Hot take | Web3 DTC
Direct-to-consumer brands eschew selling through intermediaries (e.g. department stores) in order to ‘own’ their customer relationships wherever they can. This means owning their contact information for future marketing, as well as their first-party data such as preferences or shopping habits for personalized offers or experiences. Brands have shown that direct-to-consumer business improves retention, lifetime value, and profitability, so it’s no surprise this has been a dominant trend among B2C companies for the past 20 years.
In DTC it’s all about ‘who owns the customer;’ in web3, the customer owns the brand as much as the brand owns the customer, and we believe this symbiotic evolution is transformatively positive for both parties.
This co-ownership model is achieved through brand NFTs, fungible currencies (eg. $FWB), or both, but it essentially means ‘tokenizing’ brand IP and allowing consumers to acquire, use and sell brand tokens at any time – frictionlessly, instantly and globally. Consumers get to own the unique asset itself, with all its possible benefits, but also own a share in the brand’s overall equity. This direct incentive alignment drives consumers to take it upon themselves to grow the brand as co-beneficiaries in its success. This is any marketer’s dream: an army of brand evangelists with a built-in affiliate model. Meanwhile, consumers passionate about their favorite brands get rewarded more directly for their evangelism. Win-win!
Consumers are already buying digital products. Last year consumers spent $2 billion on Roblox and $5 billion on Fortnite alone… and billions of hours on these platforms interacting with brands. But these assets are landlocked and can only be used within their native platforms. Web3 enables different digital products. Instead of being landlocked and ruggable, NFTs are interoperable and fully owned.
Brands are creating their own web3 platforms, not just products. Consumer giants like Nike understand the potential of a digital product line, generating over $186mm so far from NFTs. Late last year, they announced the launch of .SWOOSH, a community-based platform for digital shoes and jerseys that also unlock access to events, physical products, and co-creation opportunities. They are selling these digital products direct-to-consumer with creative ways to upsell and cross sell.
Secondary markets offer new ongoing revenue streams. Consumer brands today rarely capture any value when their items are resold. Unlike physical products, NFTs can be encoded with a ‘royalty’ such that every time it trades hands on the secondary market, a fraction of the payment is sent to the brand automatically. Web3 native brand Bored Ape Yacht Club has generated tens of millions in primary sale revenue, and more than $100mm in secondary royalties. That’s a new business model, and major traditional brands have noticed. Adidas and TIME have generated $5mm and $4mm, respectively, and Nike has earned more than $90mm in secondary royalties alone. The leading brands are adding custom secondary markets to their sites to retain traffic, stickiness and margins through a complete buying experience for consumers.
NFTs are powering supercharged loyalty programs. NFTs don’t have to be pricey to be effective. Starbucks is moving their 50-million-person loyalty program, which generated $15 billion in revenue last year, over to web3 platform 'Starbucks Odyssey'. They see NFTs improving that program by making loyalty ‘stamps’ ownable, and gamifying engagement in exchange for tradeable benefits like discounts and offers. As all marketers know, it’s always more cost effective to retain an existing customer than to acquire a new one. The incentivized nature of web3 adds a new dimension to loyalty and evangelism that big brands are starting to leverage.
NFT communities are dynamic peer-to-peer brand engagement groups. NFTs not only offer a new kind of DTC relationship for brands, but also for consumer to consumer. Token-based brand communities represent ‘fellow owners’ who are actively and organically interacting with each other about the brand in places like Discord and Telegram. This is also a low-effort way for brands to sustain a lively and engaged community: peer-to-peer brand discussions rather than more unidirectional engagements on Instagram and Twitter posts.
There are rich new consumer data insights in web3. Direct-to-consumer brands obsess about ‘first-party data’, essentially proprietary insights they glean about customers through their browsing and buying habits within their own ecosystem. Otherwise, brands have virtually no idea what customers are doing outside their four walls. This means rich customer data is splintered into silos across each brand’s incomplete picture, with no brand able to deliver an optimal experience for lack of full visibility.
Web3 data is much more interesting and powerful because it’s ‘open’ and tied to a consumer’s wallet address on-chain. Take a look at what other digital products they own, from which brands, and how they’re spending their money across all of crypto. All of this information is available and actionable on the blockchain.
