DTC Lessons: Community building with Gatsby

Each week, we're chatting to an expert in the eCommerce space to share their wisdom on building a resilient DTC brand in 2022 and beyond. This week we're handing the mic to Brett Bernstien, founder & CEO of Gatsby.

Take it away Brett…

Interview with Brett Bernstien, founder & CEO of Gatsby

Let us know your role and what you do day to day.

As the founder and CEO at Gatsby I'm involved in a lot! Everything from product, to sales to marketing. At Gatsby we help brands manage and scale their social communities on Instagram and TikTok by leveraging Klaviyo automations.

It’s a tough year for eCommerce. Which area should DTC brands be focusing their time and efforts towards, and why?

First and foremost I'd say retention and LTV. You spend so much time and money getting those customers acquired in the first place, and now is really the time to double down on building community and relationships with your buyers. Not only does a community bring in new customers, but it also enforces retention and repeat purchases.

At Gatsby you help leading brands to grow and scale. Can you give us 2 success stories with DTC brands. 

Klaviyo just released a case study of one of our customers - a swimwear brand called Kulani Kinis. Klaviyo and Gatsby, together, have allowed Kulani Kinis to completely automate the management of the Kulani Sun Chasers brand ambassador programme and turn social media influencers into brand advocates.

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Gatsby is a clever social plug-in that integrates with Klaviyo to enhance subscriber data with social media metrics and automatically reward them through Klaviyo Flows for tagging your brand on Instagram and TikTok.

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When customers sign up via Klaviyo’s built-in pop-up form, they provide their Instagram and TikTok handles. Gatsby then gathers social media profile metrics on each user, including how many followers and posts they have, and feeds the data back into Klaviyo. It also tracks social media mentions to measure the programme’s impact and make it easier for Kulani Kinis to acknowledge customers’ posts using automated emails. This approach has generated $425k in revenue in 6 months. You can read more about the case study here.

You specialize in building ambassador communities - what piece of advice would you give to DTC brands who want to grow in this way? 

One of the best things you can do is automate your process - it's one of the best ways to run a community at scale. It's really hard to manage community without using a tool. With Gatsby you can now set up a fully automated flow where a customer who gives their Instagram handle is sent an offer in exchange for posting content about a brand.

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The other really successful strategy is to do one-off campaigns. If a brand is launching a new product or variant, being able to go to your community and saying - here is some content, go post it on your social accounts, and we'll send you the product upfront.

What are the biggest trends you’re seeing right now in DTC? Which of these should DTC brands jump on, and which should they avoid?

Making sure your customers stick with you is a really big emphasis for brands. Building community – whether an army of advocates or a formal ambassador program – out of your individual prospects and customers keeps them more sticky: not only will they be more actively engaged with your brand, it will drive them to purchase more. But it’s important to meet them where they already are: social media platforms, specifically Instagram and TikTok. Inspiring and rewarding your customers for sharing about your brand on social media is an effective way to build community, and mechanisms that help facilitate this are going to be key.

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Personalisation is also really important - that is to do with community but it's much broader than that - it's giving customers a feeling that they are part of the brand. A merchant that does this really well is Melin hats. When I bought from them recently they were great to interact with from a customer support perspective, they were extremely responsive and colloquial throughout their customer journey.

If you could tell DTC brands to stop making one mistake, what would it be?

I don't get the sense that many brands are using the tools they are buying enough. We have a lot of integrations at Gatsby - including Klaviyo, Attentive, Gorgias & LoyaltyLion - and a lot of brands are buying these really effective, robust solutions and not leveraging them to their full capacity. We work with a lot of merchants, and there is a lot of value that is being left on the table out there.

Are there any eCommerce communities you particularly look up to and recommend everyone should follow?

I would say the Shopify Plus Community on Facebook, it's really good and knowledgeable community for people to interact with.

Thanks Brett! Where can we hear more from yourself & Gatsby?

You can find out more about Gatsby via our website, and you can follow me on Linkedin.