Tag: direct-to-consumer

Singapore – Choco Up, a global technology and financial services platform offering revenue-based financing and growth solutions for digital merchants and startups, has announced its strategic partnership with Shoplazza, a global e-commerce Software as a Service (SaaS) platform. The collaboration will provide quick and accessible business growth funding for Shoplazza’s direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands, helping businesses to overcome financing challenges commonly encountered by e-commerce merchants.

The first-ever growth funding partner of Shoplazza, Choco Up’s embedded revenue-based financing solution with a proprietary AI-driven underwriting model will offer funding through the Shoplazza platform in just a few clicks. This will enable more than 360,000 merchants to grow in gross merchandise value (GMV) through inventory purchases, marketing expenditures, and new market expansions across the globe.

Shoplazza empowers merchants by providing all the tools they need to create their online store, freeing them from third-party marketplace platforms and allowing them to grow their DTC brands globally and independently. Its integrated platform helps businesses manage their online stores, including web infrastructure, product sourcing, enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer operations, etc. On top of software-as-a-service, Shoplazza also provides merchants branding, marketing, and other e-commerce-adjacent support.

Choco Up provides quick and easy growth funding to e-commerce merchants without requiring collateral, equity, or fixed terms. For Shoplazza’s DTC e-commerce merchants, there is no need to fill out lengthy applications or go through extensive credit checks to access growth capital. With its proprietary AI and machine learning technology, Choco Up can quickly and reliably conduct the risk assessment for merchants and is able to offer funding in as soon as 48 hours.

A significant pain point faced by many e-commerce merchants is their heavy reliance on third-party marketplaces such as Amazon and Lazada. These platforms pocket commission fees as high as 45% per transaction, putting pressure on sellers’ razor-thin margins. As a result, many e-commerce merchants have adopted the DTC business model, which offers higher margins, more flexibility and a greater Return-On-Investment (ROI). However, this also requires business owners to invest in their website and online store, which can incur substantial costs.

Brian Tsang, Choco Up’s co-founder and COO, said a synergistic convergence of two of Asia’s tech companies embedded financing product partnership between Choco Up and Shoplazza to revolutionize e-commerce funding at scale. Together, the two platforms will provide merchants access to quick and easy business funding to monetize growth opportunities in the dynamic e-commerce landscape and a comprehensive suite of digital-commerce-related support.”

Tsang added, “Teaming up with Shoplazza also enables us to help yet more local businesses expand beyond borders whilst furthering our mission to increase financial inclusion for companies of all sizes and types.”

As opposed to traditional financing methods, Choco Up’s revenue-sharing model – the first of its kind in Asia – allows merchants to easily get growth funding and repay flexibly by sharing a small proportion of their monthly revenue during repayment. Merchants no longer need to worry about overdue payments due to unstable cash flows and are provided with the flexibility and protection against business growth and expansion risks. By extending credit to e-commerce businesses and supporting merchants in their pursuit of global ambitions, Choco Up bridges the gap between e-commerce businesses and growth capital.

Meanwhile, Jesse Huang, the VP of Shoplazza, commented, “Through this strategic partnership, Shoplazza will be able to broaden its range of e-commerce-adjacent support for merchants currently using its software and services. In addition, the funding provided by Choco Up can help many DTC merchants realize their global growth potential.” 

Singapore – Outbrain, a global recommendation platform for the open web, has announced the date of its upcoming virtual event ‘Unveil 2022’, an annual advertising innovation conference dedicated to address current trends in direct-to-consumer marketing. The event is slated to take place on 17 March at 12 pm, SGT.

As the event will cover the topic of marketers engaging with customers on the open web, ‘Unveil 2022’ will provide an in-depth and exclusive look into this topic while revealing the latest integrated digital technology to be showcased at Outbrain. Attendees can expect discussions across themes of brand creativity, marketing simplicity, and campaign performance.

In addition, the event will provide a glimpse at never-before-seen products and advertising technology from Outbrain that helps grow business and find customers online.

“With a rapid increase in online shopping seen across the pandemic, brands and marketers are at risk of being left behind if they don’t use the appropriate technology to connect with audiences. Outbrain has seen this trend and has been working to help brands and marketers grow their business with advertising technology that drives discovery results,” the company said in a press statement.

The event will also tackle innovations directly relating to improving advertising communications such as title suggestions to support campaign management and foster user engagement, as well as Outbrain’s solutions that will explore new and original technology across platforms and multimedia that focuses on the creative and landing page optimisation.

