage stand out by adding a nice ‘thank you’ video from the
founder thanking the customer for their purchase. You could
try humour with some of your messages as well, depending

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 181

 on your brand personality.

3. Always deliver on your delivery promise and ensure the

delivery is as quick as possible

Unboxing experience
The unboxing experience can also be a great differentiator for
any brand and more so for brands in the premium segment.
1. Start with your packaging—ensure you have put enough
thought into the kind of packaging you use. For exam-
ple, if your product is premium, then is your packaging
premium as well?
2. Does the package arrive in exactly the same condition
as it was dispatched? Sometimes outer packaging that
looks great on dispatch becomes damaged by the time
it reaches the customer.
3. Is your packaging in sync with what most of your cus-
tomers care about? For example, do a lot of your custom-
ers care about plastic neutrality or plastic-free packag-
ing? If yes, are you providing them with the experience
they care for, with your packaging?
4. Surprise them when they unbox. Here are multiple ways
you can do this. And this is not an exhaustive list since
you can get as creative as you want!
a.  Add a nice note from the founder thanking them
for their purchase
b.  Where possible, add a small surprise gift that they
definitely were not expecting (This may not work
for all brands but might work for brands in the pre-

182 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

 mium space or for high-value orders).
c. Include a free sample of your latest product

Post-purchase experience
For products that require installations or that require to be
used in a certain way to get the best results, the quality of
support and guidance you provide will make a massive dif-
ference to the impact the product is able to create.

Many a time, a product is really good, but users do not know

how to get the best out of it.

In a specific case of one of our clients, who were selling a

weight loss pack as one of their products, they were getting
a lot of negative feedback saying that the product wasn’t
delivering as promised. On digging deeper, we found that
the customers were not following the diet and exercise re-
gime that was needed for the product to work.

What we then did was we started sending a “How to get the best
out of this product” email and WhatsApp message, the day the
order got delivered. Customers who followed the recommen-
dations saw excellent results from the product resulting in not
just an improvement in overall feedback for the product, but
also an increase in the repeat purchase rate for the product.

Another good practice is to include a package insert card,

with a QR code, that will help people with the installation of
the product (where it requires self-installation), or with how
to get the best out of the product.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 183

 Customer support experience
Customers will reach out to you for support multiple times
during their journey:

Pre-purchase product queries

Delivery related queries

Post-purchase product queries, issues and returns

How do you ensure you are giving them a great customer

support experience?

Turnaround Time (TAT)

Try and keep the TAT down to one working hour. This might
sound like an extremely challenging TAT for an early-stage
brand, but if you want to build a top-notch customer sup-
port experience that will differentiate your brand from the
rest, then this is the TAT to aim for.

Most customers today are used to getting everything at

lightning speed (15-minute grocery deliveries for instance).
In such a scenario, waiting for hours and sometimes days
to get a response from a brand is definitely not something
that would meet their expectations.

It may not be feasible for an early-stage brand to have 24x7

customer support. If a message comes outside of working
hours, ensure that you have an auto-response that says
something along the lines of “Thank you for reaching out to
us. Our customer support working hours are from nine am

184 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

to six pm, Monday to Saturday. Please do share your query
here, and we’ll get in touch with you as soon as possible.”
And no, this automated response does not count towards
your TAT.

All queries that have come outside of working hours must

be responded to on priority by the customer support team
as soon as they are back to work the next day.

Invest in a strong customer support team

This team will not only help you with driving retention by
providing customers with a great support experience but
can also be a strong revenue generation channel. They can
convert customers who are sitting on the fence by answer-
ing queries and clarifying doubts that they would have about
the product, similar to how sales executives do so in offline
stores.

Ensure everyone who is in your customer support team

has great communication skills—both spoken and written;

is a people person;

is high energy (a dull unenergetic voice at the other end

is not a great first impression); and

is empathetic and can put themselves into the custom-

ers’ shoes and understand how they are feeling in a par-
ticular situation.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 185

 Optimise resolution times

Solve the customers’ problems as fast as you can. Track your

time to the first response and your time to resolution. Opti-
mise this time as you go along.

In cases where the problem is clearly from the brand’s side—

let’s say for example that the customer received a product
that was damaged—ensure that you do everything you can
to make things right. Never ask them to foot the return cost
in situations like this. I have seen brands do this and that
just makes the situation worse when the customer has to
pay for no fault of their own.

People rarely forget how you make them feel:

Always remember - people rarely forget

how you made them feel! If you want to be a brand
that is not forgotten easily, make your customers
feel loved, make them feel valued, and make
them feel special!

And do this at every possible opportunity you have - at every

step of their journey with you - from your store to delivery to
unboxing to customer support.

186 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

And you will see this work wonders with your brand percep-
tion, your customer retention and eventually your profitabil-
ity as a business.

RETENTION PILLAR 3: RETENTION

MARKETING
While you ensure that your product experience and overall
customer experience are the absolute best, remember that
customers are busy with their day-to-day lives. And if you
do not stay top-of-mind for them, they might still forget you
and end up switching to another brand.

Here’s where retention marketing comes in.

Retention marketing largely comprises two parts:

1. Building brand salience

2. Marketing automation nudges
Let’s look at both.

1. Building brand salience

How does building brand salience help retention?

In the world we live in today, customers are spoilt for choice.

There are hundreds of products to choose from and hun-
dreds of new brands to explore, in each category.

Running brand marketing campaigns to ensure top-of-

mind recall even for past customers helps ensure that when
the customer thinks of your category, they definitely have
your brand in the consideration set.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 187

 We have covered brand marketing and how you should go
about it in an earlier chapter of this blueprint. Implement-
ing all the action items there will help you not just attract
new customers but retain existing ones as well.

2. Marketing automation nudges

Sending timely relevant and personalised communication

to customers across relevant channels - email, SMS and
WhatsApp is another way to stay in touch with them and
get them to make repeat purchases.

There are two broad ways you can do this:

A. Setting up automated journeys

B. Broadcasts

A. Setting up automated journeys

Automated journeys, if done right, can be a great way to

drive retention and revenue, while saving you time.

What lies at the core of getting automating journeys right

is two things—creating relevant audience segments and
communicating the right message to those segments.

Below are some examples of segments and communica-

tions that work for most D2C brands. You can use this as a
reference and apply what’s relevant to your brand, as well as
create other similar segments that could work for you.

188 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

Automation
Objective Customer Segment Messaging
­Journey
Welcome flow Increase purchas- Subscribers who haven’t A creative welcome mes-
es from new users made a purchase yet sage with an exclusive
who have created discount for first-time
an account, but customers
have not pur-
chased yet.

Abandoned cart Recover aban- Customers who have A first message with a
flow doned carts added products to their reminder to complete
cart but haven’t com- the purchase.
pleted their purchase yet

If not purchased after

the first message, a
second message, after
a preset time duration,
with a discount code
Reorder remind- Increase repeat Existing customers who A first message with a
er flow purchase rate have not ordered in a reminder to reorder the
preset time duration product.
(depending on when
the product is likely to
get used up), excluding If not purchased after
those to whom the Up- the first message, a
sell Flow has been sent second message, after
recently a preset time duration,
with a discount code
Cross-sell flow Increase LTV Existing customers, who Showcase other prod-
have recently made a ucts that are usually
purchase bought with the product
most recently purchased
Upsell flow Increase LTV Existing customers who Showcase higher value
have ordered single packs/combos of prod-
packs of a product, ucts, highlighting the
which are likely to get higher savings on these
used up by now packs
Post-purchase Educate customers Customers who have Instructions on how to
flow on getting the best just received delivery of get the best results with
out of the product the product the product

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 189

 Automation
Objective Customer Segment Messaging
­Journey
Customers who haven’t
made a purchase in a
Share new products,
Dormant cus- Re-engage inactive while (inactivity duration
new offers and customer
tomer series customers much larger than the
testimonials
duration of the Reorder
Reminder Segment)
Ask for feedback on
their experience, offer a
discount code for com-
Post-purchase Garner feedback Customers who have
pleting a survey, and use
feedback flow from customers made a recent purchase
feedback to improve the
product and customer
experience

Apart from this, you can also create Recency-Frequen-

cy-Monetary Value (RFM) segments, which are covered in
detail in a later chapter on data infrastructure.

Multiple tools help you set up automated flows. If your store

is on Shopify, you could get started with Shopify Automa-
tions, a feature which a lot of brands tend to not use to its
fullest potential. Once you have explored and set up the
relevant ready automation templates in Shopify Automa-
tion, you can even connect it with external WhatsApp plat-
forms like Wati, to get the Shopify automation to trigger a
WhatsApp message.

For sites built on other platforms, you could use inbuilt auto-
mation flow apps/plug-ins as well as other tools like Klaviyo
for email and Wati/Zoko/Quickreply for WhatsApp.

You could even explore full-fledged customer engagement

tools like Clevertap or Webengage. However, whichever tool

190 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

or set of tools you go with, ensure you get the fundamen-
tals of segmentations and communication right. If this is
missing, then no tool, however fancy and feature-rich it is,
will be able to add enough value. Spend enough time with
your team at the design stage to ensure you have crafted
the journeys right.

B. Broadcasts

Broadcasts are messages you send to your customers or a

segment of your customers, with some specific information.

The difference between broadcast and automated journeys

is that journeys are automatically triggered by an event per-
formed by the customer, such as a new sign-up or a cart
abandonment or a new purchase. Broadcasts on the other
hand are manually triggered when there is some informa-
tion to be shared with the customer segment.

Email newsletters that you send out to your customers are

an example of a broadcast. A WhatsApp message you might
send out announcing a sale is another example.

