What is influencer marketing? Influencers, social media, followers, content, paid posts, impressions, product placement, affiliation, advertisers… These terms are increasingly present in digital marketing dialogue, and it’s not always easy to navigate the vocabulary. And yet, these words gravitate around a concept that’s new but already growing quite the reputation: influencer … [Read more...]
8 Ways To Find Super-Customers
The 80:20 rule applies to most things in life. Customer spend is often one of them: in most businesses, 20% of customers provide 80% of the sales revenue. This group of “super-customers” are the key to growing your business. These are the customers who can be most easily persuaded to spend even more and who are likely to remain customers for the longest period of time. … [Read more...]
The Most Important Marketing Metric (And It’s Not CPA)
How much can you afford to spend to acquire a new customer? It's a big question, and one I see people getting wrong every day. The reason? They have no idea what their Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is. CLV is the single most important marketing metric. Period. It can tell you if your difficult ad campaigns should continue, how big a proportion of your revenues to allocate to … [Read more...]
The E-Commerce Magic Bullet (Hint: It’s Not AdWords)
E-commerce companies often ask me why they’re struggling to compete. They think they are doing all the right things but they’re still not growing. Even though they are spending big budgets with their SEM agency, Amazon is crushing them, they can’t find any volume on AdWords and new customers aren’t staying with them past the first order. They keep running faster and faster, but … [Read more...]
Holiday Season Email Attack!
As we approach holiday season many e-commerce companies and merchants are gearing up their email campaigns in order to maximize sales at the most important part of the year. The big problem? Email inboxes are flooded with holiday-themed emails. Yes Lifecycle Marketing just released a report titled, “Engagement and Deliverability for Holiday-Themed Emails: Biggest Lessons from … [Read more...]
Micro-Moments #2: Intention-Rich Interactions
34% of online retail purchases now happen on a mobile device. The products that are bought on mobile are the ones that are in front of the customer at the moment of decision. Google defines these intent-rich moments as know-, go-, do- or buy-moments. When people shop, their smartphone is their personal advisor and research assistant. If you want to win the battle for mobile … [Read more...]
Micro-Moments #1: Being There When Consumers Choose
Part 1 of our new series on Micro-Moments One of the most useful concepts that we at mThinkDigital use for our mobile e-commerce clients is Google's Micro-Moments. The idea is deceptively simple: mobile enables consumers to interact with your brand, any time, any place. And as Woody Allen nearly said, 90% of success is just showing up. Consumers might be choosing between … [Read more...]
How Will Amazon-Brand Products Affect Brand Owners?
Amazon is going to start selling its own brands of food, diapers and cleaning materials. It has already been testing new brand names like Mama Bear and Happy Belly, with a view to rolling out new products to Amazon Prime members within the next few weeks. Big FMCG brand owners already have to compete with supermarket chains creating own-brand products that "emulating" the … [Read more...]
Blue Ribbon Panel: Interview Melissa Feemster
Does the difficulty in predicting which creatives will be accepted to run by Facebook and other social platforms make them still useful or too much bother? Why? While there are certainly very specific ad requirements enforced by Facebook, the platform itself is a critical component for brands. Facebook’s ad restrictions have been put in place to increase performance, which … [Read more...]
Blue Ribbon Panel: Interview with Melissa Feemster
How is big data going to impact the performance marketing industry? Big data is going to drive the performance marketing industry forward and help all stakeholders be more efficient. The affiliate channel usually tracks between 10-20% of an advertisers’ online spend, and has an extremely efficient ROI. Think about the growth we could achieve if we became even 10% more … [Read more...]
Building Performance through Community, Transparency and Experience
An Exclusive Q&A with Rakuten Affiliate Network GMs Melissa Feemster and Adam Weiss, Celebrating Five Years as Blue Book’s Best Affiliate Network. Kicking off a milestone year, Rakuten Affiliate Network has a lot to celebrate. It was just awarded the top spot on mThink’s annual ranking of the world’s best affiliate networks for the fifth consecutive year. This year also … [Read more...]
Blue Ribbon Panel: Interview with Melissa Feemster
What are your two or three key performance marketing-related predictions for 2016? Next year we will see even more Mobile Shopping/In-store crossover. It will be the year when O2O goes from a "test idea" to a true focus for large retailers. With 75% of consumers using their mobile devices in store to read reviews, find better pricing or make an actual purchase, I predict … [Read more...]
Blue Book Panel: Interview with Melissa Feemster
In five year’s time, will the CPS side of the performance marketing industry be bigger in the USA than it is now? If so, what will drive that growth? The CPS space has only growth ahead. For example, we’ve seen the evolution of Publisher models over the past few years and believe they will continue finding new ways to innovate and reach consumers through mobile and social … [Read more...]
4 Key BLUE BOOK CPA/CPS Network Survey Insights
The 2015 BLUE BOOK league tables brought together the opinions of over 20,000 online advertisers and publishers from across the world. Respondents were primarily from the USA and Canada but in total we received responses from over 40 different countries - an amazing collective effort by the members of the performance marketing industry. A month on from the headline-grabbing … [Read more...]
So What's Next for Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing just celebrated its 20th birthday and – wow – has it changed! Just look at the last few years. New and different affiliate models continue to appear, the world is getting smaller through the international reach of publishers, and the customer journey and experience have become ever so scrutinized. This is coupled with the consumer shift in consumption -- … [Read more...]