The vision for DTC was always for brands to create and sustain lasting relationships directly with their consumer. Instead of a consumption-based relationship with the consumer, in web3 brands and consumers “win” together in a more participatory model. In the traditional sense of DTC, the financial relationship comes down to a “buy now” moment. With web3 and NFTs, it is a ‘buy into now,’ with a value exchange loop that doesn’t end; brand and consumer are intertwined by shared incentives to create value for each other. Consumers benefit from utility and perks, or from resell potential from a liquid ‘always-on’ market. The brand or creator benefits from transaction volume via embedded royalties… in the words of Charlie Munger, “show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome."
It’s certainly not a straightforward to simple step for a global brand to integrate blockchain technology into its existing framework. Those that have succeeded in making the web3 leap like Starbucks, Nike, adidas and Sotheby’s have all done so in different ways – sometimes it’s through membership, sometimes it's through loyalty and rewards, sometimes it's simply through a new digital product line. Brands that will be the winners of this DTC revolution are the ones who see its potential to not only supplement their existing business, but offer entirely new kinds of value to their consumers.
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Adopting the Avatar: the Core of Consumer Customization
A brief playbook for brands building for the digitally-native generation.
According to McKinsey, fashion companies are expected to double their investment in technology by 2023. This statistic was one of many released during 2021's digital assets boom, revealing an important truth: consumers — and especially Gen Z — care deeply about owning their digital identities. In the two years since "NFT Summer," we've learned a lot about the evolution of consumer habits in digitally-native spaces. These insights can help guide the future of how brands operate and consumers engage in virtual environments.
As a short follow-up to our last blog post on how web3 is driving a return to the internet's golden age of customization, we're sharing some additional thoughts on how you can build for the next wave of consumer adoption. This evolution is already showing signs of incredible value for forward-thinking brands like Gucci, Valentino, L'Oréal, Adidas, Nike, and many more.
Web3 Returns the Internet to the Golden Age of Customization
This is what it feels like when the future enables what so many users loved most about the past.
MySpace, StumbleUpon, GeoCities, LiveJournal, Tumblr — the early internet thrived on user-driven, customizable experiences that, while rudimentary in design, clunky in function, and altogether useless for major brands (i.e., not monetizable or targettable), offered humans some of the earliest opportunities for representing themselves online.
Two decades later, across multiple transformational eras of the internet (more on this below), what can we learn from these now archaic — and predominantly extinct — platforms? To start, let's set the stage of the golden age of the web and the subsequent erosion of online customization that followed.
These early platforms referenced above were among the first to offer users a customizable digital sandbox that lacked the restrictions — and intrusive, expensive, increasingly ineffective advertising practices — that is now commonplace across tech. These were platforms on which people created, not platforms on which products were sold.
FAANG companies undoubtedly standardized the internet user experience. These companies built easier ways for people to create and disseminate information while creating the ability for the world's biggest brands to reach these new, content-craving audiences through new experiences and digitally-native business models. However, FAANG-style companies have also contributed to the flattening of the once-loved, now-nostalgic digital aesthetic, eliminating (or narrowing) users' ability to find customization online.
Example: go to StumbleUpon right now, and you'll just get dragged between identical Pinterest boards.
Implementing Web3 CRM: Wallets Are the New Email Address
How to Implement Web3 CRM for Consumers
Your customer relationship management system is your business's beating heart. It’s how you nurture customers, track vital information, and make strategic decisions.
Now that web3 has entered the fold, traditional CRMs can be augmented. So the question is this: Is your brand prepared for it? And what does the future look like?
Brands can expand upon their CRM data with wallets and token interactions to build loyalty in the changing digital economy.
If your CRM is the heart, what happens if it can't support your entire customer base along with their actions and interests? Consumers are adopting web3, and you want to be there from the start.
And with increasingly more limitations on what consumer data brands can collect, store, and use, along with apps and systems that don't talk to each other, brands miss out on data everywhere.
You need web3 CRM capability to connect wallets and token usage to your web2 data to accurately paint a picture of your customers.