A word of caution on broadcasts

The biggest mistake marketers make with a channel is mis-

use it to the point where it stops being effective. SMS is a
classic example. People have gotten used to receiving so
many unsolicited promotional SMSs that they do not even
open them most of the time.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 191

 If you want to be successful with your retention marketing
on email and WhatsApp, ask yourself this question before
you hit the send button on any broadcast:

What value is this going to add to the customer? What is in

it for them?

And no, the answer to this cannot always be a discount or

offer. Discounts and offers can add value once in a while,
built not all the time.

Think about this, if a brand sends you nothing else but just
offers and discounts in all their communication, after a
point, you would just start ignoring all further communica-
tion from the brand.

Ensure your broadcasts always add value to the customer

Send only meaningful broadcast messages that would re-

ally add value to the customer. For example, do not send
them a 40% off broadcast every week, each time calling the
sale by a different name. Instead, if you have an offer that
you rarely give and they would benefit from it, that might
be something you consider sending out.

And have a good mix of education-led and offer-led person-

alised communication to each segment. A good mix would
be either 70:30 or 80:20 for educational content to promo-
tional content. This ensures that they have something to
look forward to, in messages that you send.

192 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

And keep a close watch on your frequency

You must limit the frequency of your broadcasts and news-

letters—ideally never more than two to three a month, de-
pending on the business you are in and the other automat-
ed journeys you have set up for a customer segment.

Sending too many messages will result in them either ig-

noring what you send in the future or even worse, blocking
or reporting you for spam. You would not want to take any
chance that would result in you forever losing the ability to
connect with the customer.

So, send broadcast emails and WhatsApp messages spar-

ingly and when you do, ensure they are unique and add val-
ue to the customer.

Email newsletter broadcasts: Best practices

Never buy databases, especially from random third par-

ties. You do not know the quality of the database and
how many of those emails are currently in use. All good
email service providers measure something called a do-
main reputation and if you are constantly spamming
people, your emails will automatically start bypassing
the inbox and going to other folders like Promotions in
Gmail, or worse they will just land straight in spam.

How do you check your domain reputation? Ensure you

have a Google Postmaster account set up for your do-
main. This will help you measure your domain reputa-
tion over time from an email marketing standpoint.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 193

 Always segment your databases and send relevant com-
munication to each segment

Always clean your email lists—remove hard bounces,

soft bounces and those who have unsubscribed

Make it easy to unsubscribe. And ensure you honour

unsubscribe requests

Control email frequency to each customer

Keep a close watch on your email analytics. There will

be users who would not have opened your emails over
a long duration, let’s say the last 4 months. There is no
point in continuing to send emails to this list with the
hope that they would open it someday. This will just
push up your email marketing cost. Instead, move these
unengaged users to another list and work on separate
re-engagement campaigns to try and revive their inter-
est in your brand communication.

Note: Though the pointers above have been specifically

crafted for email, almost all of them, at a fundamental level,
apply to WhatsApp marketing as well.

Email Design: Best Practices

Personalise the email greeting, where possible

Keep the main message and CTA (call-to-action) above

the fold

194 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

 Design for the mobile screen—that’s where most of your
customers are going to be reading your email

An email which is just one large image is not ideal. Sin-

gle-image emails have the highest chances of going
to spam as email service providers (ESPs) know that
normal users do not send emails with just one image.
Therefore, it is important to design HTML emails with a
good mix of text and images.

Ensure the content is relevant and valuable to the seg-

ment it is being sent to

Check that the copy is crisp and concise and is in sync

with the objective of the email campaign

SUBSCRIPTION AND LOYALTY PROGRAMMES

Subscription and loyalty programmes are other levers that
can help with increasing retention.

Here are various actions you can implement:

A loyalty rewards programme

People love earning rewards when they make purchases.
Adding a reward points functionality and having various
tiers with creative names for each tier also helps gamify the
process and improves customer engagement.

You can set up reward programmes by building them on

your site or by using readily available apps or plug-ins for

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 195

 the same. For Shopify users, one of the most popular loyalty
rewards apps is the Smile app.

Wallet with cashback

If people love getting reward points, they love cashback all

the more. And most customers would not let cash in a wal-
let go to waste. Hence, they would come back just to use
their cashback. And since every purchase keeps giving some
cashback, this, if executed right, is a wonderful strategy to
maximise repeat purchases.

Testing of the subscription model for relevant

products
Is your product something that people would buy at regular
intervals? If yes, then you must test a subscription program
to see if it works for your brand.

Subscription reduces the friction in having the customer

come back and make a purchase every time hence making
it much more convenient for them, with one thing less to do
on their never-ending to-do list.

Subscriptions do have their cons though and hence you will

have to test them out to see if they work for your brand and
also work on how you can optimise the subscription flow to
increase the subscriptions.

196 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

KEY ACTION ITEMS SUMMARY
1. Retention rate has a direct impact on LTV and hence
the profitability of your business. Start retention activi-
ties right from the time you have acquired your first few
customers.
2. Measure retention with not just Repeat Purchase Rate
but also with the growth in the absolute number of re-
peat customers, month-on-month.
3. Implement all the actions discussed to scale retention
through product efficacy and innovation.
4. Constantly improve your store experience.
5. Improve all aspects of your delivery and unboxing expe-
rience.
6. After users have ordered a product, send them commu-
nication to help them get the best out of it.
7. Ensure your customer support is quick to respond and
quick to satisfactorily resolve queries.
8. Invest in brand marketing activities to build brand sa-
lience. This has a positive impact on retention as well.
9. Segment your customers and build automated person-
alised journeys to nudge them to return and make a
purchase.
10. When you send email or WhatsApp broadcasts, ensure
they add value to your customers and keep close con-
trol of the frequency.
11. Set up a loyalty program.
12. Test the subscription model for relevant products to
drive repeat use.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 197

 C H A PT E R 1 5 :

MARKETPLACES
GROWTH
Marketplaces are a key customer acquisition and growth le-
ver for a D2C brand. Here are some key reasons why:

Reach

They have a large existing audience that you can tap into.

Ease of getting started

Most marketplaces are fairly easy to set up and get started

with

Visibility

They provide an additional marketing channel to position

your product in front of a relevant audience.

Trust

Since customers generally already trust them and their of-

ferings, being present in a reputed popular marketplace
helps build some credibility for a brand as well.

This chapter will focus on the actions you can take to grow
your business on marketplaces. Let’s start with some first
principles.

198 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

THE RUB-OFF OF YOUR BRAND AND
PERFORMANCE CAMPAIGNS ON
MARKETPLACES REVENUE
Talking about first principles, this is a key fundamental con-
cept which a lot of early-stage D2C brand founders and
teams get wrong.

When you run your performance and brand marketing cam-

paigns on Google Ads, Meta Ads and others, with all traffic
to your own website, you will still see a significant rub-off of
this effort on your marketplace revenue, particularly Ama-
zon.

Though it would be difficult to quantify exactly what per-

centage of your Amazon revenue would come as an effect
of these off-marketplace campaigns, you will see your mar-
ketplace revenue growing consistently month-on-month
with a constant or improving ROAS, as an impact.

The only way you will know the true causal impact is when
you switch off all your Amazon advertising for a couple of
months and see the sales growth you are still able to drive.
However, I wouldn’t recommend implementing this switch-
off tactic.

We happened to see this impact clearly in one of our ear-

ly-stage client cases. They had just listed on Amazon and
were waiting to get all listings optimised before they could
start Amazon ads. Due to some delays and issues, this list-
ing optimization process took nearly three months. And in

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 199

 these three months, the orders went from zero to 100 orders
a month, with not a rupee spent on Amazon yet, and with
listing optimisation still underway.

So, what drove that growth? It was the performance cam-

paigns that were running for D2C website sales. We had ab-
solutely no other marketing activity or marketing spend at
that point.

So, why does this happen? Why do customers who are see-
ing your ads and who are taken to your D2C website on
clicking them, end up making a purchase on Amazon or any
other marketplace?

Well, a couple of key reasons are as follows:

1. Trust
You shop on Amazon so often, you trust it. You don’t trust a
new brand website yet. You see an ad, you like the product.
You search for it on Amazon to check availability. You choose
to buy it from there.

2. Convenience
All your details, such as addresses, contact information, and
payment methods are stored on Amazon. Why take the has-
sle of entering all that information again on a hundred other
D2C brand websites? Just buy it on Amazon. (Though one-
click checkout companies like Gokwik, Shopflo, Juspay and
Zecpe are working to solve this problem for D2C brands).

With this key concept out of the way, let’s move on to anoth-
er set of first principles!

200 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

THE FUNDAMENTAL ELEMENTS OF SCALING
MARKETPLACES REVENUE
While there may be a hundred marketplace growth tactics
and another hundred elements of marketplace optimisa-
tion that you might read about, at an absolute foundational
level, there are just two key elements that are the founda-
tion of driving marketplace sales:

1. Demand Generation
2. Demand Fulfillment

Let’s discuss each of these in detail.

1. Demand Generation
Let’s start with a fundamental truth: Most large marketplace
algorithms are designed to give maximum visibility to prod-
ucts that have the most demand.

Think about it, what is the one key metric that marketplaces
go after for themselves? It is their Gross Merchandise Vol-
ume (GMV). Any product that has demand and can help
scale their GMV is what they would ensure has maximum
visibility. That is just how their algorithms are defined. Hence,
a good part of your marketplaces growth game is actually
played outside of your marketplaces!

I have seen a lot of founders trying to scale marketplaces in

a silo—Amazon spends will scale Amazon, Flipkart spends
will scale Flipkart, D2C website spends will scale D2C web-
site sales, and so on.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 201

 Well, if only the world operated in such silos!

