You're a Brand and Drizly is Shutting Down. Now What?
How to find a navigate a new e-commerce landscape without losing control of your brand narrative, customer connections, and crucial data.
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As the holidays approach, expect an influx of gift purchases across the next few months — an annual event that’ll only be heightened by the post-COVID e-commerce shopping boom.
Even more so, broader delays in global supply chains are trickling down to affect availability and shipping for e-commerce brands across all segments. Our recommendation? Beat this year’s slowdown by getting a head start on your seasonal campaigns, promotions, and more.
We’ve laid out four steps below that every alcohol brand should take to beat the annual gift rush, while also maximizing the profitability and potential of this concentrated shopping period.
Step One: Time Blocking
First, you can start building out a major messaging campaign by looking ahead on your calendar and selecting key dates to lay out a time frame from early November up until Christmas.
Specifically, we recommend blocking out three primary phases for your campaign delivery.
Pre-Black Friday
By pushing messaging campaigns out as early as mid-November, you’re gearing folks up for the holiday season around the corner, as well as letting potential buyers know to keep an eye out for a promotion in the works.
More importantly, you’re setting your brand up to start the season on a strong note — and to not get caught unprepared by the sudden arrival of Thanksgiving crunchtime.
Thanksgiving & Late November
From Thanksgiving onward, particularly that first weekend including Black Friday, you’ll want to host and advertise some kind of actionable event, i.e. a special release or promotional discount, to jumpstart customers into their seasonal shopping cycles.
Cutoffs for Christmas
Finally, you’ll want to round out the season by selecting a cutoff date for placing new orders.
Seven to 10 days before December 25th is a safe bet for buyers to receive a bottle at their door by Christmas Day, and reminders should be sent out in the days leading up to this cutoff.
In terms of the broader time crunch that’s anticipated due to global supply chain slowdowns, you should emphasize the convenience of purchasing from a domestic brand paired with the reliability that you offer for a timely, safe delivery of your product.
Step Two: Spice Up Your Specials
Once you’ve laid the initial groundwork, it’s time to elevate your campaign by crafting it into something creative and exciting for the spirit of the season.
In other words, your buyer’s inbox may be flooded by holiday deals, but you can capture their attention and help them recognize the thoughtfulness through your core brand messaging.
For instance, Far North Spirits is offering a holiday two-pack for drinks that’ll warm you up in the colder months. Imagine a whiskey, rye, or bourbon for your spicy cocktail or mulled wine.
Ultimately, you’re working with the inventory you have and considering which themed products can play into people’s holiday spirit — even better if it’s in a bundle to boost your AOV.
On the other hand, this period offers a practical opportunity to look back at the year’s releases and offload any remaining inventory through a unique discount or exclusive holiday promo.
Step Three: Ramp Up Your Promotion Game
Next, consider the tactical logistics of your promotions. After all, it can be tricky to time promo launches, depending on whether your customer pool skews toward early or late gift grabbers.
There are two general approaches you can take: 1) offering enticing deals early on to preempt other sales or 2) holding off until late in the buyer’s window to pull the trigger on your promo.
The former can snag early shoppers, or at least convince late shoppers to try an early purchase, but could also lose its appeal by mid-December when fresher deals are dropping every day.
The latter can appeal to buyers who play the long game and wait it out for the most optimal deal, but can still ultimately result in you losing out on early or average shoppers.
Ultimately, there’s no gold-standard method and you’ll need to use your judgement depending on what aligns with your brand’s target demographic, metric goalposts, and even inventory.
For instance, returning to your campaign calendar, you can skew discounts away from marking down products and toward offering cheaper, faster shipping as Christmas creeps closer.
Step Four: Email Marketing On Deck
As we pointed out in our advice for email marketing, setting up your email flow so your comms can run seamlessly is a simple yet essential step of the process that’s easily overlooked.
We recommend starting with a quick info sweep: pull last year’s seasonal purchase data and make sure that customer cohort is consistently re-engaged early on.
In turn, your team won’t be stressed out and frantically attempt to piece together the perfect layout in MailChimp just a few days before Thanksgiving — which circles back to our larger point: the holidays are a time of year with promise of high ROI for your alcohol brand.
You can utilize this opportunity to the max by planning thoroughly and creatively, not stressfully executing a last minute, makeshift campaign.
If your brand has these moving parts staged within the first weeks of November, you should be ready to hook the earliest seasonal shoppers and take full advantage of the holiday rush.
Sit Back and Enjoy the Holidays!
Once you’ve got these steps locked in — a killer campaign calendar, creative promos, and ready-to-launch email marketing — you’ll be the one leading the holiday rush, not falling behind.