Eytan Galai, chief revenue officer at Outbrain, said, “Unveil is a key event for advertisers. It’s Outbrain’s chance to share our most exciting innovations and new platform capabilities as an opportunity for advertisers to learn about new tools and platform features designed to help them stay ahead of the game.” 

Meanwhile, Andrew Burke, managing director for APAC and growth markets at Outbrain, commented, “It’s been a year full of marketing and technological feats across our industry. I’m looking forward to delving into topics such as the use of high-quality in-stream video inventory such as Video Intelligence AG (VI) to support our brand advertisers. I’m mostly keen to share what is an increasingly important platform in your digital marketing arsenal that helps you invest in Direct-To-Consumer Marketing and ultimately gives your business more leads.”

He added, ‘Unveil 2022’ will be about how your brand can innovate and adapt to new dynamics. It will be about connecting with your audience in fresh ways. The event is not just a recap of the trends but an exploration of what the future might hold for brands.”

Register for Outbrain’s ‘Unveil 2022’ HERE.

Singapore – As the industries of retail, banking and finance, and digital entertainment become more and more active, these industries have ramped up their personalized customer engagement across their target users in Southeast Asia, as a new report from customer engagement company MoEngage shows.

According to the report, daily active users (DAUs) of e-commerce, retail and D2C brands increased by 13.36% in the first four months of 2021. When studying the monthly active user (MAU) trends of the same brands, web MAUs had increased the highest (by 8.7%) compared to mobile. 

The report notes that such activity is recorded most likely due to pandemic movement restrictions and shoppers working from home, as opposed to shopping via mobile on the go.

As the report targeted three main channels in their report namely push notifications, email, in-app messages, and website messages; they found out that push notifications that used behavioral attributes with an added layer of personalization from shopping brands saw deliverability of up to 85.67% and campaign conversions increased to over 27%.

There has been an increase of 54.9% in the number of DAUs across all digital banking, fintech, peer-to-peer (P2P) lending, insurance, and cryptocurrency platforms during the first four months of 2021.

In terms of email click-throughs, it saw better click-through rates and conversion across all industries as compared to the generic ones: open rates of emails from shopping brands went up to 28.17% and the 0.5% of emails that were behavior-based in the digital entertainment sector saw 2.4 times better click rate, while in banking, behavior-based emails boosted conversions by 2.72 times compared to generic broadcasts.

Finally, the report noted that digital media and entertainment brands using custom user segments based on behavioral and user attributes to send in-app messages to Android users saw twice the increase in click-through rates and conversion rate of up to 50.05% as compared to sending the same message to all users.

“Consumer behavior in Southeast Asia has changed rapidly over the last year, and digital adoption across industries has accelerated during the pandemic period. We’re pleased to provide organizations globally with a holistic view of how their current and prospective customers are behaving and guide them through their insights-led customer engagement and business growth journey,” according to Saurabh Madan, GM for SEA and ANZ at MoEngage.

The report concludes by stating that the findings demonstrate the importance of closely analyzing consumer behavior across every critical channel and developing both proactive and reactive outreach in association with these insights.

“Laser-focus on this [customer engagement] establishes customer-centricity, ensuring that brands meet and exceed the expectations of their customers and boost long-term loyalty and repeat business,” the report added.

2020 was the year when Direct to Consumer (DTC) achieved mainstream status, with renowned brands like Adidas, Kraft, Heinz, and PepsiCo shifting to a DTC-first model. The appeal of DTC is not only that it puts control back in the hands of brands but it also allows brands to have a 360-degree view of the customer, at every touchpoint, offering more opportunities to connect through tailored and personalized customer experience. Powered by the rise of e-commerce platforms, social media, connected devices, and channels, digitally native brands now have multiple pathways to build customer loyalty.

According to GlobalData, the e-commerce market in Australia has been on a high growth curve for the past few years, and the COVID-19 outbreak is further set to boost e-commerce sales in the country with the e-commerce market value predicted to grow from $47B in 2020 to over $77B by 2024.

The rising appetite for online shopping is driving brands to increase their digital presence, and the increasing demands have also raised expectations when it comes to customer experience (CX). About 73 per cent of consumers expect brands to understand and cater to their individual needs.

If brands want to adopt a DTC strategy, and do it well, data-driven CX has to be at the core of their marketing strategies.

Achieving real impact through CX

In traditional retail, wholesale manufacturers sell through retail distributors with little control over how the product is sold – where exactly it is placed in the store, how much information salespeople share about the product, and whether the customer is satisfied with the overall shopping experience. The brand experience is no longer standalone but instead depends on the retail experience. If the latter is unpleasant, the customer’s frustration will likely get projected on the brand itself and may even prevent a sale.