As mentioned in the earlier section, a large chunk of your

demand generation on marketplaces will be driven by you
doing your performance and brand campaigns right (the
rest is driven by on-platform efforts).

This will get more and more customers coming to market-

places and searching for your product (increasing demand),
which in turn will get the platform to show your product
more often in the category.

So, do yourself a favour by breaking down the siloed approach

and looking at your marketing spends more holistically. Do
all you can to build your brand and generate demand for
the products through ads outside of the marketplace eco-
system.

Another mistake a lot of founders make is to start focusing

on all other optimisations (listing, marketplace platform ads,
etc.), without working on driving demand generation first. If
you skip this step and focus on all other optimisations that
follow, you will not see the kind of growth that you would
want.

2. Demand Fulfillment
Generating demand is not enough; you need to be able to
fulfil demand quickly and ensure the customer has the best
experience during the fulfilment process.

202 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

You might have done a great job at generating demand,
but what if you do not have the stock in place to fulfil the
demand?

Here’s how running out of stock on Amazon can negatively

impact you:

You lose revenue you could have got out of the demand
you have generated.

Competitors who have stock at that point will benefit

from the demand you helped generate. You just did
your competitors a favour!

You run the risk of these customers sticking to your

competitor for future orders as well, impacting your re-
peat rate and LTV.

Customers who were ready to buy at that moment,

might lose interest and change their minds by the time
you are back in stock.

And most importantly, your organic ranking on Ama-

zon will get impacted and it will take some time for you
to bounce back even after you are back in stock.

We have covered how you can best manage your inventory

in detail in the earlier chapter on supply chain and logistics;
here is a quick recap of two key points, to ensure you are
able to fulfil demand effectively:

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 203

 Ensure sufficient stock availability at all times

Plan your manufacturing and procurement well in ad-

vance based on:
your revenue projections and
your supplier’s lead time

Always have a buffer stock:

Ship your stock to Amazon FBA warehouses and ensure
you have at least 30 days of stock there at all times.

A quick note on maintaining too much inventory with Amazon

Maintaining excess stock at Amazon warehouses can hurt

you as well. For one, it will result in additional costs (called
long-term storage fees) that Amazon charges for units that
have been stored in Amazon Fulfillment Centers for more
than 150 days (five months). Second, it will have a negative
impact on your Amazon Inventory Performance Index (IPI)
score. When your IPI score falls below a certain threshold,
Amazon imposes inventory storage limits and restricts you
from stocking more inventory. For more information on IPI
score, what it is, how it is calculated and how you can keep
track of it, here is a great in-depth guide.

Hence inventory planning becomes critical and you should

maintain optimal stock.

204 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

Minimise delivery time
This is one metric a lot of early-stage founders miss out on—
what is your average delivery time in various parts of the
country?

A long delivery time can be a dampener on your demand

generation efforts as a good number of consumers might
drop off if the delivery window is long. Therefore, as a first
step, ensure that you are on Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA). This
is a much better option in most cases, than shipping by
yourself.

To minimise delivery times across the country, it is import-

ant to ensure that you have your warehouses distributed
across key zones, starting with where you expect the most
demand.

As mentioned in the logistics chapter, you will need to have

a GST registration in each state where you want to stock up
in an FBA fulfilment centre. As you scale, you would want
to ensure stock availability in as many fulfilment centres as
possible, spread out across multiple states. This will mini-
mise your delivery time for customers, irrespective of which
area they are ordering from.

Acing your distribution this way will help you see a much
quicker growth in your Amazon sales and you will be sur-
prised at how this simple strategy can help your brand grow
leaps and bounds.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 205

 SCALING ON AMAZON VS OTHER
MARKETPLACES
As you scale your business, you will want to maximise the
discovery and visibility of your product. In this scenario, you
would want to ensure that you can get on as many relevant
top marketplaces as you can. These would be a combination
of horizontal marketplaces like Amazon and Flipkart, cate-
gory-specific vertical marketplaces like Firstcry (baby cat-
egory), Nykaa (beauty), and Myntra (fashion), to hyperlocal
marketplaces like Bigbasket, Blinkit and Swiggy Instamart.

Though each marketplace gives you a platform to reach a

wider audience and also build credibility for the brand, when
it comes to scaling a marketplace, every marketplace has its
nuances. What works on one might not work on another.

This difference is particularly stark when it comes to Amazon

vs other marketplaces. Amazon has over the years built a so-
phisticated ad product. It is not without reason that Amazon
is the third largest ad platform in the world, by ad spending,
after Google and Meta.

You can leverage Amazon ads quite well to drive sales growth
for your product on the platform (more details on this later in
this chapter). However, almost no other marketplace has an
ad platform that is, at the time of publishing this blueprint,
as scalable as Amazon. A lot of brand teams think that just
because they are able to spend a certain amount on Ama-
zon ads and drive sales, they can do the same on other plat-
forms, such as Flipkart, etc. However, this rarely is the case.

206 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

You must ensure you approach each platform keeping in
mind its nuances. Though it would not be possible to get
into the nuances of each horizontal and vertical marketplace
in this chapter, what follows are the best practices you can
apply and actions you can take to drive growth on Amazon.
A majority of the fundamental principles though can be ap-
plied to most other marketplaces as well.

MARKETPLACE GROWTH LEVERS

There are three key steps in your customers’ purchase jour-
ney on marketplaces:

Finding your product (driving visibility)

Clicking through to your product (driving traffic)

Purchasing your product (driving conversions)

Let’s look at how you can optimise each of these three stag-
es of the customer journey and drive rapid growth.

FINDING YOUR PRODUCT

(DRIVING VISIBILITY)
Platform visibility is of two kinds namely, organic (where you
rank in search results without paying for ads for the listing)
and paid (where the listing is driven by investment in ads).
Let’s look at both.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 207

 Driving Organic Visibility
A key factor for ranking organically on Amazon is “Sales Ve-
locity” or how quickly the sales of your product are increas-
ing.

The most effective way to increase your sales velocity is by

generating demand for your product, which we have cov-
ered earlier in this chapter. Apart from this, optimising your
listings to the hilt will further help in this regard. Let’s look at
how you can go about doing this.

Optimising your product listings

You can start by researching keywords that people are

searching for around your product. You can either use paid
tools like Helium10 or Keywordtool.io Amazon, or you can
use SellerApp’s free keyword research tool, free for up to 10
searches a day and Amazon’s search term data (available in
Brand Analytics in Amazon Seller Central) to find most pop-
ular keywords.

You need to ensure that you have these keywords included

in your product title (the most relevant keyword here), de-
scription, bullet points and in your backend keywords.

Apart from sales velocity and keyword-optimised listings,

two other important factors that impact organic visibility
are ratings and reviews (covered later in this chapter) and
stock availability. We covered the importance of stock avail-
ability earlier in this chapter and talked about how stock-
outs will negatively impact your organic ranking on Amazon

208 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

and how it will take some time for you to bounce back even
after you are back in stock. Hence, it is important to ensure
you maintain sufficient inventory in FBA fulfilment centres
at all times.

Overall, optimising your listings to drive organic visibility on

Amazon (also known as Amazon SEO) is extremely import-
ant. Here are a couple of detailed guides you can refer to for
actions you can implement to grow your organic visibility
on Amazon:

Amazon SEO: How to Optimise Your Product Listings

Amazon SEO: A Comprehensive Guide For Sellers

Driving Paid Visibility

Amazon Ads are extremely powerful and can help you get
in front of the right target audience, both when they are ac-
tively searching for your product/category, as well as when
they are shopping for other products and categories.

Amazon Ads Fundamentals

Amazon Ads can be broadly divided into three categories:

Sponsored Product (SP)

Sponsored Display (SD)

Sponsored Brand (SB)

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 209

 Each campaign type has sub-types and multiple nuances,
which you should be aware of. However, getting into that
level of detail on Amazon ads is out of the scope of this blue-
print. Therefore, please go through this detailed Amazon ads
guide, to get you up to speed on the fundamentals, before
you proceed further in this blueprint.

With the Amazon ads fundamentals out of the way, let’s look
at some key aspects:

Planning and budgeting for Amazon Ads

A common question for brands just starting off on Amazon

is how much budget should you start with?
You can follow either of the two approaches we have covered
in the chapter on Planning and Budgeting. You could either
start with a small budget (which will vary from business to
business depending on the category, competition and num-
ber of products to advertise, but would recommend starting
a bare minimum of about Rs. 15,000 to Rs. 20,000 for the
first month) or you can start with an order goal and work
backwards to arrive at an estimated budget to allocate.

You can revisit both the above approaches, which we have

detailed in the planning and budgeting chapter and follow
either one of them to get started.

How to get started with and scale Amazon Ads

There are multiple approaches to getting the best out of

Amazon ads and different Amazon ad experts will share dif-
ferent strategies that have worked for them.