Enhancing your CRM with web3, you can track and reward engagement across virtually any physical or digital touchpoint and connect it all in one place to analyze and manage.
Onboarding customers to create web3 wallets is the first step to getting started. The good news is that, with Mojito, the process is seamless for new users. They can set it up and manage it with an email address. In many ways, wallets have become the new email address, offering more benefits for customers and providing brands with the holistic data and CRM capabilities they need.
Mojito's web3 CRM collects and pulls all these moving pieces from different parts of the web together to create one remarkably effortless customer experience.
In this article, we’ll compare the differences between a web2 and web3 CRM, the benefits of using a web3 CRM, and how Mojito might be the right fit.
What’s the difference between web2 and web3 CRM?
The CRMs most brands use do not facilitate the needs that web3 has—the biggest one being connecting offchain and onchain data and creating an integrated portrait of customers across all physical and online interactions.
Web2 CRMs provide essential data and communication tools to manage emails, SMS lists, social media followers, eCommerce buyers, event attendees, and more.
But it's difficult to connect every data source you'd like to trigger into your web2 CRM, let alone add new data sources in web3.
Brands can instead use a web3 solution to augment their CRM by connecting data sources in a different way that brings everything together. Companies can create the most connected, data-rich CRM they've ever had.
Brands require CRM solutions to capture the entire customer data picture across both the internet and real-life experiences. In turn, they create a community-driven customer base, increase sales, and use their CRM for better connections, communication, and data.
Wallets are the new email addresses
It's no secret that brands are losing data through their traditional channels. Big Tech companies are reigning in how much data you have access to, like Apple limiting cookies, and how brands now get an incomplete picture of their customers.
Additionally, as customers interact with web3, your brand is in the dark until you establish web3 CRM capability.
Web3 wallet addresses are unique identifiers for users on the blockchain. Their address is recorded when they purchase an asset or trigger activity on the chain. With Mojito, onchain and real-life interactions join together in one familiar experience.
As your customers interact with your brand and create or log in with their wallets, you can associate that with their customer profile.
When a customer logs in on your profile manager, they can add their web3 address, resulting in a holistic view of your customer.
This is a huge opportunity for first-party data. Your brand can get direct analytics from your activities through a verified, authentic process supported by onchain and offchain interactions.
Wallet addresses offer a more reliable and extensive way to gather data on customer behavior, help drive engagement, and make better growth decisions.
Cookies are the new NFTs
While traditional solutions suffer from increasingly limited access to cookies, web3 offers brands a bright and better future.
NFTs are non-fungible tokens. A non-fungible token is a digital asset recorded on a public decentralized ledger called a blockchain. It can be verifiably owned and impossible to forge.
NFTs make it possible for someone to digitally own an asset, which has changed the future of technology. But it also provides a unique opportunity for web3 CRMs, engagement, and data.
"NFTs: your ticket into a brand's action." — Michael Litman
Dynamic NFTs utilize live metadata to gather customer information and drive engagement.
Before solutions like Mojito's Dynamic NFT, non-fungible tokens didn't change. And why should they? People wanted a unique digital asset that would last forever and retain or grow in long-term value.
But as web3 matured, so did the perspective on NFTs.
What if the value of an NFT was change?
For example, artists began to experiment as they created NFTs. They would explain that the NFT would change and evolve. This in itself made it valuable and rose in popularity.
Brands would learn how to use it for data and supercharge engagement only a short time later. Traditionally, metadata remained static, but now Dynamic NFTs update metadata based on consumer behavior.
Brands can leverage metadata in many use cases:
Loyalty programs: Customers can join membership communities when they purchase a digital pass with Mojito's traditional, familiar checkout experience. Every time they interact with your brand across any first-party or third-party platform, like redeeming rewards or visiting an event, their token metadata is updated and fed back into your CRM.
Exclusive access: Brands can implement token gating, limiting access to your brand's NFT or memberships. Gate websites, apps, events, games, and more. When customers check in, their activity becomes trackable.
Enhanced membership and subscriptions: Dynamic NFTs allow brands to sell time-access passes with expiration dates. While owners can always retain the NFT, their subscription must be maintained for full access to benefits. Brands use the metadata to identify subscription holders and analyze their activity (while adding a new revenue stream).
