The Top 10 Tech Stack for DTC CPG (Food & Drink) Brands
We recently got to talk with Orla Weir about her Top 10 Tech Stack for DTC Consumer Brands.
Not familiar with Orla? Orla Weir is a brand & growth marketeer with expert experience building and scaling digitally-native global brands. Most notably, she helped build Ugly Drinks from the ground up and has spent time at Reckitt’s incubation and investment hub.
Not familiar with what the acronyms mean? DTC stands for Direct-to-Consumer, meaning you sell your products straight to the end-user. CPG means Consumer Packaged Goods and is an industry term for merchandise that customers use up and replace on a frequent basis like food, beverage, cosmetics and cleaning products.
Her Top 10 Stack for DTC CPG Brands
🛒 Store: Shopify: This is a no-brainer. Shopify allows start-ups to launch their DTC store without hefty development costs, with built in themes, with a great user interface and a wide ecosystem of apps and plug ins. Shopify Plus is a bonus but you can still do a lot on a basic Shopify plan, making it cost effective too
✉️ Email: Klaviyo: I’m yet to find another email CRM tool which ranks higher than Klaviyo in my book. It’s easy to use with lots of great out-the-box features that make segmentation, content & design, automation and reporting straightforward.
📲 Sms: Postscript: Having trialled several SMS platforms, I found the experience on Postscript to be the most intuitive platform with the best support team. It had everything we needed to drive list growth, create engaging SMS content, analyse performance and easily build campaigns and automations.
💛 CX: Gorgias: Gorgias is best for its built in macros, tagging capabilities and wide range of integrations. It makes it easy to create great customer experiences.
⭐ Reviews, referrals, loyalty: Yotpo: The things I love about Yotpo is the ability to run all these interlinked features - referrals, loyalty, reviews - from one place. They also have a super hands on customer support team and supply you with your own customer success manager to work with.
🔁 Subscriptions: Smartrr: I’ve used both Smartrr and Recharge for subscriptions. I think it’s the trickiest tool to get right but there were a few things I loved about Smartrr - the branded subscription experience, the gift your subscription option and great analytics.
📝 Surveys: KnoCommerce: KnoCommerce is the only survey tool built specifically for e-Commerce and with Shopify in mind. Because of that, it has the best analytics, the most appropriate conditional logic that drives action - not just insight - and capabilities to segment your surveys to the right users using integrations with the likes of Klaviyo.
💻 A/B testing: Google Optimize: Google Optimize is a cheap and cheerful solution. We used our dev team to run by-weekly A/B tests through Google Optimise.
🔍 Analytics: Source Medium: Source Medium visualises all your data to help you double down on what’s working and cut what isn’t. They have a range of amazing features but one of my favourites is their ability to analyse purchase behaviour & LTV down to the coupon code used.
📈 Drive repeat purchase: Repeat: Repeat is a super powerful tool that analyses customer repurchase behaviour and then triggers email & SMS prompts that are personalised to the users - pushing the right products at the right time based on their past actions. Checkout details are saved and they can repurchase in-flow, removing a tonne of friction and saving time & effort for the customer.
How did Orla choose this list? “It was actually pretty hard to squeeze into a top 10 to get the foundations… there’s a ton of other incredibly exciting solutions that integrate with this ecosystem that are worth raving about! One of the common factors of these tech solutions have in common is that they’re built to reduce the time spent trying to figure out how to use the tech, freeing up time to spend on brand, creative, content and growing your business.”