210 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

The steps shared below are what have worked with most of
our clients. You could use them as a guide to help you get
up and running with Amazon ads, and then scale it up:

1. When you have a small budget to start with, always start

with Sponsored Product campaigns, with keyword tar-
geting, on Auto mode.
2. Once the Auto campaign has been able to generate
enough keywords and product targeting ideas (this
should take a few weeks to a couple of months de-
pending on the volume of your spend), you can pick the
top-performing keywords and product targets and start
manual campaigns.
3. To structure your manual campaigns, split your perform-
ing targets from the Auto campaign into three groups:
a. Group 1: Top keyword targets
b. Group 2: Top product targets
c. Group 3: Top category targets
4. Further, segregate Group 1 into three keyword groups:

a. Brand
b. Generic
c. Competitor
5. Create three Sponsored Product (Keyword targeting)
campaigns for each of the above keyword groups
6. Create one Sponsored Product (Product targeting)
campaign each for the product targets and the catego-
ry targets
7. Exclude the keyword, product and category targets
that you have added to the manual campaigns, from
the auto campaign
D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 211
 8. Monitor the campaigns on a daily basis:
a.  Look for keywords, particularly generic, as well as
products and categories, that are giving you better
ROAS and increasing their bids. Similarly, reduce
bids for non-performing targets. However, it is im-
portant to ensure you give the campaign time to
scale before reducing bids. Being too aggressive
with bid reduction in the early days can hurt you
more than help you.
b.  Look through your search terms report and exclude
irrelevant search terms
9. For a more in-depth understanding of Amazon cam-
paign optimisation, here’s a useful resource to guide
you.
10. As you scale your budget, initiate Sponsored Brand and
Sponsored Display campaigns, in that order. Here are a
few guides to help you with setting up and optimising
the campaign types:
a. Amazon Sponsored Display Ads
b. How to Use Amazon Sponsored Brands Ads
c. How to Use Sponsored Brands Video Ads on Amazon

Amazon ads are quite complex and have a lot of nuances.

As you scale, you would want to hire a team member/con-
sultant/agency to help you ensure you are getting the best
results from your ad spend.

Whether you run these ads yourself or through an agency,

here are the key aspects you should be reviewing daily and
weekly:

212 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

Monitoring Performance Daily

Keep an eye out for any abnormal dips in order volume:

Let’s say in the morning at 10 am when you check your order

count, you usually see 15 orders. One day, you see only five.
You should immediately have the team check for these fun-
damentals:

Are all the listings intact?

Are any key listings search suppressed (not showing in

organic listings when you search) or suppressed for ads
(not showing in sponsored listings when you search)?

Are any products out of stock?

Are there any recent negative reviews on any of your

top products that could have impacted the conversion
rate?

Were any changes made to any listings in the previous

24 hours that could have affected the conversion rate?

Are your Amazon ads spending as per the budget set?

Were any changes made to the ad campaigns in the

previous 24 hours that could have affected the cam-
paign performance?

If your investigation of all the above shows everything is fine

from an input perspective, then it could be a factor beyond
your control. Give the campaigns some time, maybe a day

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 213

 or a maximum of two to three days. Things should return
to normalcy. If they don’t, then you have definitely missed
something in the investigation of the above points. Go back
and do a detailed investigation. Do not stop until you have
found possible causes and fixed them.

The rest of the daily monitoring and campaign optimisa-

tion should be done by your performance team/agency and
as founders or business heads, you would want to focus on
other areas in this blueprint that would help you move the
needle in the long-term.

A quick note on daily sales ups and downs

Just like we mentioned in the performance marketing cam-

paign section—don’t fret over daily ups and downs. Some
days, orders will be low and some days they will be high. As
long as this variance is +/- 30 to 40% within the last seven
days’ average, it is fine. Getting into details on why orders
are down by 20% or 30% every time they are down, will only
make you and the team inefficient. I have seen quite a few
founders and business heads making this mistake.

Just to clarify the above, here are two screenshots of a D2C

brand’s Amazon sales over a period of time. The first chart
shows the daily sales and the second chart shows monthly
sales.

214 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

You will see that though there are ups and downs in the dai-
ly sales value count every day, the brand has been growing
considerably well month-on-month.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 215

 So, focus on getting all the key inputs in this blueprint right
and the brand will grow and achieve its growth goals month-
on-month.

Weekly

Have weekly catch-ups with your performance team and

agency and review the overall performance, week-on-week,
with the below key metrics covered:

Spend

Orders

Revenue

Ads ROAS (Ad Revenue divided by Ad Spend)

Blended ROAS (Total Revenue divided by Ad Spend)

Cost Per Order

AOV

Conversion Rate

If any of these have dipped in the last week, they should be

investigated to check if it was a routine dip or if something
went wrong.

Apart from this, it would be good to look at specific cam-

paigns that were performing but now have stopped and
discuss optimisations for those.

216 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

Maximising Share of Voice (SoV) with multipacks,
combos, gift packs and other assortments
This is another super important area from a visibility per-
spective.

When you search for your brand on Amazon, how much of

the listings page do you own? The percentage of your list-
ings on the page divided by the total listings on the page
is your Share of Voice (SoV) on the Amazon shelf for that
branded search. This number should ideally be as close to
100% as possible. For an early-stage brand, you should aim
for a number as high as possible.

So, how do you maximise your SoV?

By having as many products show up when anyone search-

es for your brand name on the platform.

You might want to say, “But I only have 10 ASINs at the mo-
ment. I can show only 10 products on the page, at best.”

Well, that’s where multipacks, combos, gift packs and other

assortments come in!

For example, here’s how you can convert one ASIN (for ex-
ample, “ABC Organic Cocoa Powder”) to three ASINs [For
those of you who are unfamiliar, ASIN is Amazon Standard
Identification Number, a unique identification given by Am-
azon to each product listing]:

ASIN 1: ABC Organic Cocoa Powder - Pack of 1

ASIN 2: ABC Organic Cocoa Powder - Pack of 2
ASIN 3: ABC Organic Cocoa Powder - Pack of 3

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 217

 Just by doing this for each of your 10 product ASINs, you now
have 30 ASINs (though practically you might not do this for
all your products and might do it only for some).

Apart from helping improve your SoV, this tactic will also in-
crease your chances of improving your AOV.

Likewise, think of all the various permutations and combi-

nations that you can use, to come up with combo packs. For
example, you could have a combo of ABC Organic Cocoa
Powder & ABC Gluten-free Cake Mix.

Would any of your product combos make good gifting op-

tions? Add a nice gift box to your combo and convert it into
a gift pack!

Your product assortment strategy,

with a good mix of multi-packs, combos and gift packs,
will go a long way in improving your visibility
as well as improving your AOV and ROAS!

218 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

CLICKING THROUGH TO YOUR PRODUCT
(DRIVING TRAFFIC)
Now that you are on your way to improving your product
visibility on Amazon, the next thing you should optimise for
is for people to click on your product and land on your PDP.

When browsing products on an Amazon category page, let’s

look at what a user would take into account before deciding
whether to click on a listing (either organic or paid) or not:

Factors Impacting Click-through-rates on a listing

Note: Product screenshot, with brand name redacted, used

for illustrative and educational purposes only

Is the brand familiar? Have they bought from the brand

before? Have they heard of it? Do they trust it?

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 219

 Is the title in sync with what they are looking for?

Is the product image clear and attractive?

Is the overall rating ideally 4+, with enough reviews?

Is there a badge (such as Amazon’s Choice, Bestseller, Deal

of the Day, etc.) that makes the listing more appealing?

Is the price after discount (if any) competitive?

When is the delivery expected?

Here’s how you can optimise for each of the above and max-
imise your click-through-rate and hence your PDP traffic:

1. Build brand familiarity and trust

Brand familiarity is driven by demand generation—a combi-
nation of your brand and performance marketing.

Revisit the chapters on performance marketing and brand

marketing and implement all the action items and best prac-
tices mentioned. This will help you build brand recall and
trust and get you higher click-throughs from the Amazon
search page to your Amazon Product Display Page (PDP).

2. Get ratings and reviews

If you do a Google search for “how to get more Amazon re-
views”, you will get articles with multiple ways to grow re-
views. Below are a few of the most effective ways, that we
have seen work:

220 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

A. Start with friends and family

In the early days of the brand, try to get as many reviews as

you can from your extended friends and family circle by re-
questing them to buy your product and, if they like it, leave
a rating and review on Amazon.

You could also request your partner agency teams to try

your product by making a purchase on Amazon and leaving
an honest review.

B. Add a product insert

As the brand grows, the best way to garner reviews is to have

a product insert card with a message requesting customers
to leave a review if they like your product.

If your brand has a clear vision/mission (which ideally you

should), adding how the customer review will help you
achieve it is a great way to get more customers to leave you
a review.

For example, if you are a dog food brand, with a mission to

ensure that every pet dog gets the healthiest food, then you
would want to mention how the review will help more pet
parents get the best for their pets.

You could also say something along the lines of “Thank you
for choosing <product name>! We hope you are completely
satisfied with your purchase. If you liked our product, please
leave us a review. It will go a long way in helping our small
business and will also help other customers like you make a

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 221

 more informed choice. Thank you in advance for your sup-
port and for taking the time to leave a review.”

Add a QR code to the product and insert a review card that

leads straight to this page (www.amazon.in/ryp). This link
works for everyone and opens up their Amazon Review Your
Purchases page, which makes it easy for them to leave a re-
view.

C. Leverage Influencers

Another way to get ratings and reviews is through the in-

fluencer route. You will be working with influencers anyway
as part of your brand-building and community-building ini-
tiatives. Most brands ship the product to their influencers. A
better way though is instead of sending them the product,
request that they can buy it from Amazon and if they truly
like the product, then leave a review. Make this a part of your
influencer process. Not all influencers might work on these
lines, but even if you get some of them to do, it will help you
grow reviews through another channel.

There are also influencer platforms and networks that help

get real users to buy your product and review it. These could
be used as well.

D. Avoid any form of incentivised reviews

Amazon has a strict policy against incentivising reviews ei-

ther for freebies, coupons, cashback or any other rewards
(for example, leave a review, send a screenshot on WhatsApp
and get 10% off on your next order or get a Rs. 50 cashback).

222 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

So, it is best to avoid this method, else, you stand the risk of
having your listing blocked for reviews.

Here are a couple of other guidelines to keep in mind, while

requesting reviews. Avoid asking for “positive” reviews or
asking only happy customers for a review:

Amazon has a strict policy against asking specifically for

a five-star/positive review, so this as well is best avoided.

