Feeding Your Brand: Three Strategies for Driving Revenue in the DTC Food & Beverage Market

Over the past few years, rapid growth and technological innovation in the ecommerce space has led to a thriving direct-to-consumer (DTC) food and beverage industry. 

But as a new data privacy landscape takes shape alongside evolving consumer preferences and needs, many brands are tasked with reimagining their marketing strategies to promote continued growth, drive revenue, and make their products stand out in an increasingly complex environment. 

In this blog, we’ll use insights from our recent webinar, “Feeding your Brand: How to Excel in Food Food & Beverage Online” to explore how DTC food and beverage brands can maximize consumer engagement and make positive, data-driven marketing decisions that drive revenue in the face of the challenges outlined above

Generating High-Impact Reviews 

Unsurprisingly, online reviews are an absolutely critical component of any ecommerce business. In fact, research shows that 99.9% of customers read product reviews before making a purchase, and these customers are willing to spend up to 31% more on a brand that has excellent reviews. 

But social proof is even more important for online-exclusive food and beverage brands, as first-time customers naturally can’t try the product until it arrives at their doorstep. As Steph Carcamo, Customer Experience & Support Operations Manager at conversion optimization platform Justuno, says when speaking about the power of reviews and other user-generated content, it’s a way to make sure that taste and those other senses that don’t translate well through ecommerce, are still driving traffic to your website.

However, it isn’t as simple as providing a space for customers to leave feedback. For one thing, consumers today are less likely to volunteer information if the process isn’t as frictionless as possible. Moreover, equally as critical as the impact of the reviews themselves is the quality of data that can be generated from them.

Here are just a few ways to increase engagement, remove friction, and maximize the generation of actionable insights from the review process using the Okendo platform:

Highlight key selling points with product attributes

You can’t expect every customer to provide in-depth feedback describing both their individual experience and the specific attributes of your product. However, using the Okendo platform, you can integrate product attributes directly into the review process, allowing customers to rate their experience with your product based on customizable features, such as flavor, ingredient quality and value. 

Food & Beverage brands like Aloha are using Okendo to highlight key selling points of their products by making it easy for customers to rank them during the review process. This means the team doesn’t have to just hope that their customers specifically write about important selling points and gives potential customers a clear view into how reviewers rate attributes such as flavor, ingredient quality, value, nutrition and packaging.

Learn about your buyer with customer attributes

The more you know about your customer, the easier it is to personalize your outreach efforts to increase conversions and drive sales. With Okendo, you can present a few simple questions to new customers about their individual needs, which not only makes it easier to collect actionable zero-party-data (ZPD), but allows the potential buyer to filter and access reviews from other customers that share their preferences. 

Companies like Golde, a superfood beverage, are using Okendo’s customer attribute capabilities to collect consumer data around age range, benefits, and best uses. When a customer gives a review they can select from product benefits such as digestion, energy and mood, and highlight how they use the product ,ie., smoothies, coffee replacement and more. 

Similarly, Slate Milk, the subscription-based DTC brand that sells high-protein chocolate milks and lattes to health-conscious individuals worldwide, is also taking advantage of customer attributes. Using Okendo, their customers can leave a review for their variety pack and highlight which flavor is their favorite thanks to customer attributes. This also means the Slate Milk team no longer has to guess which SKU inspired them to leave the review in the first place. The team unlocked a prime opportunity to ask their happy customers to subscribe to their favorite flavor or build their own box experience. As Shannon O’Boyle, Marketing Director at Smartrr says, “this gives customers a reason to stay engaged, increases exposure across your products, and drives AOV through personalization.”

Generate more reviews and user-generated content with incentives

73% of consumers say they would be motivated to submit a review if offered an incentive, whether in the form of a coupon code, loyalty points, or a gift card. Beyond generating more reviews, incentives can be an effective driver of future purchases and work to improve customer lifetime value. With Okendo, you can easily integrate incentives into the review process, and even offer tiered rewards in exchange for reviews that include user-generated content (UGC) like photos and videos. 

Generating as much UGC as possible is critical in the social-media age, as it creates a sense of authenticity and provides the kind of social proof you simply can’t get with traditional, professionally staged photoshoots of your food and beverage products. 

Leveraging Micro-Surveys to Gain Customer Insights, Personalize Campaigns 

As marketing strategies are updated to reflect new privacy restrictions regarding the collection of customer data, it’s increasingly important to find new and effective ways to learn as much about your customers as possible. And while the use of post-purchase and other micro-surveys certainly isn’t new, many food and beverage brands have yet to mine this strategy for the full spectrum of its benefits.