Digital Marketing
There’s a few standard routes to paid digital marketing and none of them are a big deal to set up technically. But deciding on your offering and commercials can take longer than you think.
Affiliates pay only for conversions
If you are selling B2C, affiliates can be an easy win, with nothing to pay unless a sale is made. Setting up an affiliate program can be fiddly, especially when it comes to dealing with website cookies and variable commission rates for different products. We have experience with some major networks: Affiliate Future, CJ Affiliate, Awin, and Trade Doubler. There’s no need to implement more than one network – and doing so makes things complicated and runs the risk of double payouts.
The trouble with affiliates is the ones that actually work are the big voucher/cashback websites. Which means you not only have to pay the affiliate for the sale, but you have to give away a promo/voucher code too. So, suddenly your healthy margins start to look tissue thin. Couple that with the fact you may even have paid Google for the click too.
Newsletter lists auto subscribe
Hopefully you are already using a 3rd party system to send out marketing emails and not just using Outlook. If you don’t have a system, we can help set one up – they are not expensive – up to 2000 or so subscribers is normally free. Not having a system is not really an option these days – as for GDPR compliance you need to demonstrate how you deal with unsubscribes – and you can’t do that through Outlook.
Even if you have a system, it’s very common for these to become messy after a while due to changing priorities and new subscribers. This results in badly segmented data, which means your emails are not properly targeted. The result: people unsubscribe or, worse, complain to the ICO. We can help with a rebuild – all it takes is a bit of analysis of what you want now, then extract all the data, remap all the fields, then reload it. If you have a big list, this is a good thing to plan around your renewal date, as it might be worth changing systems, or at least re-negotiating with your current provider.
Another big issue is how the names get into the list – you want to make sure that it’s all automated. From your website, from email enquiries and from bookings/orders in your back office.
One technical issue that crops up is getting emails into people’s inboxes and not their spam folders. There are some simple rules here that apply when you are actually building the newsletter, such as not linking to other domains and how your host your images. But their are also some technical things to sort out, like DKIM and SPF settings at your domain registrar.
Google Ads/PPC/remarketing a money pit?
Google is very good at is relieving you of your profits if you’re not careful – and you may well be doing all these things through an agency and not in-house – but it’s a very quick way to spend a lot of money. Are you checking what they are doing?
Agencies can be so detached from your business, they can’t always know what they should be promoting or how much to spend – so you need to keep on top of it. Sometimes it’s better to bring it in-house – and although you may have less knowledge of how the PPC platform works than an agency, your business knowledge will more than make up for it. Our advice is don’t be scared of getting your hands dirty with the Google platform – we can help you though it, having run many campaigns over the years.
Product feeds to affilates
Building a feed for Google Shopping or for affiliates to use and publish on their site is an easy job and, again, can run off a cheap server in-house. This can give your affiliates live pricing and availability of whatever inventory you want to expose.