Also, asking only happy customers for a review is not

recommended. For example, “If you are happy with the
product, leave us a review. If you are unhappy, please
reach out to us with your concern on <email>” is not rec-
ommended.

3. Optimise the title

We have covered this in the previous section. Just to reiter-
ate, ensure your title includes the most relevant search que-
ries in it and also the key product USP.

4. Get a badge, where possible

There are many different types of Amazon badges, with
some examples below:

Bestseller Badge

Amazon’s Choice Badge

Prime Badge

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 223

 Deal Badges

Special Event Sale Badges

Badges like Amazon’s Choice and Bestsellers can only be

earned by driving sales volumes to become among the top
brands in the category.

Deal badges like “Lightning Deal” or “Deal of the Day” can

be set up through your Seller account, provided you have a
discount and meet the criteria required for these deals.

For a more detailed understanding of all Amazon’s badges

and how you can get them, here is a beautiful guide that
will help.

5. Price, coupons, deals and discounts

I generally don’t recommend brands compete purely on
price. This is a strategy which will keep you going for the
bottom all the time and will impact your path to profitabil-
ity if you get there. However, this depends on the type of
product you have, how differentiated it is, if at all, and the
category you are in.

For products that do not have much differentiation, then the

price would be a key deciding factor for the customer. There
are multiple pricing strategies you can use here. Here’s a
useful guide that you can go through to help you with this.

For premium products, with strong key differentiators and

with clear communication on the additional value the prod-

224 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

uct provides, you can compete on product superiority which
justifies a higher price. In fact, for strongly differentiated
products, not having perennial discounts can be another
differentiator in itself. This is not to say that you should com-
pletely avoid discounts. You can give some small discounts
where possible, as users are used to seeing at least some dis-
counts on products. Apart from business as usual discounts,
it is good to give some discounts on festive sales and special
occasions as well. But deep discounting is best avoided.

6. Utilise FBA, become Prime Eligible and minimise delivery

time
Optimise your delivery to ensure that you can deliver as soon
as possible, ideally in a day.

Utilising the Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) service is general-

ly much better than fulfilling orders by yourself as this helps
with reduced delivery time in most cases and also makes
your product eligible for the “Prime” badge. As mentioned
earlier in this chapter as well, as far as possible, ensure you
are on FBA.

And as also discussed earlier, ensure you are stocking your

products in more and more FBA warehouses across the
country, to minimise delivery times.

All these optimisations will drive the maximum number of

users to click-through to your product display page (PDP).
Let’s now look at how you can convert them to paying cus-
tomers.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 225

 PURCHASING YOUR PRODUCT
(DRIVING CONVERSIONS)
Once users have clicked through your product listing and
come on to your PDP, this is your chance to convert them.

Some actions discussed above that will help you improve

your click-throughs, will also help you improve your conver-
sions:

Brand familiarity and trust

Ratings and reviews

Price, coupons, deals and discounts

Utilise FBA, become Prime Eligible and minimise deliv-

ery time

Apart from the above, here are a few other key things you
should work on to maximise conversions:

1. Optimise your product images and videos

Unlike in an offline setting where consumers can see and
feel your product, in an online scenario your images and vid-
eos do the job for them.

Hence, it is important to ensure these images and videos

are of the highest quality and give a clear view of all aspects
of the product. In addition, your product images and videos
must highlight all your key product benefits and key differ-

226 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

entiators from the competition. They should clearly answer
why the consumer should choose your product over a simi-
lar competitor product.

2. Optimise your product title, description and bullet points

We have covered how you can optimise your titles in earlier
sections.

For description and bullet points, ensure they highlight the

below:

Focus on advantages and benefits to convince your cus-

tomer to buy the product

Address customers’ key pain points and important ques-

tions. Use data from all your customer feedback and re-
views to understand and communicate this ­better

Include the top keywords that your customers search for

the most so that the content resonates with them. This
will also have the added benefit of improving your or-
ganic visibility. Stay away from keyword stuffing though

Be clear, compelling and concise. Do not stretch your

bullet point length just to maximise the character limit
that Amazon allows you. In most cases, brevity is best.

3. Optimise your A+ content

A+ content is another key lever on your listing page that

helps you convince your customers to purchase.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 227

 Here are some key best practices to keep in mind for your
A+ content:

Focus on your USPs

Use a mix of high-quality images and some text

Use a mix of lifestyle and product images

Ensure your images are visual and not text-heavy

DRIVING CUSTOMER LOYALTY ON AMAZON

By now, you have already understood and internalised the
need to build loyalty and drive repeat purchases to scale LTV
and build a sustainable business.

Unlike on your D2C website, where you have access to cus-

tomer data and can keep interacting with them to drive re-
tention and loyalty, on Amazon you don’t have that luxury.
However, all the key pillars of driving retention, except nudg-
es through first-party communication channels like SMS,
email and WhatsApp apply to Amazon as well:

Having a great product

Providing a great delivery experience

Providing a great unboxing experience

Revisit the chapter on retention and action on all of these, if

you haven’t already.

228 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

Apart from the above, here are a couple of other actions to
help you drive loyalty with Amazon customers:

1. Add a “product insert” to follow on social

Since you have no other way of reaching out to these cus-
tomers, getting them to follow you on social channels like
Instagram is a great way to ensure you have them as part of
your community and can keep them updated with educa-
tional content, product updates and offers.

Due to limited organic visibility on Instagram, you will only

reach a small chunk of your Instagram followers organically.
Hence, it is good to ensure that all your key communication
is promoted to all your followers through paid ads. This will
ensure you are engaging them, including those who have
bought on Amazon, at regular intervals.

2. Enroll your products for “Subscribe & Save”

Amazon’s Subscribe & Save option allows users to get auto-
matic deliveries of products they intend to use regularly. Once
they subscribe, they get an additional discount for doing so.

The beauty of this option from a brand standpoint is that peo-

ple get the product ordered on auto-pilot and a lot of them
do not cancel subscriptions once they subscribe. Hence, this
becomes a great repeat purchase and loyalty tool.

Once you enrol for the programme, you can use the S
­ ubscribe
& Save dashboard on Amazon Seller Central to monitor your
current and historic Subscribe & Save performance.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 229

 KEY ACTION ITEMS SUMMARY
1. Streamline your inventory management and ensure you
have sufficient stock availability on the marketplace at
all times
2. Do all it takes to minimise your delivery time in most
locations to either same-day, one-day or max two-day
delivery. Anything more than this will negatively impact
your conversion rates.
3. Optimise your product listings with relevant keywords
to improve your organic visibility
4. Get started with and scale ads on the marketplace, to
drive paid visibility. Follow all best practices
5. List multipacks, combos, gift packs and other assort-
ments to maximise your Share of Voice (SOV) on the
Amazon search page
6. Action all tactics to improve your click-through-rate and
drive more customers to your listing
7. Action the various tactics discussed to get ratings and
reviews on products
8. Optimise your product images, videos, title, description,
bullet points and A+ content to maximise conversion
rates and increase your revenue
9. Enrol relevant products for the “Subscribe & Save” pro-
gramme on Amazon

230 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

C H A PT E R 1 6 :

DATA INFRASTRUCTURE
There is a strong reason why they say that data is the new
oil. Companies that accumulate data, harness it and put it to
good use can grow much faster than companies that don’t.

In the D2C space, the way you use data to your advantage
can be a strong differentiator. You should be using data to
drive your decision-making from as early as possible. As
the business grows and as you accumulate more data, you
should start moving data to a warehouse, harnessing it bet-
ter and building relevant dashboards. You would then use
these dashboards, to draw insights and make smarter busi-
ness decisions faster.

HOW THE EFFECTIVE USE OF DATA CAN

HELP YOU SCALE FASTER?

Data used right can help you make more impactful

decisions in every area of your D2C business,
which can help turbocharge growth.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 231

 Let’s look at some examples of how you can make informed
data-driven decisions in each area.

Note: The list below is not exhaustive and is just examples to

get you to start thinking along these lines. With data at your
disposal, you can use it in more ways than you can imagine
to draw insights and take action.

Marketing

1. Aggregate data across your D2C site and marketplaces

With a lot of D2C brands, particularly early-stage, sales

and other key data points lie in two separate silos namely,
third-party (3P) marketplaces and the D2C website.

Bringing this data together in one single dashboard can

help you in multiple ways. Below are some examples:

Keep a constant tab on your overall Blended ROAS: Total

revenue (D2C+3P) divided by the total spend (D2C+3P).
This is a key marketing efficiency metric. If there is a dip,
you can deep-dive into which channel is causing the dip
and work to fix it.

Track your overall Cost-Per-Order

2. Track Acquisition ROAS (aROAS)

Most D2C brands calculate their D2C ROAS only at an overall

customer level, which is not ideal. ROAS must also be calcu-
lated at a new customer acquisition level (Acquisition ROAS

232 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

or aROAS). This can be calculated by dividing new custom-
er revenue by the total spend (excluding retention-focused
spends).

Very few tools give this metric out of the box. And tracking
this manually will not be feasible. Only a robust data infra-
structure system will help you track metrics like these.

3. Build smarter customer segments

The more segmented your customer data, the more person-

alised and effective your communication will be.

You can use data analytics to build smarter customer seg-

ments at scale, based on multiple parameters.

One example of data-driven customer segmentation RFM

analysis.

RFM stands for Recency, Frequency and Monetary Value.

As the name indicates, it splits your customers into multi-

ple segments, based on their recency of purchase (split into
two to four segments from most recent to least recent), fre-
quency of purchase (split into two to four segments from
most frequent to least frequent) and lifetime purchase val-
ue (split into two to four segments from highest value to
lowest value).

