• by Andy Goldberg , Columnist, February 8, 2018

There’s nothing new about direct-to-consumer performance marketing. It has been around since the early days of the web and decades before that in various media, including direct mail, print and TV. 

What has changed is that most brands are now “Amazonable,” meaning they could be white-labeled by the very online platforms that receive the direct signals of purchase intent. If you’re a brick-and-mortar retailer, the threat is clear. If you sell consumer packaged goods at retail, you’re also vulnerable if Amazon decides to create an AmazonBasics version of your product and sell it to its loyal customers at a lower price (indeed, this has happened with any number of items and has already begun to happen with headphones).

The value of a brand in today’s world is precarious, at best, without the ability to interact with customers directly and constantly, across multiple devices. If you bond with them, if you know who they are, and you talk to them and they love your brand, you won’t be destroyed.

In this environment, brands need to cultivate loyal customers to survive.  Smart brands realize that the majority of their sales profits come from existing customers and that a minority of customers — the best customers — often account for the lion’s share of overall sales.

The problem is that, until recently, there hasn’t been a way to reach such existing customers on their various devices. The targeting now available lets marketers maintain one-on-one dialogues with consumers that help them build strong relationships.

This is a shift. Most brands have treated digital as a means to reach as broad an audience as possible. But the days of spray-and-pray advertising that depend on getting click-through rates of0.35% are ending as brands realize that broader reach also means taking brand safety risks and seeing results that are often artificially boosted by fraudulent tactics.

Engagement is the key to creating a strong customer base

Most brands have been aware of the risks of being Amazoned for some time. One of the most meaningful bulwarks against that sizable threat is to build and own a rich data set about their customers — one that enables the kind of personalization and loyalty that Amazon has perfected. 

Brands usually collect first-party data through their customers’s interactions on their websites, their activity in-store, or via an email outreach program. But in the age of ad blocking and limited attention spans, getting the customer to arrive at the brand’s site, let alone meaningfully engage with it, is a challenge for even the most-seasoned marketers.

Increasingly, consumers are asking for something in return for giving their time, attention, and personal information. That’s making it more and more of an imperative for brands to create valuable content that engages consumers, forcing companies from all sectors to fashion themselves into publishers. Using advertising or social media, brands need to deliver content that offers a balanced value exchange; consumers are willing to keep returning to the site and to build a relationship with a brand if they feel they’re getting something in return. That could be anything from games to tips, recipes, rewards, discounts, or the chance to win something.

Engagement is what creates that unshakeable brand affinity, not only because of the direct effect it has on consumers, but because of the valuable first-party data that brands get in return for offering something of value. That’s what drives performance in today’s market.

There really isn’t an alternative to building this kind of direct relationship with consumers, one transacted with a balanced exchange of genuinely valuable content and customer data. The brands that do it are in a much stronger position when Amazon comes for them. Those with solid customer data, and valuable direct relationships, are the ones that big ecommerce giants need to acquire or partner with instead of just running them out of the market.

It all goes back to those direct relationships, and the balanced exchange that keeps the bonds strong.