5 Fundamentals Every D2C Brand Needs to Grow

When we start working with a new ecommerce client, there’s usually a familiar pattern. They’re running ads, ticking boxes across a few channels, but struggling to scale or stabilise their revenue. Nine times out of ten, it’s because they’re missing one or more of the five fundamentals every D2C brand should have in place.

These aren’t just nice-to-haves. They’re the foundation for sustainable growth.

Let’s walk through each of them.

1. A Discovery-Driven Acquisition Channel (for Scale)

If you want to scale, you need to be discoverable. That means showing up where your audience spends their time – and showing up well. A discovery-driven acquisition channel is all about demand generation. You’re not waiting for people to search for your product – you’re actively putting it in front of them in the right context.

Typical examples? Meta Ads (run through Advantage+ campaigns) and TikTok Ads. If you’re weighing up which to lean into first, we compare them in Meta Ads vs TikTok Ads.

The trick is not just running ads but having a creative testing framework. You need to be able to consistently test new creative at scale. Think of it like fuelling a fire – the moment you stop testing, performance starts to drop.

So what does a framework actually look like? Keep it simple and repeatable:

• Ship a fixed number of fresh concepts every week – not one big launch a quarter. For a scaling account that might be three to five new concepts weekly, each with a couple of hook variations.
• Judge them on hook rate first – the share of people who watch past the first three seconds. There’s no official Meta benchmark here, so build your own account baseline, but as a directional rule of thumb around 25% is workable and 30%+ is strong. Kill anything stuck well below that and pour budget into the winners.
• Tie UGC volume to spend and cadence – the more you spend and the more you test, the more fresh assets you need feeding in. A handful of influencer videos once a quarter won’t keep the fire lit.

And to support that, you need a steady pipeline of user-generated content. UGC drives performance in today’s ad platforms, but it’s not enough to get a handful of videos from influencers once a quarter. You need a system that brings in fresh creative assets based on your ad budget and how frequently you’re testing. This is what unlocks scale. (We go deeper on the mechanics in how we scale Meta ads the right way.)

2. An Intent-Based Acquisition Channel (for Stability and ROI)

Discovery channels can get you volume, but without an intent-based channel, your acquisition efforts will always feel shaky. This is your performance safety net.

Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising (formerly Bing Ads) are the classic examples. You’re capturing users already searching for your product or a related category. These campaigns tend to be more stable, more measurable, and usually more profitable on a last-click basis.

A healthy intent channel should be capturing real category and non-branded demand, not just harvesting people who already typed your brand name. If almost all your search revenue is branded, you’re measuring loyalty, not acquisition. Pairing discovery and intent well is the whole point of a full-funnel Google Ads and Meta strategy.

They’re essential for stability and predictable ROI.

Even better, intent channels often give you insights that feed back into your creative strategy. What are people actually typing into search? That’s gold for ad copy, email subject lines, and product page messaging.

3. A Primary Retention Channel (for LTV)

Acquiring customers is one thing – keeping them is where the margins are made. Every brand needs a solid retention engine, and email remains the most powerful tool for driving customer lifetime value.

It’s direct, it’s owned, and it converts. But only if you’re using it properly.

That means segmentation, automations, and campaigns that actually add value. Not just discount blasts. Your email strategy should mirror your buyer journey and give people a reason to come back. Most D2C brands run this on Klaviyo, where your welcome and abandoned-cart flows tend to do the heavy lifting.

If your retention strategy isn’t driving at least 20-30% of your revenue, you’re leaving money on the table. Klaviyo’s own guidance points to email and SMS driving around 30% of total revenue for a healthy B2C brand, so treat that as the bar to clear rather than a ceiling.

4. A Secondary Retention Channel (for Additional Touchpoints)

Once you’ve got your email setup running, it’s time to expand your reach with secondary channels.

This might be SMS, WhatsApp, or push notifications – depending on your market and audience. You can run SMS from inside Klaviyo, or use a dedicated platform like Attentive if you’re at the scale to justify it. The goal isn’t to spam customers, it’s to be top of mind in the moments that matter. Used correctly, these channels offer additional, context-relevant touchpoints that keep customers engaged without overwhelming them. The health check here is simple: a growing, genuinely opted-in list you send to sparingly and relevantly.

And with the right tracking in place, they can be great tools for reactivating dormant customers or boosting AOV with timely upsells.

5. A Growth Marketing Experiment Process (for Continuous Improvement)

Every high-performing ecommerce brand I’ve worked with shares one thing in common: they treat their store like a living, breathing product. That means constant testing, learning, and improving.

You need a structured process for this.

Start with CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation), and break it down by stage of the funnel: homepage, product page, cart, checkout. Look for friction points – tools like Hotjar (now part of Contentsquare) for heatmaps and session recordings, and VWO for structured A/B testing, make those friction points visible. Then layer in AOV (Average Order Value) optimisation – bundling, upsells, free shipping thresholds.

And don’t stop there. Run regular split tests across multiple channels to iterate on your key metrics. The health signal isn’t any single win rate – it’s cadence: a documented, always-on testing schedule rather than the occasional idea. The best brands aren’t guessing – they’re experimenting.

The five fundamentals at a glance

Here’s the whole thing in one place – the channels and tools to run each fundamental, the health benchmark to aim for, and the tell-tale symptom when it’s missing. Benchmarks are directional; build your own account baselines over time.