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 233

 You would then combine these RFM segments to form log-
ical segments as follows:

Customers who have made a purchase most recent-

ly, most frequently, and generated the most revenue:
these would be your core customer segment

Customers who have the highest frequency: these are

your loyal customers

High-value customers who are low on recency: these

are precious customers at risk of loss

For each of these segments generated, you would then cre-

ate personalised communication. For example:

For your core customers, you might want to have them

enrol in a loyalty rewards programme to try and keep
them in your core group for as long as possible.

For precious customers at risk of loss, you might want

to consider a “We Miss You” campaign with an attrac-
tive offer.

If you are keen on understanding RFM segments in more

depth, here is a guide that will help.

For brands at a smaller scale of less than 2,000 to 3,000 D2C

orders a month, you can even do this as a once-a-month ex-
ercise in Excel and refresh your segments monthly. Here is
a beautiful guide you can refer to, to help you create these
segments in Excel.

234 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

4. Creative analysis at scale

We have stressed the importance of creative to build the

brand and drive sales, earlier on in this blueprint. Having a
strong data infrastructure with data analysis capabilities
will help better understand how each creative is performing
across channels. You can then draw insights to improve the
creative quality and performance.

5. Smarter Media Planning

Having a 360-degree view of your data can help you better

understand which marketing channels helped acquire cus-
tomers that have the highest LTV. These would be channels
that you would want to invest in more for the long term.

6. Track Brand Strength Metrics

As your brand grows, you will see steady growth in the key
metrics below:

Google Brand Search Volume

Amazon Brand Search Volume

Search Frequency Rank on Amazon

Share of Search

Tracking these metrics on a dashboard over time, ideally

from as early on as possible, will help measure the impact of
all your marketing activities on the overall brand. It will also

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 235

 help you better understand the impact of any large-scale
brand marketing campaigns you run.

Customer Support

1. Categorising customer queries to draw insights

You can use data analysis to go through all the customer

queries, categorise them and draw insights.

For example, what percentage of the total customer queries

were to ask about the status of their order? If this number
is too high, then it either means that your delivery process
is too slow or there isn’t clear communication with the cus-
tomer on how they can track their order status.

Likewise, you can find other common threads in your cus-

tomer support queries and better and more efficient ways
to handle them.

2. New product development insights

Apart from finding common issues, you can also understand

common product issues to improve the product.

You can also leverage this data to look for customer unmet
needs and use these insights for product development and
innovation.

3. Track Customer Support Net Promoter Score (NPS)

In the chapter on customer support, we talked about cus-

tomer support NPS and how it is a very important KPI to
track the effectiveness of your customer support team and

236 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

processes. Having a robust data infrastructure and dash-
board will help you track this much more easily.

Supply Chain and Logistics

A data-driven supply chain can have a huge impact on re-

ducing operating costs. Here are some examples of how us-
ing data can help improve your supply chain efficiency:

Analysis of production volumes, inventory data and

sales data for better demand forecasting, procurement
planning and inventory planning

Data of lead times for each supplier to help you plan

procurement accordingly

Trends of sales by region to plan inventory in various re-

gional fulfilment centres

Trends of sales by region combined with demand fore-

cast to plan where the next fulfilment centres should
be set up

Analysis of order delivery times to check time from or-

der placement to delivery, to check how many orders
are taking more than two days to deliver

Breakdown down the above data into “Order to Ship ‘’

and “Ship to Deliver” to quickly understand the reasons
why delivery times have gone up and fix the root cause

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 237

 BREAKING DATA SILOS: HOW TO SET UP
YOUR DATA INFRASTRUCTURE RIGHT
There are four steps to setting up your data infrastructure
right and harnessing the power of data for business deci-
sion-making:

Step 1: Start with your data sources

Think of all the data sources you have in your e-commerce
business. Here are some of the most common ones:

E-commerce store (Shopify, Woocommerce, etc.)

Ad platforms (Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Amazon Ads,

etc.)

Marketplaces (Amazon Seller portal, Flipkart Seller por-

tal, etc.)

Organic social (Facebook Insights, Instagram Insights)

Analytics platforms (Google Analytics, Google Search

Console, etc.)

Direct messaging platforms (Email, SMS and WhatsApp)

Customer Support

Warehouse and inventory data

Finance data

238 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

Today, for most businesses, most of this data rests in their si-
los. To move this data and store it in one place, you will need
to choose the below for each data source:

You will not need to move every data point from every
data source as that will end up with you being over-
whelmed by the data instead of the data empowering
you. You need to define which are the most important
data points that you want to move, with the long-term
in mind.

How often do you want this data to be updated (hourly,

daily, weekly, etc.)?

Do you want historic data to be moved as well as a one-

time task? If yes, how many months and years of data
do you want to move?

Step 2: Move your data from the source to the storage

Once you have identified your data sources and defined
which data points you would want to leverage, you would
need to store your data in a data warehouse. There are multi-
ple cloud-based data warehouses that you can choose from,
such as Google Bigquery, Amazon Redshift or S ­ nowflake to
name a few.

To move your data to your warehouse of choice, you will need

to build data pipelines (called Exchange-Transform-Load
(ETL) pipelines in data infrastructure parlance). These are
automatic connectors that move data from each of your
data sources to the warehouse. There are multiple data inte-

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 239

 gration platforms which provide data pipelines as a service,
which you can choose from.

Step 3: Build dashboards to analyse your data

The next step is to build relevant dashboards with data from
the warehouse.

There are multiple data visualisation tools like Tableau, Pow-

erBI or Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio) that
you can choose for this. If you go with Google Bigquery for
your data warehouse, then Looker Studio would be the best
choice as the two integrate fairly well.

Step 4: Activate the data to drive business decisions

Data sitting in a dashboard is of no use if not actively used
by the business to uncover insights and drive decision-mak-
ing for growth.

Make sure you and your team are asking the right questions
about the data so that your data analysts can work with the
data to find the answers.

Build a culture of data-led growth at your brand where data

is at the centre of everything you do and all decisions you
take.

240 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

KEY ACTION ITEMS SUMMARY
1. Shortlist all the various data sources for your D2C busi-
ness.
2. Move the data from these sources into a data ware-
house.
3. Build dashboards to analyse the data and draw insights.
4. Use the insights to take actions to grow the business
faster and more profitably.
5. Build a culture of data-driven decision-making in the
organisation.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 241

 C H A PT E R 1 7:

OFFLINE EXPANSION
As a D2C brand, though we would love to have our entire
target audience complete their journey from awareness to
purchase online, that is rarely the case in India yet and is un-
likely to be the case in the near future either.

We will continue to have a mix of all types of purchase jour-

neys such as pure online, Research Online Purchase Offline
(ROPO), check product offline buy online (Reverse ROPO)
and pure offline, for some time to come.

If you want to scale and build a sustainable business, then

being omnichannel is the way to go—both with your brand
presence as well as with your marketing efforts.

Why is being omnichannel key in India?

Apart from the customer behaviour mentioned above, here
are a few other reasons that make omnichannel key:

1. Scale to a larger market

The online shopper base in India is just about 200 million

(Data Source), which is less than 15% of the population. And
a good percentage of this online shopper audience does
shop offline as well making them omnichannel customers.

242 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

Almost every consumer brand—digital first or otherwise—is
going after this “online” audience. If you want to scale fur-
ther, you will need to tap into the other 85% of the audience,
which currently prefers shopping offline. This will maximise
your reach and help you scale.

Most leading D2C brands in India today have scaled be-

yond the Rs. 100 Cr. revenue mark either have a significant
offline presence or is planning one soon. Mamaearth and
Sugar are some significant examples. Mamaearth’s revenue
from offline channels in Q1 and Q2 of FY23 was Rs. 255.8 Cr,
comprising about 35% of the total revenue, while for Sugar,
60% of sales come from offline retail stores.

2. More experiential shopping experience

No matter how much we love the convenience of shopping

online, the experience of actually checking and trying out a
product in-store with salespeople to assist you and answer
your questions is different and cannot be replaced by the
online world in the near future at least.

This is all the more important in categories like furniture,

fashion, beauty, jewellery, interiors, electronics and gadgets,
some personal care segments, etc. where people want to
see, feel and experience a product before buying it. In these
categories, not having an offline presence means losing cus-
tomers to brands that do.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 243

 3. Strengthens the brand and builds trust

As humans, when we see and feel something in person, we

tend to trust it more. This inherent behaviour might evolve
and change over time, but this is the general customer psy-
che at the moment, especially in India.

Being present when people are walking around in malls or

window shopping helps build recall. And when a consumer
walks into your store and interacts with the store team and
the products, it builds trust as well, which will help in sales
of the brand across channels.

Note on when a D2C brand should take the offline

plunge
You might not need to set up an offline presence at an early
stage in your D2C business. When to take the plunge will
depend on your growth goals, your category and your tar-
get audience profile.

If your category requires offline scale and if it meets your

target customer profile, you should keep this in mind and
start planning your omnichannel foray at the right time.

Exploring offline at an early-stage

Even while you are at an early stage, you could explore some
offline presence and marketing options, based on your cat-
egory and what investment would work best for your busi-
ness at that point.

244 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

Here are a couple of offline presence options that you can
explore even at an early stage:

1. Exhibitions, expos and pop-ups

Having a store in an exhibition is a great way for an ear-

ly-stage D2C brand to connect with its audience. Doing this
has multiple advantages:

People who might have been exposed to your ads online

end up interacting with your brand in person, thereby
boosting trust and credibility.

You get to see customers physically interacting with your

product and understand what they like/dislike about it.
You can also understand their preferences which you
can use both in product development and marketing.

