It’s easier than ever to go to market with your own product. Paying in cryptocurrency, VR fitting rooms and AI shopping assistants may be all the rage now but the winners are the companies adjusting to shifting consumer trends.

Mad Men marketing doesn’t work anymore as Millenials step in as the driving force of buying power. Even their parents are changing the way they shop. Let’s look at the top consumer trends now and how brands can be relevant.

Some subscription-based brands have exploded to stardom: Harry’s, Dollar Shave Club, BirchBox, ipsy, Trunk Club, BarkBox, etc. not to mention Amazon Subscribe and Save.

You probably also want to reap the goodness of customer love as they do, but cannot offer subscriptions for some reason. We get it! Not all products and brands can immediately get thousands people on board paying monthly. Or because your customers buy at very different time intervals (you can monitor time between orders with Metrilo’s retention analysis).

If you have an unlimited pool of potential customers and also unlimited budget to acquire them, this article is not for you. Your shop can survive with one-time sales.

If your target audience or budget, though, is not so huge, you need repeat purchases to stay in business.

Native is one of the few wildly successful DTC brands that got acquired – by no other but Procter & Gamble for the incredible sum of $100 million in cash only 2.5 years after launch. They had only one product at the time of the acquisition and 8 employees.

We are insanely happy to have shared Native’s journey from 0 to hero as their trusted analytics platform. Native’s founder Moiz Ali, who now is on our advisory board, doesn’t hide he uses Metrilo daily and this level of control over the business performance helped hugely to get where they are today.

That’s why we’d like to go over the tactics that Native used, the concrete focus points that brought them success.

You are launching your own brand. Great! You want it to fill a gap in the market and want it to become a lovemark.

You know that to get there you need to be customer-centric to the bone because modern brands cannot afford to have anything else as their number one priority but customers.

This is something we can help with.

What does it mean to be customer-centric?

For ecommerce brands, customer-centric means putting the customer first and making their experience the top objective. Customer centricity can be called a strategy since it’s not how all companies choose to do things, it’s not the default. 

If you read the Metrilo blog often, you’ve noticed we preach profitability and sustainable growth for ecommerce companies. We see so many companies go out of business not because they don’t have sales, but because they don’t make any money! Yes, that’s right. Sales don’t automatically mean you earn money.

How much do you make on a sale?

That’s the gross profit margin formula, this is what you make from each product.

This is the net profit margin formula, what you earn after all costs and expenses of the business.

Now, we are not experts on interest rates and taxes, so we can’t give you advice on how to lower those. But we can help when it comes to sales, marketing and how to optimize it to get better profit margins.