I saw a Beauty & Personal Care (BPC) brand offering seventy per cent off last week.

If you have been in the D2C space for a while you’d know:

○ Cost of Acquisition has been on a constant rise since 2021
○ Number of Shopify Stores has increased from less than 3K stores in 2017 to 30K stores in 2022

I see a lot many growth stage brands using price as a growth lever now because other tools which worked earlier with a lightspeed pace for acquisition have slowed down now:

○ Influencer Marketing
○ Performance Marketing
etc

Brands using price as a lever could impact the eco-system, considering nascent stage brands won’t have the deep pockets which funded ones do to offer such deep discounts.

What are some growth hacks nascent stage brands could try to build their community?

○ Offer entry products

These entry products could allow the user to enter your brand universe and then eventually transact. For instance, if a brand is selling stationery items:

Give out stickers to new subscribers
Or an ebook about typography to gain new subscribers.

○ Think humans, not numbers

We have a bias towards numbers and we start looking at human beings as cold numeric. Each person who is engaging with your brand channels (website, social media, newsletter, whatsapp) is someone who is actively putting in the time and effort to learn more about what you do, why are you doing it, how has your journey been so far..so on and so forth.

Considering a user’s time = money, they are actually paying you – so ensure you treat your audience as humans, instead of going down the automation road because everyone is reading those first three articles based on a google search and following a templated automation – which might not work.

And, worse, it could annoy/spam your users.

Choose wisely how you’d like to communicate with your community, they are not numbers – they are humans.

○ Ask for feedback

For early-stage brands, feedback is gold and each piece of feedback you receive from your community member could be the next growth lever.

Add more hacks to this list and help the community 🙂