UK affiliate marketing has gone a long way since its inception. It has become more mainstream, and altogether more complex.
And regardless of all the challenges, it now offers (both advertisers and publishers) more opportunities than ever.
Consumers can buy almost anything online from groceries to holidays, gadgets to clothing, even cars.
Ecommerce today is exciting, innovative, and profitable: last year U.S. shoppers made internet history when Cyber Monday sales topped a record-breaking $1.5bn in online sales.
According to comScore, it was the biggest spending day in U.S. ecommerce history.
But one of the cornerstones of retail, be it online or in physical stores, has always been turning one-time shoppers into regular customers. What’s the best way to do that?
Successful ecommerce thrives on working with the the best business partners that ensure you stay one step ahead of your competitors, but over the last decade things have become pretty stagnant in the affiliate channel when it comes to service provider choice.
Large brands tend to review their affiliate network provider every two to three years and differentiation between service providers has become harder to see.
A worrying trend has arrived driven by a lack of innovation. In order to lock in market share contracts have been increasing and the small print surrounding notice periods has been growing.
Content is king. This phrase might have been around a long time, but it’s still applicable to marketing. Of course, nowadays it’s only truly valid if the content is personalised.
Otherwise, the message just won’t get through to your audience.
As technology progresses and new digital channels are adopted, targeting becomes more sophisticated, which makes personalisation even more critical.
Even though it is impossible to have a conversation today with a CMO or other marketing leader that doesn’t address digital strategies and tactics, it is easy to forget that the term “digital marketing” did not even exist 10-15 years ago.
In the rush to drive likes and tweets, pins and favorites, ratings and reviews, marketers often overlook traditional tactics, which are still an effective way to motivate desired behaviors among consumers.
And as the land grab to gain digital mindshare continues to pick up steam, it is becoming ever more important to differentiate your brand by offering compelling solutions to consumers across all channels — both digital and traditional.
With mobile commerce continuing to gather pace through the performance channel, it has been interesting to look back across the past few weeks to analyse the role mobile played over the Easter bank holiday.
With our March stats indicating that traffic through mobile devices reached 21.1% while sales were at 14.2%, it was interesting to see the impact of a long weekend on mobile usage.
We have traditionally seen that consumers turn to mobile devices at weekends. This is not particularly surprising when we consider that office workers step away from their desktops and instead use mobile devices to access the internet.
In May of 2013 Affiliate Management Days is coming to Europe. The inaugural conference in London is going to be opened by the already-legendary Matthew Wood.
By way of preview, I have sat down with Matthew to ask him a few questions about the current state and future of affiliate marketing.
Matthew has over 15 years of experience in affiliate marketing. He is the founder of a4u and a4uexpo, and an acknowledged thought leader and speaker within the sector.
So we’ve proved online performance marketing is big, but what’s next?
The headlines attached by the IAB and PwC to the ground-breaking study into Online Performance Marketing say it all: ‘The UK’s “hidden” £814m online economy’.
The report has provided fantastic ammunition for everyone involved in affiliate marketing and lead generation, whether talking from the network perspective, publisher or even client side, to point to the enormous value that OPM delivers.
We can see where the 12% average growth per year over the last five years has come from and where the potential for future growth might be. Financial services accounts for 45% of total spend retail 20%, media and telecoms at around 10% and travel and leisure at 9%.
Most large brands in the UK are involved in affiliate marketing and the study also signalled continued rapid growth with an average increase in investment of 25% this year.
Over the past two years we have witnessed traffic through mobile devices increase from 2% to 19% of total network clicks.
If we exclude tablet devices from this equation, traffic through mobile handsets has grown from 1.8% to 11%.
With consumers increasingly using mobile devices to access the internet, it becomes of paramount importance to ensure that the mobile user journey is optimised for this experience.
Leadfindr is a new startup from Mark Rogers, Raoul Urma and Econsultancy guest blogger Justin Rees. It is a social media lead generation platform that enables brands to use social media to find genuine prospects.
I’ve been asking Justin and Mark about Leadfindr, the business model behind it, and the company’s plans for world domination…
It’s that time of year again. A time where teams come together, exhibiting strategy, tactics, and know-how to attempt to rank above others. A time where lots of careful planning and execution boils down to a “make it or break it” finale. That time of year is Super Bowl Ad season, of course.
While many advertisers gave it their best shot, only a few reigned supreme. Though there has been plenty of analysis of this topic, here’s my recount on the good, the bad and the awkward.
Son of the late and venerable historian Eric Hobsbawm, Andy Hobsbawm may make history, not write it. That’s because he, along with technologist and serial entrepreneur Niall Murphy, as well as computer scientists Dom Guinard and Vlad Trifa, are making great strides with EVRYTHNG, a software company bent on connecting objects to the Internet — making them “smart,” as it were.
Powered by the EVRYTHNG Engine, the technology makes real the “Internet of Things,” a concept first named in 1999. In that schema, objects are given virtual identities (perhaps through RFID tags, maybe through a barcode or QR code) and connected in a Web-like structure.