Fundamental	Example Channels/Tools	Health Benchmark	Symptom If Missing
1. Discovery-driven acquisition	Meta Ads (Advantage+), TikTok Ads	Fresh creative tested weekly; hook rate roughly 25-30%+ on Meta (set your own baseline)	Spend won’t scale without CPA spiking; revenue hits a ceiling
2. Intent-based acquisition	Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising (Bing)	Capturing category and non-branded demand, not just branded searches; stable last-click ROAS	Acquisition feels shaky; ROAS swings month to month
3. Primary retention (email)	Klaviyo	Email and SMS driving ~30% of total revenue (Klaviyo directional benchmark)	Low repeat-purchase rate and weak LTV; every sale bought with paid
4. Secondary retention	Klaviyo SMS, Attentive (SMS/WhatsApp/push)	A growing, genuinely opted-in list; timely, relevant sends	Missed reactivation and AOV upside; a single owned touchpoint
5. Growth experiment process	Hotjar (Contentsquare), VWO	A regular, documented CRO and AOV testing cadence	Growth plateaus; decisions made on opinion, not data

What this looks like in practice

Theory is one thing – here’s the retention fundamental doing its job. Club L, a London occasion-wear brand, switched its email and SMS stack to Klaviyo and within a year had grown email and SMS to 33% of its direct-to-consumer revenue. Roughly two-thirds of that came from just two automated flows: the welcome series and the abandoned-cart sequence (Klaviyo case study).

That’s the point. Adding one missing fundamental didn’t mean buying more traffic – it meant monetising the traffic they already had far harder.

Which fundamental to fix first

You don’t need all five perfect on day one. Diagnose where you’re actually stuck, then start there:

• Can’t scale? Your discovery channel and creative testing framework (Fundamental 1) are the bottleneck. More budget won’t fix a creative problem.
• Unstable or swinging ROAS? Shore up your intent channel (Fundamental 2) – it’s the performance safety net that steadies everything else.
• Plenty of first orders but thin LTV? Your retention fundamentals (3 and 4) are where the margin is hiding. Worth pairing with a hard look at your unit economics.
• Everything “fine” but flat? You’re missing a real experiment process (Fundamental 5). Start with the 13-point CRO research framework and the metrics that actually matter in ecommerce.

Build a Culture of Data-Driven Collaboration

This is where most brands fall short, even if they’ve nailed the fundamentals above.

Growth is a team sport. That means breaking down silos and sharing data across departments.

Here’s what that might look like:

• The email team shares top-clicked products with the creative team to guide new ad concepts
• The social team shares hook rate data with copywriters to shape more effective messaging
• The performance team shares high-converting headlines with the email team to boost open rates
• The web team shares conversion rate by product with media buyers so they can allocate spend more efficiently
• The insights team shares best-performing days/times to launch campaigns more strategically

When this kind of collaboration happens, you create a culture of optimisation. Everyone is working toward the same KPIs, using the same data.

Map the Full Customer Journey

Even if you’re only managing one channel right now, zoom out.

From the first impression of your creative all the way through to checkout – and beyond – every touchpoint matters. Look at:

• Hook rate (how many stop to watch your ad)
• Watch time
• Click-through rate
• Email opt-in rate
• Product page views
• Add to cart rate
• Checkout completion rate

Once you’ve mapped the journey, you can start to optimise every step. This is the first thing I implement when consulting with any new brand. Why? Because it turns a reactive marketing team into a proactive growth engine.

Rounding it all up

If you’re running an ecommerce brand or managing one for a client, start here:

• Set up your foundational channels
• Create a testing framework for creative and CRO
• Build a culture of data sharing and cross-functional collaboration

Get these five fundamentals in place and you’ll be in the top 10% of D2C brands – not just surviving, but scaling with confidence.

FAQ

What are the 5 fundamentals every D2C brand needs to grow?

A discovery-driven acquisition channel for scale (think Meta and TikTok), an intent-based channel for stability and ROI (Google and Microsoft Advertising), a primary retention channel for lifetime value (email via Klaviyo), a secondary retention channel for extra touchpoints (SMS, WhatsApp or push), and a growth experiment process for continuous improvement (CRO and AOV testing). Most brands that struggle to scale are missing one or more of these, not failing at the channel they’re already running.

Which fundamental should I fix first?

Diagnose where you’re stuck. If you can’t scale spend profitably, the bottleneck is usually your discovery channel and creative testing framework. If your ROAS swings wildly, strengthen your intent channel as a safety net. If you get plenty of first orders but weak repeat business, your retention channels are the gap. And if everything looks fine but growth is flat, you’re missing a proper experiment process.

What percentage of revenue should email drive for a D2C brand?

As a directional benchmark, email and SMS should be driving around 20-30% of total revenue for a healthy B2C brand, and Klaviyo’s own guidance points to roughly 30%. If you’re well below that, the issue is usually a lack of segmentation and automated flows – welcome and abandoned-cart sequences typically do the heavy lifting.

What tools do I need to run these five fundamentals?

At a minimum: Meta Ads and TikTok Ads for discovery, Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising for intent, Klaviyo for email (and Klaviyo SMS or Attentive for SMS), and a CRO stack such as Hotjar (now part of Contentsquare) for behaviour insight plus VWO for A/B testing. You don’t need all of it on day one – add tools as each fundamental becomes a priority.

How do I know which fundamental my brand is missing?

Match your symptom to the fundamental. Capped scale points to discovery, unstable ROAS to intent, low lifetime value to retention, and stagnant conversion rates to a missing experiment process. The comparison table above pairs each fundamental with its health benchmark and the symptom that shows up when it’s absent, so you can self-assess in a few minutes.