Claudia Laurie is the Co-CEO and Founder of Prive. This resource drop is proudly sponsored by Prive, the simplest and most powerful subscription platform for CPG brands. Enable, manage, and grow subscriptions in minutes.

Some of the products featured here are from our partners who compensate us. This may influence which products we write about and where and how the product appears on a page. However, this does not influence our evaluations. Our opinions are our own.

It’s no surprise that the past two years have changed the ecommerce and DTC landscape permanently. As millions of consumers turn online to purchase their everyday necessities, the online shopping experience needs to become increasingly frictionless and personalized to the shopper to successfully acquire, retain, and build relationships with your customers.

To keep up with the changes in the ecommerce market, it is important to get visibility into the freshest tools to make up your brand’s tech stack. Not only has ecommerce grown, but the number of tech tools enabling businesses has also exploded. To cut through the noise, we have identified a few key tools to focus on in 2022.

Below are a few categories that are particularly critical to growth this year whether it’s doubling down on your retention strategy, or looking to build a longer-term relationship with your customers. , worth taking a second look at:

Subscriptions

One of the most significant conversations in ecommerce today is the reaction to Apple’s recent privacy changes, which makes it more expensive to target users and thus acquire them.

Brands realize that changes in advertising rules mean that it is time to take a second look at their customer engagement strategy. Many ecommerce brands are seeing this leaky bucket where they are spending millions on trying to get shoppers to discover their product and fall in love with it, but then the shopper doesn’t convert to a second or third purchase. This is unfortunate as there probably was an opportunity to retain them.

With subscriptions, brands can substantially patch the holes in this bucket and develop a long-term relationship with their customers, making not only the customer’s experience better but fundamentally driving LTV.

For any ecommerce brand that wants to get serious about driving incremental LTV and growth, subscriptions (whether it subscribes & saves, membership, pure-play subscriptions) are probably the most effective way to maximize their investment into customers to date.

Prive Subscriptions

The subscription solution that the market needs is not being provided. Prive is here to solve this problem by providing simple, flexible, and intelligent subscription enablement.

If you are new to subscriptions, with Prive, you are guided through creating your first subscription and can launch in under five minutes. If you are a subscriptions-first brand, we offer new levels of flexibility, customization, and intelligence required to fit in with your subscribers’ lifestyle and get tighter on churn prevention.

For rapidly growing businesses, we provide an embedded customer portal that allows customers to self-service and manage their subscriptions so you can scale without additional costs.

Whether a business is a small startup or a massive enterprise, subscriptions are a lever that provides more ways shoppers can buy, simply. We are excited to pave the way for a new subscription experience for businesses selling physical goods.

Email and SMS Marketing

Email marketing continues to be the key and the most consistent revenue driver for CPG brands, even with the naysayers shouting “email is dead”. And there’s evidence to back it up – for every dollar spent on email marketing, the return is $36. That’s huge! That’s not all – four out of five marketers said they’d give up social media when compared with email marketing.

Along with email marketing, brands have started to put a good chunk of their budget into SMS marketing as well. You can say that SMS is what’s hot right now. Because of its fast, concise and non-intrusive nature, SMS fares well with shoppers. Plus, the numbers don’t lie – some brands are scoring an 116X ROI from this channel.

Klaviyo

Klaviyo, used by 70,000 paying customers, is pretty much the #1 email marketing platform for Shopify stores. Klaviyo is used by merchants for a variety of reasons – TOF campaigns, abandoned cart recovery, post-purchase flows, transactional emails and even newsletters. The beauty of Klaviyo is that it can integrate with every other ecom tools, fetch their data and give you advanced segmentation capabilities.

Postscript

Ask anyone on Twitter about their recommended SMS marketing platform and they will likely say Postscript. With over 7000 customers, Postscript touts itself as the leader in the SMS marketing category for ecommerce brands. With Postscript, you can build your TCPA-compliant subscriber list, drive traffic and sales using personalized and automated SMS campaigns, create hyper-targeted customer segments, or talk 1:1 with any customer – all from a single platform.

Reviews

Get this – a whopping 93% of customers believe that user-generated content (UGC) is extremely useful for making a purchase decision. They even spend close to an average of 5.4 hours per day with user-generated content alone.

UGC is a powerful form of content that comes in many shapes and forms – images, video, text, or audio. Instead of spending thousands of dollars on ads, brands can invest in creating more UGC as that’s a real customer talking about your product, which, in turn, can influence sales.

Junip

Junip is a fan favorite with 2500+ brands using the app. It’s the most lightweight platform to collect reviews as text, photo or video. With this tool, you can review replies and feature the best, add a Google Reviews snippet, and incentivize customers for reviews.

Shipping & Returns

Customer loyalty is integral to the success of a CPG brand. Did you know that a 5% increase in customer retention can increase company revenue by 25-95%? And, you can easily ensure that by focusing on your post-purchase experience and a big part of that is shipping and returns.

ShipBob

ShipBob is a tech-enabled 3PL solution trusted by 7,000+ brands to ship orders across the globe. Orders are automatically sent to our warehouses, where inventory is picked, packed, and shipped to your customers. Besides offering seamless order and inventory management, ShipBob’s 2-day express shipping program allows brands to ship orders across the continental US within two days.

Loop

Refunds are expensive. Enter Loop – the platform that encourages exchanges in place of refunds. Loop’s platform (politely) asks if you want to buy something else with the refund value. This is essentially an exchange. They claim that Loop’s customers retain revenue on 40% of their returns.

Loyalty

Did you know that 75% of customers unanimously like to be associated with a brand that offers rewards? Yep, no lies there. In an era of unlimited options, holding on to your existing customers while attracting new ones is extremely grueling, making customer retention and loyalty a key factor in determining the success of a CPG brand.

Yotpo

Yotpo lets you choose from 14 different rewards campaigns, including points for purchases, account creation, social actions, birthdays, and more. You can redeem these points in the form of coupons, shipping, products, etc., and customers can keep earning points based on their spending and referrals.

Analytics

“What’s measured, matters”. This especially applies to CPG brands. With multiple channels, a ton of metrics, and several other moving parts, your analytical data is the lifeline that will save you from the chaos. From blended ROAS to MER to sales/email, analytics tells you the behind-the-scenes story, and enables you to take data-driven decisions.

Triple Whale

Triple Whale positions itself as the ecomOS. It helps brands centralize metrics from all the tools they use to drive revenue. You can create custom dashboards, custom metrics, create cohorts, visualize revenue funnels and much more. Plus, their new product Pixel lets you track third-party data with the utmost accuracy – something even Facebook and other platforms can’t do.
You can find the complete list of recommended tools here: Tech Stack for ecommerce Brands