Customer interactions: Brands use NFC-enabled spaces to connect customers with their Dynamic NFTs and events, physical checkout experiences, and more, intertwining digital and physical customer engagement. When someone redeems a reward by scanning a code or object, your brand can track that activity.
Web3 solutions like Mojito use webhooks to send data from third parties back into your CRM. Every time a user takes an action, Mojito sends that data to your CRM and vital tools. Your data is collected, verified, and authenticated in one place, on or offchain.
Mojito offers a cohesive relationship management infrastructure. You can leverage a complete picture of your customers through thousands of interactions involving physical triggers, third-party apps, web2 tools, and web3 activity. Customer actions across the web or in real life can be configured to work with your CRM.
You’ll be able to understand your customers better than ever and reward them for their engagement at a level that was impossible before.
Benefits of using a web3 CRM
You don’t have to worry about a bumpy or complex ride when you adopt a true web3 CRM.
You’ll have all the tools, resources, and tech stack integrations needed to make an enterprise solution for your customers that meets the standards of your brand.
Below are several benefits you can expect when you connect your web2 CRM to a web3 solution.
1. Bring web2 and web3 data together
Mojito facilitates web2.5, meaning instead of "switching" web experiences, brands and customers can use web2 and web3 with no learning curve or friction at all. All is encompassed in one familiar internet experience.
Users can pay with a credit card or crypto and interact with the online apps they've used all these years (as well as easily using web3 apps).
Mojito enables brands to collect and pull necessary data to understand their customers through all web iterations and experiences—all in one CRM solution.
They can use the full power of this web2 and web3 data for events, NFT collections, token gating (exclusive access based on ownership), and other digital ownership experiences.
2. Actionable data for better customer relationships
Every brand wants to improve its customer relationships. Still, as the internet becomes more fragmented, especially with the introduction of web3, improving service and keeping up with expectations will be much more difficult.
Web2 CRMs are not capable of putting all these actions and platforms together.
However, web3 CRM platforms improve customer relationships by incorporating off and onchain activities through a centralized database.
If brands adopt an enterprise web3 CRM, they can meet changing consumer needs and stand out in the market with better and improved relationships thanks to the tools and possibilities web3 offers.
3. Improved sales and marketing strategies
Now, more than ever, your sales, marketing, and customer service teams will have access to the most accurate and transparent data within multiple channels and communities, all in one place. Your CRM can include customer history, preferences, community management details, and more data points within web3.
You can use accurate and more abundant data to analyze customer behavior for improved decision-making. A suitable CRM can also help sales and marketing teams provide personalized messages based on their data, increasing conversions and other KPIs.
4. Next-level customer service
Not only does better, more current information help improve customer relationships but so does the level of service you can provide.
Your team can proactively resolve issues with real-time data collection (for example, tracking customer engagement and pinpointing areas of opportunity), which increases customer satisfaction.
Brands can go beyond positive experiences and create the best problem-solving processes and community-building opportunities for your customers.
5. Greater ROI potential
Web3 CRMs connect your stack, improving overall sales, marketing, and customer service and building long-term loyalty.
These critical benefits offer bigger ROI potential and future growth. By analyzing blockchain activity, brands can track the popularity of certain products, use blockchain-verified data to track inventory and invest in the areas customers are most interested in.
Web3 CRMs also open new revenue streams, like selling digital assets with NFTs. Brands can even test the reception of new physical products by selling limited sample releases with “NFT digital twins” (when a physical good comes with an NFT representation at purchase).
6. Strategic positioning
You can better position your company for the economic shift to the decentralized web with a web3 CRM.
For example, Mojito's web3 CRM also includes "web2.5" features for the transition.
Some customers won’t know how to navigate web3—they’ll want simplicity. Others will want every tool available to them. Web2.5 serves everyone. New users can pay with a credit card and have a user-friendly experience. At the same time, web3 adopters can take full advantage of innovation and opportunities with cryptocurrency payments and more.
Brands will serve web2 and web3 users for the internet's evolution, and they'll have a robust CRM foundation for the new economy.
