As part of the Ruby Has Thought Leadership Series, we invited five of our ecommerce marketing partners to present their digital marketing solutions for accelerating the growth of direct-to-consumer brands. We’ve summarized the key takeaways from each panelist below. For a more in-depth look at each solution, watch the full webinar HERE.

Host Matthew Carpentieri, VP of Global Partnerships at Ruby Has Fulfillment, kicked off the webinar with a case study that illustrated the importance of matching your fulfillment capabilities to your marketing plan.

Key Takeaway:  It’s critical that your marketing solution be paired with a fulfillment solution that can quickly scale, so when you hit the marketing gas pedal, your fulfillment team can keep up with the growth.

Matthew Jasper, Head of Digital Transformation Solutions at Redstage

Redstage works with brands and manufacturers on the B2B and B2C side to help solve their digital needs both from an ecommerce perspective, and as a trusted partner. The company can help with ecommerce strategy solutions, in-house design, web development. and system integration.

Redstage starts by learning your core business strategy and identifying all of the areas of your business that they need to understand including sales, marketing, product data and information, inventory, shipping and fulfillment, operations, and administration. The team then helps you build a scalable digital business to support those key areas. By generating user stories, prioritizing them, and building a plan that drives a return on investment for the various elements and components of the site, Redstage helps meet your digital needs across your entire business, rather than just building a website.

Key Takeaway: “Other dev shops, they say, ‘Yeah, we’ll toss a couple of developers at this and we’ll figure it out,’ and that’s usually how things go sideways with ecommerce development. We go through a robust process for identifying your needs, building the requirements, generating the user stories needed in order to build the solution, and then working with you to understand what we’re going to build before we build it, so we don’t waste critical hours on recoding and revising the work prior to launch.”

Elon Manson, Account Executive at Scalefast

Scalefast is an end-to-end ecommerce solution, focused on helping brands accelerate and sustain their direct-to-consumer growth. Brands utilize Scalefast’s end-to-end solution to optimize their ecommerce infrastructure, technology, and operations to ensure they continue to see growth.

For brands, ecommerce is a strategy, not their core business. Their core business is their product. Scalefast’s core business is ecommerce. So, just as a brand is hyper focused on making sure they’re delivering a high-quality product, Scalefast is hyper focused on optimizing ecommerce and each element of it, from the platform to payment systems, UX, logistics, and customer support.

Key Takeaway: “When you look at growth from a DTC perspective, there are three areas that you must win, and you’ve got to win at all three: your product, your e-marketing, and your ecommerce. If you don’t have all three, you might not see that growth. If your ecommerce isn’t optimized, that actually will handcuff your marketing team and, ultimately, your growth. A common story that we hear, and many of you may have experienced, is your marketing team wants to run some promotion or operation around affiliates, or subscription, or loyalty, or some other feature, but the ecommerce team is actually the one shutting it down because the feature is not available.”

Andrew Hurley, Co-Founder of Channeled Ecommerce Agency

Channeled is a boutique marketing agency that focuses primarily on helping companies launch, manage, and grow their brands on Amazon as well as other marketplace channels. The company focused on brands that really want to accelerate their growth on Amazon in particular.

For brands just launching on Amazon, Channeled helps them rapidly accelerate the approval process and optimizes the brand’s listing to position them for success. This includes managing Amazon promotions, bid automating ads based on conversion data, brand building, account monitoring, product strategies and opportunities, review and reputation management, data, and insights( such as returns analysis and competitive/category data). Channeled also help FBA brands with strategies to deal with Amazon’s changing rules around inventory storage and restock limitations, so the brands aren’t limited on what they can replenish back into Amazon FBA for Prime selling.

Lastly, Channeled manages P & L for their clients, using COGs data to ensure profitability. “We find it completely necessary on Amazon because the costs can be quite expensive. Brands have to have greater than 50% gross margin to really make it work. And we’re there to make sure that we’re targeting both top line and bottom line goals with our partners.”

Key Takeaway:  When asked whether he saw sellers trending toward any particular Amazon program (Fulfilled By Amazon, Seller Fulfilled Prime, or Fulfilled by Merchant) Andrew responded: “Where possible, SFP is great. I’m actually here in Vegas at an Amazon conference, and we’re hearing these horror stories of pallets and pallets of products sitting in inbound receiving for three and four months at a time… Amazon’s inventory restock/replen rules have changed multiple times over the last year, and it’s been completely disruptive because one day your allowable inventory can drop by 25-30%… Brands who have built out good systems for managing this are suddenly at the whim of rules that aren’t particularly transparent…We’re strongly advocating for our brands to dip their toes into a little bit of Merchant Fulfilled, and then they’ll be able to qualify for SFP when it opens back up.”

Joel Presman, Co-Founder and US General Manager at Remarkety

Remarkety is an email marketing and SMS automation platform that was built from the ground up for ecommerce. The company focuses on helping ecommerce brands increase revenue, boost conversion, and maximize the value of every customer. Brands use the Remarkety platform and the rich ecommerce data it provides to enable exceptional customer segmentation, personalization, and automation with email, SMS, and social marketing campaigns.

Remarkety clients can customize pre-built templates to create their own marketing campaigns depending on their goals. They can increase revenue with targeted, hyper personalized email campaigns. They can boost conversion by creating targeted follow-up emails for visitors who browse their site and then leave, or abandon items in their cart. They can personalize and automate order follow-up emails, welcome emails, birthday emails, and rewards emails. Even transactional emails can be hyper-personalized to cross-sell or upsell merchandise and increase a customer’s lifetime value.

Key Takeaway: Transactional emails usually have the highest open rate and highest engagement so why not use them? “Transactional emails don’t have to be boring…With Remarkety you can use this email real estate to add other offerings, and bring customers back to back to your website… And the results are amazing. We see 50% to 60% to 70% open rate on those transactional emails… It’s really important for marketers to understand that the engagement and the retention is at least as important as the acquisition of new customers.”

John Florey, CEO at SAMA Labs

SAMA Labs is a 35-person, creative performance marketing agency focusing on paid acquisition, retention strategies, and creative for small to medium sized ecommerce brands that want to scale. The founders built, launched, and scaled 4 of their own ecommerce brands before starting the agency, and emphasize that it’s important to work with a team that can relate to what you’re going through, whether you’re looking to make your first million, or looking to scale from $5M to $20M

SAMA Labs works with brands that are just getting off the ground and need help with branding, package design, logo design, web design, and web development. They also help more established brands leverage different platforms with enough frequency to build an online presence. Understanding marketing metrics is important. But it’s also imperative to understand how operational components like margin, COGs, and supply chain challenges, relate to your success with marketing, as that can help you plan properly for the future as you continue to grow.

Key Takeaway: “A lot of brands I talk to on a daily basis, struggle [with] understanding how to marry everything at once, when it comes to what I consider the digital heartbeat of a brand. I think not enough companies today are creating a valuable enough conversation with consumers and they’re just trying to sell products. And with the majority of products out there being in a very competitively categoric space, it’s important now more than ever to make sure you’re creating great content, you understand who your consumer is, you have brand awareness, and you have strong brand building capabilities.”