Beyond Marketplaces: The Rise of DTC Marketplaces
In recent times, e-commerce has been seeing major shifts and rapid change. Since the pandemic, there has been a great shift in consumer behaviour and the emerging concept of DTC Marketplaces or Direct-to-Consumer Marketplaces has become pivotal in reaching consumers.
DTC Marketplaces are considered to be the next big thing in the evolution of retail and we believe it is here to make its mark. Essentially, the concept of DTC Marketplaces is to make purchasing from brands much more convenient for consumers while offering an easy and direct solution for businesses to reach their target customers through a platform that bridges the gap between the brands and their consumers.
Some of the prominent features and benefits of DTC Marketplaces include being able to offer valuable experiences to your target audience through strong e-commerce infrastructure and the ability to use great analytics tools to help in detailed tracking and optimizing of the performance on the platform. This will not only help in building a stronger relationship between the brand and the consumers but also enable the brands to offer personalised experiences to their target audience.
Programmatic advertising can play a valuable role in aiding DTC brands to reach their target audiences. Let us dive deeper into how programmatic advertising can benefit DTC Marketplaces:
Efficient Targeting and Personalization for DTC Marketplaces:
One of the major advantages of a DTC platform has been the enablement of brands to directly engage with consumers without having to get wrapped up in the traditional distribution channels. The benefit that comes with this is the access to first-party data. First-party data or 1P data serves as a valuable user data source as it is directly retrieved from the consumers themselves making it extremely reliable to use for targeting relevant audiences effectively. This is the user data of consumers who have interacted with the platform by either visiting the platform or purchasing products from the platform.
First-party data is considered to be one of the most accurate and reliable which enables a more personalized experience for the consumers through highly targeted ads driving higher conversion rates, ultimately resulting in higher ROAS or Return on Ad Spend. The cherry on top when it comes to utilising first-party data is that the collection of this data complies with the evolving privacy guidelines. An example would be a clothing e-commerce app that gathers user data to deliver a personalized experience. By utilizing collected data such as in-app behavior, preferences, wishlists, purchase history, browsing history, and demographics, the app can enhance the user experience. This data enables the app to provide personalized recommendations through ads, dynamic content, and special offers to encourage desired user actions. Furthermore, this information allows the brand to receive valuable feedback and make necessary improvements.
On the note of personalisation, implementing dynamic creative optimisation or DCO can be a great way to provide a more personalised experience to the target audience. DCO can be defined as a display ad technology that aims to create a personalised ad viewing experience for the target audience through personalised ads based on the user data available about the viewer. These dynamic ads have been proven to perform better than static ads due to their relevancy and optimised output. One of the areas that DCO has proven to be extremely beneficial is the app retargeting campaigns as these often use the targeting variables of user behaviour, demographics, geographical location, and context.
Effective Retargeting and Optimisation:
A mobile measurement partner or MMP is a mobile marketing provider that is a must-have in an app marketer’s tech stack as it aids in attributing and organizing user data to deliver useful campaign performance metrics. It can be highly beneficial for DTC Marketplaces to partner with MMPs to deliver highly effective ads backed by data. This is done with the use of a probabilistic model and Unified ID or UID for targeting purposes.
The Probabilistic Model uses data collection as one of the main steps which involves user data collection for various parameters such as IP address, OS version, device model, carrier information, and more excluding the IDFA for effective targeting. Moreover, Unified ID 2.0 or UID 2.0 is a way to replace the use of third-party data in ad targeting without compromising user privacy. It does not depend on other technologies such as third-party cookies and enables app marketers and advertisers to set up user identity. The identifiers for this are built based on secure email IDs and phone numbers that are shared only after consent from the consumers. Additionally, this adds to connected TV (CTV) and apps where a login is required. Overall, this helps brands maintain a valued exchange and offer a great experience to their consumers.
Machine learning can be a powerful tool when used rightly for DTC marketplace advertising as a data-driven process that analyses users’ in-app behaviour, preference, and engagement pattern to optimise the ad campaign to deliver highly personalised ads to the target audience to achieve higher ROAS.
Learn more about RevX’s Advanced Machine Learning Offering below:
In Conclusion:
In the ever-evolving landscape of DTC Marketplaces, programmatic advertising is a great tool for app marketers to include in their marketing strategy as it employs the first-party data uniquely available to DTC Marketplaces and puts it to great use by implementing it in impactful ad campaigns. These campaigns have a high potential for creating invaluable experiences for high-intent users and have a higher chance of conversion by prompting the desired in-app action from the users.
To know more about how RevX can benefit your DTC business reach out to our team here.
Hansika Sana
Marketing Manager, Content