In contrast, a DTC approach allows brands to have complete control over their product lifecycle, marketing, and every moment of engagement. Since they are so close to the process, they have first-party data to connect with prospects and customers on a one-to-one basis, at every touchpoint. Customers expect DTC brands to use that data to enhance and personalize CX, regardless of the channel that they are using at any given point in time.

Those touchpoints live in a vacuum, and marketers have the advantage of leveraging customer data to guide changes to their marketing strategies and create a frictionless experience for the customer. DTC players know when, where and how consumers engage with their brands and the effect of each touchpoint. In other words, they have the information necessary to power ultimate personalization.

Managing omnichannel transitions

However, DTC isn’t the be-all and end-all of success. Consumers are demanding a holistic omnichannel experience, and this includes traditional, bricks and mortar retail. The demand for an omnichannel experience fits with the nature of convoluted modern shopping and ever-changing consumer behavior as around 73 percent of people now demand the convenience of an omnichannel approach for their shopping journey.

Moreover, from a business and sales standpoint, giving the consumer more flexibility drives revenue growth and retention from the added convenience of a consistent omnichannel experience such as allowing customers to visit a retail location before purchasing online or giving them the option to buy online and collect in-store. According to research by V12, retailers with omnichannel strategies have a 91 percent greater annual customer retention rate.

If brands choose to go this route, it is imperative for every step of omnichannel journeys to contribute to a positive and seamless overall experience – including the physical ones. This can only be achieved when all systems and marketing programs are communicating with each other to ensure that each interaction informs, and is informed by, every other interaction in real-time.

However, brands won’t be able to create touchpoints that are deeply engaging, one that demonstrates attentiveness to customer needs and preferences, and one that rewards loyalty with increasingly compelling experiences, unless they invest in their data. Data holds the keys to defining customer journeys, discovering pain points, and optimizing and integrating experiences across channels, in real time, to better understand and serve customers.

As consumers globally continue to live with uncertainty amid the pandemic, their purchasing behavior becomes more unpredictable. Adopting or transitioning to a DTC model, while delivering consistent and exceptional data-driven CX will help brands and marketers accommodate unforeseen consumer behavioral changes and capture more market share.

Brands that want to capitalize on this eCommerce boom need to engage directly with their consumers to future proof their businesses against the evolving market, changing trends, and the impacts of the pandemic.

This article was written by Robin Marchant, head of marketing at Shopify for APAC.

Shopify is a global commerce company, headquartered in Canada, which provides tools for businesses to start and grow their brands.

California, USA – Media company The Walt Disney has announced a new leadership structure for the Asia Pacific, with two new leaders for The Walt Disney Company (TWDC) APAC and TWDC India.

While TWDC India has yet to see a new president until early 2021, TWDC has already appointed former executive vice president and managing director for TWDC Greater China, Japan and Korea Luke Kang (pictured) as TWDC’s president for APAC. He will oversee the company’s businesses in ANZ, Greater China, Japan, Korea and Southeast Asia.

Entitled in his role also are managing Disney’s media networks, direct-to-consumer offerings including Disney+, media distribution and motion picture businesses, as well as other operations across APAC (excluding Disney parks). He will continue driving growth, innovation and brand affinity across these extremely diverse markets, and will closely collaborate with the consumer products team.

He will report to Rebecca Campbell, chairman of international operations & direct-to-consumer at The Walt Disney Company.

“With his deep understanding of our businesses in Asia Pacific, Luke is ideally suited to lead our efforts in the region. He has played a critical role in transforming our business in Asia optimizing operations, developing successful new revenue streams, and rapidly moving to roll out Disney+.  I’m confident that he and our extended team will deliver even more value as we continue to manage and grow Disney’s DTC and media businesses in the region,” said Campbell.

On the other hand, Kang commented, “I’m grateful for the confidence Rebecca has placed in me. I look forward to driving the Company’s business in Asia Pacific as we continue to evolve rapidly in order to engage our consumers across multiple touchpoints. It is an honor to build upon the legacy that Disney has established in some of the most exciting markets in the world and lead these amazing teams.”

Prior to his position, aside from his duties as an executive vice president, he had also worked as executive vice president & managing director for TWDC Greater China. He also worked for management roles for Viacom/MTV Networks in Asia Pacific and Monitor Group Asia Pacific Region before joining Disney in 2014.