The 3-2-1s of DTC Success for 2025

What are winning DTC brands doing on their websites that drive dollars in 2025? While there’s no silver bullet, but there ARE a few key strategies we know work. Read on to learn about the 3-2-1s of DTC success for 2025.

Build a Funnel with Soul

In today’s digital world, clienteling isn’t dead—it’s just evolving. To succeed in Direct-to-Consumer (DTC), brands must deeply understand their customers and create experiences that feel both personal and purposeful.

It all starts with a fundamental question: Who are you in the eyes of your customers? A clear, well-articulated unique selling proposition is essential, along with tailored landing pages experiences that cater to different customer segments without alienating existing shoppers. Personalization is key, but it must strike the right balance—enhancing the shopping journey without overstepping privacy boundaries.

Your website should be more than just a sales channel; it should be designed to collect and leverage meaningful data to improve the customer experience. Listen to the data, not assumptions. Optimize for engagement by offering multiple ways for different personas to interact with your brand. And don’t overlook existing traffic—use peak moments like sales or viral events to gain deeper insights into customer behavior.

Bring the Sale Back to the Site

In the world of online alternatives – marketplaces with competitive loyalty programs, free shipping, and personalized recommendations – your DTC site needs to give people a reason to visit and buy. Brands who win at DTC do three things consistently:

First, they have a stand-out look and feel. Your site is your “modern-day billboard” - it is your credibility as a brand. Also, don’t forget: pretty things (backed by a quality product) make people want to buy.

Second, they have the “right merchandising”. Customers need a reason to buy from you. It could be DTC-only offerings that you don’t offer elsewhere, bundles that add value, exclusive collaborations offered only on your site, or limited run drops.

One of 1r’s client collaborations achieved revenue 500 basis points (bps) higher during the collaboration period than the average for the entire quarter, a boon for overall year over year revenue.

Finally, winning DTC sites have compelling site perks, like loyalty programs and thoughtful subscriptions. 10% off is a good start but be careful you don’t put yourself in the same category as Amazon – try experimenting with subscription boxes that surprise and delight.

Winning DTC brands also invest in features that elevate the shopping experience:

- Personalized product quizzes to help shoppers find the right fit.

- An inclusive visual representation that ensures all customers see themselves in the brand.

- A focus on clean, ethical ingredients to meet the expectations of conscious consumers.

On-site SEO Drives Traffic and Revenue

The data shows: that page SEO moves the needle way more in terms of traffic and revenue than blogs do. But how do you do that?

First, you need to engineer the right site architecture and structure from the beginning during your design and build or site refresh. This is the technical side of SEO. Things like an intentional URL structure for variants, actually using H1 and H2s, and thoughtfully incorporating high-value keywords with search volume on collection and search pages.

Pro tip? Make sure you have a design and build team that is strong in technical SEO. In one of 1r’s recent design and build projects, we achieved a 200% lift in organic traffic.

Second, your Product Listing Pages are your biggest opportunity for ranking and the seat of your authority and relevancy. You’ll want to explore coded SEO content blocks that support keywords with search volume, backlinking, and schema markups.

By focusing on low-difficult, high search volume few words, 1r helped secure a 90% lift in organic traffic for one of our core beauty clients.

Product Detail Pages, while helpful, will give you less gains; however good structure, keyword optimization, and tagging elements according to Google’s Shopping attributes will all help.

Big and Slow: Heavy Pages, Clunky Navigation, and Stale Design

A slow, clunky website isn’t just frustrating—it’s a conversion killer. If your homepage is heavy, your navigation overwhelming, or your site packed with outdated features, you’re making it harder for customers to buy. And in the fast-moving world of DTC, staying stagnant means getting leapfrogged by newer, more agile competitors.

The biggest culprits? Code bloat, poor UX, bad mobile experiences, and complex site operations make it difficult to maintain site health. Not only does this hurt conversions, but it also makes it harder for Google to crawl and rank your site, impacting organic traffic.

So how do you stay ahead? Prioritize performance. Regular UX and competitive audits help identify friction points. Invest in SEO optimization to keep your site visible. Implement best practices like comparison tools to enhance usability. And don’t just focus on top-of-funnel (TOF) acquisition—many brands are seeing the biggest drop-offs not in TOF or bottom-of-funnel (BOF), but in on-site conversion rates (CVR).

A sleek, fast, and intuitive site isn’t a luxury—it’s a necessity for DTC success. Stay lean, stay relevant, and make sure your site is working as hard as you are.

Creative Without Strategy

According to Facebook, creativity drives 55% of the outcome of a campaign. On TikTok, it's 70%.

Our message? Invest in creativity — for the full funnel.

What works on-site does not work in ads and is different from what works in email. You need an array of creativity to make the whole system work - all branded, but different depending on which user is interfacing with you.

A few of our recommendations include investing in great quality creative, mapping your creative investment to your channel investment and channel plans, and if you are doing lifestyle, making sure your models reflect your ideal customer profile. Also, don’t skimp on UGC and solicit input from your channel experts for creative input.

Lastly, don’t be afraid to invest in a new creative direction from time to time for outside-the-box takes on your creativity.

With how easy it is to stand up a site, tack on new 3rd party functionality, and deploy features, it is becoming even more difficult to interpret what is happening across your platforms and channels.

The 1r POV? The smartest brands out there are the ones that are not optimizing for each channel separately but are optimizing for balanced success across the full funnel.

For small brands, we like the model of a strong internal hire. Someone who can run a bunch of platforms and get you quick wins. Don’t try to go for a unicorn who has done everything - they’ll be hard to find and expensive. Find a generalist marketing person with an entrepreneurial spirit.

For big brands, working with different agency experts for each channel can be a workable option and get you the best of the best. However, a requirement to make this work is having an amazing internal champion (or team) who can bring it all together — integrating eCommerce, data, and marketing. The big risk here is that data is subjective, and you need to avoid agencies putting their channel first at the expense of the overall business.