As 2014 dawns, Rakuten LinkShare offers 6 key tips for marketers running cost-per-acquisition programmes, outlining the importance of good data and using seasonal highs and lows to your advantage.
The tips from Rakuten LinkShare’s Campus initiative which offer advice for advertisers and marketers running CPA programmes over the next year:
1. What constitutes a publisher site in affiliate marketing?
2. The importance of good data
3. Understanding links
4. Attracting new customers
5. Seasonal highs and lows
6. Managing a multi-channel marketing programme
Rakuten Linkshare has taken some hints and tips from the Campus initiative and put together some advice for advertisers and marketers running CPA programmes.
1. What constitutes a publisher site in affiliate marketing?
Links and vouchers spring to mind when people think of the affiliate industry. But what exactly is a publisher an affiliate site? While links and vouchers remain valuable, the affiliate industry has developed some new and exciting business models in recent years, which encompass loyalty points, social media, mobile and even virtual currency. We’ve detailed the ways in which some of these models work, but this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the ways advertisers can reach shoppers using publisher sites.
• One of the biggest revenue drivers are loyalty site publishers, which rewards users for returning to sites by offering incentives and points. A good example of this is Shopcade. Brands understand the need to keep customers coming back time and time again, and loyalty programmes are valuable in the age of the fickle consumer.
• Social media publishers such as WantNeedLove work differently – they use the wisdom of crowds to circulate their product offerings, allowing shoppers to save and share items they like. The publishers then use the trend data they get back to further optimise offers.
• Other publishers use virtual currency models, rewarding consumers for their activity levels (most frequent in gaming) or mobile models, that mean shoppers are targeted when browsing on mobile or even when they are out and about, such as sending texts or push notifications based on criteria set by the shopper (for example when something goes on sale).
2. The importance of good data
To appear on any publisher sites regularly and drive subsequent sales, whether it’s a coupon model or a mobile publisher, data is key. It’s in everyone’s interest for data across the affiliate sector to be good quality, but it is worth remembering that ultimately advertisers (brands) are responsible for the quality of the product data feeds made available to publishers through an affiliate network.
The basics of assuring good data hygiene are keeping it up-to-date and error-free. One of the biggest complaints is the existence of product records that are no longer sold by brands. This can result not only in click-throughs that do not convert, but can also discourage your partner publishers from using your data in the future. If you don’t have the capability to cleanse and standardise your data, it can be outsourced to companies such as Rakuten Popshops.
3. Understanding links
An affiliate link is a tool used to connect brands with potential customers online, via publishers. Links range from simple text links, such as a sentence fragment like “click here for 50% off”, to dynamic rich media links, which can be changed and updated to promote whatever deal or product is most relevant at that time.
Getting the most out of your links as an advertiser requires not only an understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the different link types, but also knowledge of your consumers – how do they shop and what is most likely to tempt them to make a purchase? Simple affiliate links send the reader straight to a brand website via a hyperlink, banner ad or individual product that can be clicked on. They can also be more sophisticated, using interactive rich media; a multimedia link that allows advertisers to push updated text and banner linking code to affiliate publishers. This means you don’t need to change linking code when you make changes to your creative.
4. Attracting new customers
Affiliate marketing is a great way to reach new customers – the lifeblood of a successful brand. When setting up a customer acquisition programme, consider targeting shoppers with a personal promotion, and reward your partners with a unique publisher offer – rewarding both new customers and your partners can be very powerful. This could be free delivery on the first order, a free sample with a purchase or a discount on their next order. Remember to give publishers new images and links to show clearly that the offers are for new customers.
Remember that the value isn’t just in the first sale but winning an ongoing new customer, so check ways you can measure the long-term value of new customers internally. Tracking future purchases allows for better models of measurement of the affiliate programmes return on investment (ROI). Loyalty publishers are great partners for achieving this.
5. Seasonal highs and lows
You don’t have to be a genius to know that retail follows seasonal patterns. There are natural peaks and troughs, both online and on the high street, but savvy retailers and marketers have realised that to stay ahead of the competition they must maximise sales on key shopping days such as Boxing Day and Cyber Monday, as well as negating the lull in sales at other times of the year.
Taking the ‘Back to School’ period before the new academic year start as an example, our network data shows that books and magazines peak in the last two weeks of August, whereas the Children’s category, which includes items like school uniforms, peaks in the last week of July and the first two weeks of August. Advertisers must make use of seasonal trends and ensure that creative is ready ahead of schedule for publishers putting together pages and promotions that are timed to fall in line with consumer spending behaviour.
6. Managing a multi-channel marketing programme
Once you’ve got a successful affiliate programme up and running, it’s worth thinking about how you can extend the CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) model into other parts on your online marketing. Paid search, retargeting and display are areas with natural synergies with affiliate. Managing an effective cross-channel programme is about understanding the customer journey online. Our network data showed that one shopper can have as many as 14 touch-points with a brand over five days (with the final one being the purchase). This can include Google searches, display ads and engagement with retargeting ads.
Advertisers should aim to measure all their CPA channels in one place, so overlap, cross-channel engagement and attribution are all accurately measured. This allows advertisers to adjust spend accordingly to see what’s working and what isn’t. For example, a paid search result may have been the first piece of content that inspired a shopper to look at a product, retargeting ads may have kept the shopper interested and a free delivery offer may have finally convinced the shopper to buy. A case study from our network shows that conversion rates increased nearly 500% when a shopper is engaged on a CPA basis via three or more channels compared to just one channel. So we know that increasing the overlap between channels will drive incremental revenue.
Alisa Reichert, Education Strategist at Rakuten Marketing commented: “We launched Rakuten LinkShare Campus because we realised that there was a vast, untapped resource within our employees. Our account managers have always been on hand to help clients and publishers improve or adjust their programmes and the technology that supports these programmes, but we realised that many people would rather learn in their own time and in their own way – whether that’s through trialling and testing, seeing examples where others have implemented changes successfully, or participating in demos and webinars. Campus lets people do this, and also provides a recognised industry certification for those who pass the assessments.”
All Campus information and assessments are hosted online. Tutorials take place via a series of webinars, online videos and weekly newsletters. To learn more about Campus or sign up to become a certified affiliate programme manager, please visit the website.
http://www.linkshare.co.uk/edu/campus/