You might just bump into some customers who are al-
ready using your product and love it—a great chance to
request them for a video testimonial and record it there.
You can then showcase this on your website and social
media (with their permission, of course).

2. Offline marketing channels

Keep exploring options offline where you can connect with

your target audience. This could be sponsorships of niche
events or ads in niche magazines.

There have been multiple research studies that have shown

better brand recall with a combination of media (tradition-
al plus digital for example) as against using just one me-

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 245

 dia channel. This is because when consumers interact with
a brand in different places—online and offline—each time
they are in different states of mind. For example, you are in
a different state of mind when you are browsing Instagram,
watching a YouTube video, listening to music or driving past
a hoarding. Each interaction thus has a different impact on
the subconscious mind, and a combination of these inter-
actions builds better brand recall as against just one kind of
interaction.

An omnichannel marketing approach generally helps get

the best results. When you find a relevant offline channel to
invest in, try it out and ensure you have some way to mea-
sure its impact.

Closing thoughts
Offline is a different ballgame altogether, very different from
how the digital world works. Once you decide to take the
plunge into the offline universe, hire a consultant or team
members who understand offline well and particularly have
in-depth knowledge of offline sales and distribution. That
will help you avoid massive mistakes that could result in a
lot of money being burnt with little to no return.

246 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

KEY ACTION ITEMS SUMMARY
1. Check if expanding offline would be a relevant growth
option for your business in its current state.
2. While you wait for the right time to make a full-fledged
offline plunge, explore being a part of relevant exhibi-
tions, expos and pop-ups, as well as advertising through
relevant offline marketing channels.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 247

 C H A PT E R 1 8 :

TALENT
Talent is a key growth lever to help you scale your brand ef-
ficiently. Without a strong competent team, growing at a
rapid pace will be a major challenge.

Though this chapter on talent is right at the very end of this

blueprint, it is one of the most important growth levers.

As you scale beyond a few thousand orders a month on your

journey to 10,000 orders, you would need to add bandwidth
to your existing team, to support the growing number of
tasks to accomplish.

MOST IMPORTANT ROLES TO HIRE FOR

EARLY-STAGE D2C STARTUPS
Let’s look at some of the most important functions/roles you
should be hiring for and some recommendations for at what
point should you be hiring them:

1. Digital Marketing
Role:

This person will lead all digital marketing activities and ini-
tiatives, monitor progress week on week and work with the
agency to ensure that the goals set for SEO, brand market-
ing and performance marketing are achieved.

248 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

When to hire:

If any of the founders do not have any marketing experience,

it would be ideal to hire this role from the word go. Else, a
good point to hire would be once you have hit about 750 to
1,000 orders a month.

2. Marketplaces Growth

Role:

As you scale to multiple marketplaces, you will need a team

to manage the relationships and drive growth here.

This team would:

drive growth for the brand across all third-party mar-

ketplaces;

oversee day-to-day marketplace operations and opti-

mizations;

lead on new marketplace expansion;

manage marketplace inventory and liaise with the sup-

ply chain team to ensure supply at all fulfilment centres;
and

measure KPIs and monitor ROI on marketing spends

for each marketplace.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 249

 When to hire:

For this role as well, if any of the founders do not have any
prior experience with marketplace operations, it would be
ideal to hire this role from the word go. Else, a good point
would be once you have hit about 500 orders a month across
marketplaces.

3. Brand Manager
Role:

This person would drive creative and communication strat-

egy for the entire brand, a specific product or a set of prod-
ucts, depending on the scale you are at. The key responsibil-
ities of the role would include:

Create effective brand marketing and product mar-

keting communication to differentiate the brand and
product

Analyse competition and market trends to uncover op-

portunities and challenges

Lead on creating content, creative and communication

for new product launches

Work with the marketing team to derive data-driven in-

sights on creative and copy and use these insights to
improve the effectiveness of communication

Develop the social media content and communication

strategy for the brand and build the community for the
brand on social media

250 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

When to hire:

In the early days of the brand, since product differentiation

and communication is a key element to success, this role
should be handled by one of the founders. Once the brand
scales to a couple of thousand orders a month, you could
hire a brand manager to work with the founder on this.

4. Website Developer

Role:

Technology is a key differentiator in the D2C world.

The faster you can test and optimise your online store to con-
stantly improve the customer experience, the better your
growth will be. This person will be responsible for maintain-
ing the website, fixing any bugs or errors and implementing
all feature enhancements.

When to hire:

In the early days of a brand, this role is best outsourced to a

website development and maintenance agency. Once you
get to about 10,000 orders a month, you would have a lot
more tech tests and feature upgrades that you can do to
scale further. At this point, it would be ideal to hire an in-
house web developer.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 251

 5. Customer Support
Role:

This person would be responsible for:

responding to customer queries across channels, such

as email, WhatsApp, and other social media platforms;

connecting with customers on the phone where re-

quired and resolving their concerns;

responding to customer phone calls; and

ensuring quick first response to queries and appropri-

ate quick resolution to ensure customer delight.

When to hire:

We have stressed the importance of customer support and

how it impacts retention and brand trust, multiple times in
this blueprint.

A customer support executive should be onboard as early as

possible to help the founder address queries in the best way
and in the quickest time possible.

Once you have scaled to more than two customer support

executives, you should also consider hiring a customer sup-
port manager who will be in charge of the entire customer
support function and ensure they are meeting the KPIs we
have outlined earlier.

252 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

6. Supply Chain Operations
Role:

This team would be responsible for:

creating production plans, working with the suppliers

to ensure that the plans are executed on time;

planning and managing inventory to ensure 100% stock

availability at all times;

managing stocks to optimise warehouse usage and

warehousing costs;

managing the shipping and logistics process to ensure

timely deliveries for all customers; and

optimising supply chain processes to improve efficiency.

When to hire:

You would ideally need a person in this role from the first
day itself. As you scale, you will need to divide the supply
chain function into various areas namely, production plan-
ning, inventory management, and shipping and logistics,
and hire people to manage each area. You will also need a
supply chain or operations manager to lead this team.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 253

 WHERE TO HIRE FROM
A common question I get from founders is what are the best
places to source talent.

Here are the top ones that I have seen work well for ear-
ly-stage brands:

1. LinkedIn
LinkedIn generally works best for hiring most of the above
roles. The key to hiring on LinkedIn is doing it right. A key
mistake quite a few founders make while hiring on Linke-
dIn is to post a job from the company page and boost it.
This does not generally give the best results for early-stage
brands.

What works best is posting the job from the founders’ per-
sonal LinkedIn profile instead. This gives a lot more credibil-
ity to the posting.

Once you have posted the job, LinkedIn gives you the option
to boost the job, currently starting with Rs. 100 a day. Gener-
ally, for most job roles, spending about Rs. 1,000 will get you
a good number of applications.

You can then filter out and shortlist the relevant ones for an
interview.

Once you shortlist them, send them all a message that they
have been shortlisted for an interview and send them a
Calendly link for them to book an interview slot with you.

254 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

Calendly makes the process super-smooth and efficient as it
cuts out multiple steps of coordinating a suitable time with
each candidate. Interested candidates will book themselves
a slot and you can then interview them.

2. Talent consultants and firms

Talent consultants and recruitment companies are another
way to source candidates. You can share the profile and es-
timated CTC with them and they will source candidates and
send them to you.

When you pick a recruitment agency, ensure they have ex-

perience in filling roles for consumer companies of a similar
scale to yours.

3. Employee referrals
This is one of the best ways to hire as someone from your
team is recommending the brand to someone they know.
This helps the potential hire get a good idea of the brand
vision and culture beforehand. And since they have familiar
people to work with from the first day itself, the environ-
ment is more conducive for them to settle into the role and
integrate with the culture faster.

Once the new hire has completed their probation period,

you could include a referral bonus for the team member
who referred them.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 255

 B O N U S C H A PT E R :

COMMON MISTAKES
EARLY-STAGE D2C
FOUNDERS MAKE
After having spoken to and worked with multiple early-stage
D2C founders, here are some of the most common mistakes
I have seen them make, which you must avoid:

Mistake # 1 - Not speaking to consumers enough

We have stressed the importance of speaking to consum-
ers and how it helps get customer feedback which can help
improve existing products, launch new products and also
sharpen marketing communication.

A lot of early-stage founders I have spoken to have not been

able to prioritise this task enough, either for themselves or
for their teams.

Revisit the first chapter of this blueprint where we have cov-

ered why speaking to customers consistently is so import-
ant for an early-stage D2C brand and how you can set up
this process for yourself and your team.

Overall, ensure you speak to at least a few customers every

week. This is the best feedback on brand, product and new
product development that you will ever get.

256 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

Mistake # 2 - Wanting to do everything: Spreading
themselves too thin
This is a mistake that not just D2C founders but other found-
ers make as well. And this is especially true for single-found-
er brands.

As an enthusiastic founder of a growing brand, in a bid to

ensure everything is going right, the founder ends up being
involved in too many things and spreading themselves too
thin. This results in over-involvement in execution and day-
to-day firefighting and missing out on the big picture and
strategic decisions to drive long-term growth for the brand.

It is important to ensure you start building the right team

from the first day. This takes time and you may not have
your dream team right from the start, but ensure you set
aside enough time for this, so it frees up your time to do
more important things. Revisit the chapter on Talent, to un-
derstand the key roles you should be hiring for and when to
hire them.

Mistake # 3 - Not investing in strong creative and com-

munication
I have seen brands spending a ton of money on performance
marketing, without getting their communication right first.
This results in sub-optimal campaign performance and
slower growth.

As we have discussed in the chapter on brand and product

communication, invest time and effort in creating a com-

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 257

 munication document for your brand overall and for each
product.