Whether your user base is composed of individuals shopping for friends and family or corporate customers with high-volume needs, Accelpay is the platform of choice for your alcohol brand.
To get access to our instant storefront setup and stress-free bulk ordering, get started here.
Drizly's climb in the alcohol market is a classic case of strategic adaptation within the complex U.S. three-tier system. But let's call a spade a spade - this compliance-centered approach primarily fattened Drizly's wallet, extracting substantial value from brands in advertising dollars and customer relationships, and taking a hefty cut from retailers. It's like making brands and retailers dance to a tune they didn't choose, only to find that the dance floor wasn't really theirs.
The Real Deal for Brand Suppliers
Here’s the kicker: Drizly’s model was great for Drizly. They got their $1.1 billion, and Uber saw its benefits, but what about the brands? For them, the story wasn’t so rosy. Drizly’s marketplace approach and item-led platform seemed like a digital necessity, but it essentially sidelined brand suppliers. They were lured into a model where they lost control over their brand narrative, customer connections, and crucial data – all for the sake of fitting into Drizly’s market strategy.
What It Has Been Like for DTC Marketers
For a growth marketer in the liquor industry, navigating e-commerce poses distinct challenges, starkly different from many other sectors. Typically, a growth marketer's role involves tracking the customer journey end-to-end, from the initial interaction with an advertisement to the final purchase. This process is crucial for gathering data to understand customer behavior and optimize the sales funnel.
However, in the liquor industry, the conversion process often involves a critical redirection to third-party platforms or marketplaces like Drizly. This redirection at the point of purchase creates a significant barrier in data collection. Essential information such as detailed purchase behavior, customer contact details, and preferences, which are pivotal in refining marketing strategies and understanding consumer behavior, become inaccessible.
This gap in data collection is particularly challenging when it comes to implementing and measuring effective direct-to-consumer strategies. Without insights into the final stages of the customer journey, assessing the impact of marketing campaigns and making informed decisions to enhance the conversion process becomes difficult. The inability to track these key interactions leaves a blind spot in understanding and engaging with the customer base.
The result is a substantial obstacle for liquor brands looking to establish a strong e-commerce presence. The lack of direct customer interaction and data insight hinders the ability to build direct relationships with customers, a cornerstone for successful e-commerce and brand loyalty. For growth marketers in this industry, finding innovative ways to bridge this data gap is essential for crafting effective marketing strategies and fostering long-term customer relationships.
Where DTC is Heading
The Covid-driven frenzy has waned, yet alcohol brands have recognized ecommerce as a vital channel for consumer engagement and cost-effective marketing, allowing them to profit while building direct customer relationships through email, SMS, and organic social media. And so the brand suppliers that realize this are now also seeking sophisticated solutions that can isolate only the part of the digital marketing funnel that they do not want and cannot have control over: payments and fulfillment. At AccelPay, we recognize this evolving need, especially in the liquor industry. Our platform is designed to be a powerful yet unobtrusive partner, seamlessly integrating with a brand's existing tools and platforms. Whether you're using Shopify, a headless commerce setup, or any other e-commerce system or Content Management System, AccelPay complements your tech stack, focusing on what we do best - sophisticated payment routing and strategic fulfillment.
The benefit of AccelPay lies in its tech-agnostic and brand-forward approach. Our system is engineered to handle complex transactions involving memberships, corporate orders, end-consumer sales, promo codes, and subscriptions. We don't interfere with your brand experience or customer interface; instead, we ensure that the backend processes, particularly those concerning the sale of liquor products, are managed efficiently and compliantly. This approach ensures that transactions are not just compliant with the intricate three-tier system but also streamlined and customer-friendly.
For enterprise brands, this means having the best of both worlds. You get to create and manage your brand experience directly on your domain, maintaining the customer interface and engagement tools you prefer. Concurrently, AccelPay takes care of the 3-tier complexities of payment processing and order fulfillment. This dual approach allows brands to maintain their unique brand identity and customer experience while leveraging our expertise in navigating the specific challenges of the liquor industry.
We understand that modern brands require more than just a one-size-fits-all solution. They need a platform that can provide sophistication in payments and fulfillment without encroaching on their ability to manage their brand experience. AccelPay is that partner, offering a tailored, behind-the-scenes support system that allows brands to shine in their customer interactions while we handle the intricacies of liquor sales transactions and fulfillment. This is the future of DTC in the liquor industry, and AccelPay is at the forefront, helping brands navigate this landscape with ease and transparency.
We encourage you to schedule a demo with us to learn more!
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Braxton Freeman
Grolsch