Industry
Digital marketing for D2C and ecommerce brands
Most D2C brands are not short of traffic — they are short of margin. Profitable growth comes from three levers: what you pay to acquire a customer, what a first order contributes after all costs, and how often someone buys again. Platform-reported ROAS ignores cost of goods, shipping, returns and discounts, and routinely flatters accounts that are losing money.
A brand doing $500,000 a month at a reported 3x ROAS can be comfortably unprofitable, and usually does not find out until the year-end accounts. The number that decides whether a D2C business survives is contribution margin per order after everything, and once you start reporting on it, half the decisions in the ad account change.
- Contribution margin reporting
- Weekly creative testing
- Retention flows included
- Shopify and headless builds
Food, beverage, apparel, beauty, wellness, jewellery and homeware brands selling direct through their own store, and often through marketplaces alongside it.
D2C and ecommerce marketing at a glance
| Who this is for | D2C brands with their own store, and repeat-purchase categories in particular |
|---|---|
| The metric that matters | Contribution margin after cost of goods, shipping, returns and discounts — not platform ROAS |
| Where retention should sit | Email and SMS at 20–30% of revenue for a well-run programme |
| Creative cadence | Weekly. Meta accounts fail from creative fatigue far more often than from targeting. |
| First thing we fix | Store speed and checkout, before increasing spend |
| Platforms | Shopify and headless storefronts; Meta, Google Shopping and Performance Max |
What gets in the way
The problems this sector runs into
ROAS is not profit
Platform ROAS is revenue divided by ad spend, and nothing else. It excludes cost of goods, shipping, payment fees, returns and discount codes. Brands scaling on ROAS alone routinely scale their way into losses while every dashboard stays green.
Rising acquisition costs
Paid acquisition gets more expensive as you scale, because you exhaust the cheapest audiences first. A business whose entire model depends on paid acquisition has a ceiling built into it, and retention is how you raise it.
Creative fatigue
Meta accounts decay when the same assets run too long. The fix is a supply of genuinely new angles and hooks, not new placements or audiences for the same three videos.
Second-order rate
Whether a brand compounds or plateaus is decided by how many first-time buyers come back. It is measurable, it is improvable through lifecycle marketing, and it is almost always under-managed relative to acquisition.
What we do about it
How we approach D2C and ecommerce marketing
Paid acquisition
Meta, Google Shopping and Performance Max, structured around margin rather than headline return. Products with thin margins get bid differently from those that carry the business, which most accounts do not distinguish at all.
Creative pipeline
A weekly cadence of new hooks, user-generated content and static concepts, tested systematically with results recorded. Creative is the main lever on Meta performance, and it needs a production line rather than occasional bursts.
Conversion rate optimization
Product page, cart and checkout work prioritised by where the money is actually leaking, established from analytics rather than opinion. A one-point lift in checkout completion is often worth more than a month of additional spend.
Lifecycle email and SMS
Flows that raise repeat purchase rate and average order value without additional media spend. For most brands this is the cheapest incremental revenue available and the least contested.
Store performance
Speed, mobile experience and on-site search. A store that takes five seconds to load a product page on 4G loses a meaningful share of the traffic you just paid for, before anyone sees the product.
Margin reporting
One view of blended customer acquisition cost, contribution margin and payback period. This is the report that tells you whether to scale, hold or cut — and it is the one most brands do not have.
How we run it
The order we work in
Establish true unit economics
Real margin per order after cost of goods, shipping, payment fees, returns and discounting. Everything afterwards depends on this being honest, including the uncomfortable parts.
Fix the leaks first
Store speed, checkout friction and tracking accuracy before any spend increase. Paying to send more traffic into a leaking store is the most expensive way to discover the leak.
Acquire against a target
Scale the channels that hold your target acquisition cost, supported by a live creative pipeline so performance does not decay two weeks in.
Retain deliberately
Lifecycle flows, subscription options and win-back sequences, so the second order costs almost nothing to win and the third is close to free.
Compound
Reinvest against contribution margin, and let email and organic carry a growing share of revenue so the business is less exposed to auction prices it does not control.
Questions
What this sector asks us
What is a good ROAS for a D2C brand?
There is no universal figure, because the break-even point depends entirely on your margin. A brand with 70% gross margin can be profitable at 2x; one with 30% margin needs well above 4x to survive. Rather than benchmarking ROAS, calculate your break-even ROAS from your own margin and treat that as the floor.
Why is our revenue growing but our profit falling?
Almost always because spend is being scaled on platform ROAS, which excludes cost of goods, shipping, returns and discounts. As you scale, acquisition costs rise and discounting usually increases, so contribution margin falls even while reported ROAS looks stable. Rebuilding reporting around contribution margin normally makes the cause obvious within a week.
How do we increase repeat purchases?
Build the lifecycle flows first — post-purchase, replenishment reminders timed to actual consumption, and win-back at the point where customers historically lapse. Then give people a reason to return that is not a discount, because discount-trained customers stop buying at full price.
Should we sell on marketplaces or direct?
Both, for different purposes. Marketplaces provide volume and discovery but keep the customer relationship and compress margins. Your own store gives you the customer data, the email address and the margin. Most brands we work with use marketplaces for reach and invest in direct for profitability.
Do you make the creative?
Yes — static, motion and user-generated-style content, produced in-house on a weekly cadence. Keeping creative production inside the same team running the media is what makes weekly testing realistic rather than aspirational.
Services used
What a programme here usually includes
Performance Marketing
Paid search, paid social and remarketing, run against a cost per qualified lead you agree before anything is spent.
Email Marketing
Flows, campaigns and segmentation that turn a dormant list into a predictable monthly revenue line.
Web Development
Marketing sites, landing pages and storefronts built for Core Web Vitals, search visibility and conversion — not for a template gallery.
Next step
Talk to someone who already knows your sector
No discovery call spent explaining how your industry works. We will start from what you already know and go from there.