Mistake # 4 - Not investing in rapid product innovation

We have covered the importance of building a strong prod-
uct portfolio in the very first chapter on the product. In most
cases, you will not be able to scale your D2C brand with just
a handful of products. We have talked about how a robust
product portfolio helps improve AOV, ROAS and LTV, there-
by helping the brand grow sustainably.

Ensure you avoid making this mistake and invest in constant

product innovation and new product development.

Mistake # 5 - Not building customer support processes

from the first day
A great customer support experience is key to customer ac-
quisition and retention. Done right, it can also differentiate
the brand from the competition. Apart from this, the cus-
tomer support team can also double up as a sales team and
convert customers through consultative selling.

Yet, I have seen quite a few founders under-invest time and

effort in giving customers a great customer support experi-
ence.

Ensure you follow all the action items from the chapter on
customer service to build and scale the customer support
function right from the beginning.

258 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

Mistake # 6 - Not starting performance marketing im-
mediately
The moment you have the prerequisites of product, store,
communication and creatives ready, you must start invest-
ing in performance marketing to drive sales.

Some might say that you should first invest in brand-build-

ing and then start performance marketing only after a few
months.

There’s nothing wrong with investing in brand marketing

from the first day (as long as you are doing it right), but wait-
ing those few months to start performance marketing will
only make you lose time. All performance marketing plat-
forms are strong enough today to find customers who ei-
ther are already in the market for your product or could be
early adopters to test it out.

Acquiring customers quickly will also help you test your

product market fit and garner real customer feedback fast-
er. Hence, you must start with performance marketing as
soon as you are ready with the prerequisites.

Mistake # 7 - Not initiating SEO early on

SEO is a long-term investment that takes time to show re-
sults. The later you start it, the longer it will take to bear fruit.
And you will also lose out to competition that has been in-
vesting in SEO ahead of you.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 259

 With so many things to get done in an early-stage startup,
this is one area that tends to get left out as it does not pro-
vide instant results.

You are building a brand for the long term and it is best to
initiate SEO efforts early on, to reap those long-term rewards.
Implement all the actions from the chapter on SEO to en-
sure you are doing it right.

Mistake # 8 - Not solving for supply chain efficiency

early on
An inefficient supply chain can have large negative impacts
on growth.

Imagine not having stock to fulfil the demand you have

worked hard to generate. Imagine a string of customers
getting the wrong product delivered. Or a large chunk of
customers getting delayed deliveries.

All of this will mess up your customer experience and be

detrimental to business.

Revisit the chapter on supply chain efficiency and start

building efficient supply chain processes and a smart sup-
ply chain management and operations team, right from the
beginning.

Mistake # 9 - Pushing too much money into perfor-

mance marketing too fast
One brand that we started working with had acquired a

260 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

truckload of customers over a couple of years purely by scal-
ing their performance marketing budgets. However, the
overall health of their business—measured by their profit-
ability (cash burn), LTV and retention rates—was in a mess.
There was a whole lot of negative feedback on multiple
products, on the delivery experience and also on the cus-
tomer support experience.

Though they were able to acquire customers rapidly and

build a fairly large customer base, most of those customers
never came back.

And since they had a bad experience once, getting them to

trust the brand and its products again would require addi-
tional brand-building investment.

Scaling performance marketing is great, as long as all the

other key aspects of the business—product, supply chain,
logistics and customer service are able to support that
growth. As you scale your customer acquisition through
performance marketing, ensure you keep a close watch on
all the other key business metrics that we have discussed in
this blueprint.

Mistake # 10 - Not doing brand marketing right

All startups will find the need to invest in building the brand
as they grow. However, as mentioned in the chapter on brand
marketing, this is the easiest way to burn money without
even knowing if it is driving any results.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 261

 Most of the time, D2C marketers watch performance cam-
paigns with a hawk’s eye, as that’s what is driving revenue
numbers on a day-to-day basis.

But, in a large number of cases, brand marketing campaigns

are rarely ever optimised, or even monitored.

They are a “setup, start and forget” in most cases. At the

end of the campaign the agency will share a “planned vs
achieved” report, where invariably, in almost all cases, they
would have achieved better Reach, Impression, View and
Traffic numbers than planned and declare the campaign a
huge success.

Revisit the chapter on brand marketing and ensure that

whenever you run a brand marketing campaign you:

1. Follow all the best practices listed

2. Have a clear measurement plan, measuring outcome

metrics and not just activity metrics

Mistake # 11 - Trying to scale marketplace revenue

with only on-platform spends
A fairly fundamental mistake that some D2C founders make
is thinking that each marketplace operates in a vacuum.
And if you want to scale revenue on a marketplace, you can
do so by just increasing spends on that platform.

As we have seen in the chapter on marketplaces growth, this

is rarely the case. Since you have already gone through that

262 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

chapter you would by now understand the impact of your
brand campaigns and website performance campaigns on
marketplace revenue.

The moment you understand that these marketplaces do

not operate in a silo and that off-platform investments will
help drive on-platform revenue, you will start working with
these platforms better and see faster growth.

Mistake # 12 - Putting too much time and effort into

what is being posted on Facebook and Instagram pages
Having a robust content strategy to build a community on
Facebook and Instagram and engage your customers defi-
nitely helps. However, in the larger scheme of things, the im-
pact that you would derive from this effort is much smaller
than the impact you could get by investing in so many other
things that we have discussed in this blueprint for business
growth.

Many a time, I have seen founders, particularly early-stage,

spending too much of their time over-scrutinising every post
that goes on social media pages. The same time invested in
the product, performance marketing, brand marketing or
retention efforts could help drive much better results for the
business.

If you catch yourself making this mistake, it is time to cut

some of that time and focus it on more important areas.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 263

 Mistake # 13 - Not adopting a data-driven approach
Just a few months into a D2C business, you would have gen-
erated enough data which you could start analysing to draw
insights and take action.

For example, you could do a creative analysis to see which

creatives are driving the best performance marketing re-
sults. You could look at your customer data and see which
regions you get the best results from. You could look at plat-
form-level data and audience targeting data and see what
is giving you the best results. You could analyse your deliv-
ery times and see how you could improve them in your key
regions, to start with. You could look at customer conversa-
tions and review data, get product feedback and improve
your product. You could use customer insights to work on
new products to build.

It took me less than a minute to write all the above possibil-

ities down. And I can go on and on. But you get the drift.

Even in an early-stage business, you have enough data to

put to good use. Yet, I have seen so many brands not do this
enough.

Start building a culture of data-driven thinking and deci-

sion-making in your team right from day one. Implement all
the action items from the chapter on data infrastructure so
that you can build a data moat that will help you stay ahead
of the competition and grow your market share faster.

264 D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT

Which of these 13 mistakes have you made at some point,
or are you making now? Now that you are much more in-
formed and have this clear actionable growth blueprint for
your D2C brand, you can avoid not only these mistakes but
others as well and steer your brand better on your growth
journey.

D2C GROWTH BLUEPRINT 265

CLOSING
THOUGHTS
Building a successful brand, starting from zero,
takes time. And a lot of effort.

The objective of this blueprint was to give you

a roadmap and a set of actions to show you the
right path, minimise your effort and accelerate
your brand’s growth. I hope that that objective
has been achieved and you are now much better
equipped to effectively and efficiently grow your
D2C brand than you were when you first got
your hands on this blueprint.

Here’s a quick summary of all the areas that you

should be working on:

1. 
Your products are the foundation of your
business. Ensure they are differentiated and
a cut above the rest.

2. 
Invest in a top-notch product, unboxing and
delivery experience.
3. 
Excellent customer support is key to
building a brand that customers love. Focus
on getting this right from day one and
maintaining the quality and speed as you
scale.

4. 
Know the unit economics of your business
in and out. Track this month on month.

5. 
Have a deep understanding of the target
consumer for every product. Keep investing
in getting a better understanding and use
this to optimise your communication and
targeted ads.

6. 
For the brand overall and each product,
have a document with clearly defined
benefits, differentiators and how they can
best be communicated.

7. 
Keep optimising your online store to
improve the customer experience. You will
love it when your conversion rates improve,
beat all benchmarks and you see an impact
on business.
8. 
Build a robust supply chain and logistics
ecosystem. You have great products
for which you worked hard to generate
demand. Don’t let stockouts and bad
delivery experiences spoil the game for you.

9. 
Get your performance marketing right. This
is key to acquiring customers efficiently,
especially in the early stages.

10. Start investing in building the brand

from the first day. You will thank yourself
(and me) for this when you see the long-
term impact of it. The impact of brand
investment is extremely hard to measure
and this is where you could end up burning
a lot of money. It is important to ensure that
you do this the right way.

11. Your Average Order Value (AOV) is a key

component of your customer lifetime value
(LTV). Use the various tactics discussed to
maximise it as much as possible.
12. Invest in SEO and PR right from the first
day. This will help you reap tremendous
long-term benefits for the brand.

13. Repeat purchases are your ticket to

profitability. Do all it takes to maximise
retention rates.

14. Marketplaces are a key growth channel.

Invest in all the actions mentioned to scale
your brand here.

15. Data is a very strong differentiator. Harness

it to the maximum to improve efficiency in
every aspect of the business.

16. Keep offline expansion in mind. Start small

with exhibitions and pop-ups. Make a full-
fledged foray when the time is right.

17. Without the right team, getting all the

above right will be next to impossible. Start
building the right team, right from the word
go!

And that’s a wrap!

I’m sure you have made a list of to-do’s that
you need to get done after going through this
blueprint. So, what are you waiting for? Go get
cracking!

Wish you all the best on your journey to building

a mighty successful brand!

ROHIT UTTAMCHANDANI

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