One of the many issues 2020’s disruption shed light on was the lack of digital skills in huge parts of the global population. Regional lockdowns and physical restrictions forced many people to do a lot of things online they were not used to.
Whether it was navigating Zoom calls and Google Hangouts to stay in touch with loved ones, searching for the latest government news and updates on social media, or shopping for groceries via websites, many users were exploring these online options for the very first time.
The digital skills gap is a topic that had been growing in importance for many countries around the world for several years. But 2020 blew the doors open on the dilemma and made it apparent that constructive education and training were in short supply.
Digital dilemmas extend to business too
This lack of digital knowledge is as much a problem for businesses as it is for individuals. The IAB UK’s Digital Skills Gap Survey revealed almost 90% of members find it challenging to recruit staff with up-to-date digital skills.
For Natalie Bell, CEO at media communications agency Manning Gottlieb, this is thanks to the pace of change in our industry.
“When it comes to digital advertising,” Bell states in the survey, “nothing stays the same for long. While this makes for an exciting, fast-paced industry, finding employees that have up-to-date digital skills isn’t always easy and has now become such a transient talent group that I believe it’s stifling industry-wide growth.”
That speed of change was never more apparent than in 2020 when many companies were forced to reconfigure their entire working cultures and business models overnight.
Like the individuals that constitute them, many companies found they were not quite in the best shape to make this sudden transition to online advertising and ecommerce, and lacked the talent, tools or resources to adapt.
And, counter to a growing trend in recent years that has seen large companies lean more towards in-housing as much of their services as possible, the pandemic demonstrated the value of outsourcing some elements of your business; martech being one of them.
Affiliate marketing: A solution hidden in plain sight
As Bell suggests, the pace of change within digital advertising is lightning fast. Today’s cutting-edge is tomorrow’s blunt tool of yesterday. Deloitte reports that in several industries, including marketing, workers must redevelop their skills every 12-18 months just to keep up.
But to do so requires huge capital investments in people, in training and in technology.
What if though, from a marketing perspective, there were some means of keeping up with the latest technological developments in the industry that didn’t require constant retraining staff?
Or which meant you didn’t have to push your own product teams and developers to design new ways of acquiring customers to stay ahead of competition?
Or didn’t involve large upfront costs to acquire a new technology or solution that then needs to be incorporated into your own software stack?
What if you could access such cutting-edge ecommerce technology at the touch of a button and pay for it on a performance basis, only after you know that it works for your business?
And what if you could do this across a variety of different technologies covering an array of different marketing areas?
Well, you can. And the answer has been hidden in plain sight for years: Affiliate marketing.
Our channel’s entire model is largely based on the premise of outsourcing customer acquisition and, more recently, brand awareness.
Historically, that has primarily been in the form of providing qualified traffic. But increasingly this has extended to a collection of more technical partners that can help businesses optimize their on-site capabilities or provide analytical functions they cannot build or create themselves.
Networks like Awin’s have developed universal solutions that can house these partners so a brand can quickly insert them into its own websites with a single click and assess their impact.
Want to personalize the deals you display to your site visitors to ensure only the most relevant promotions are offered? Try Smarter Click or RevLifter.
Want to up-sell related products via AI-powered bundles to drive up average order value? Partner with Increasingly. We spoke to Sri Sharma, Increasingly's CEO, below.
Want to implement a referral marketing tool on your site to encourage your customers to spread the word of your brand post-purchase? Experiment with Soreto.
Surfing the wave of martech innovation
This kind of plug-and-play approach to martech provides an extremely agile tactic to online marketing. It liberates a brand from being weighed down by worries of developing these tools themselves, and instead allows them to focus on improving their own products and services.
The same goes for publisher businesses too. Monetization of traffic is increasingly a space in which similar tech partners can help shoulder some of this burden. Awin’s own publisher tag houses a variety of useful tools.
From Trackonomics’ dashboards that aggregate traffic data from across ad platforms, to Monetizer101’s price comparison tools, and Monotote’s tech for turning video and imagery into shoppable content.
Why spend time, effort and resources developing this technology yourself when you can leave it to those who have real expertise in it? Why invest huge capital in developing something that may be outdated in a year’s time when you can maintain a cutting-edge without committing to it?
Digital advertising is complex and increasingly so. But with the right technology partners at your disposal you can continually surf and benefit from this surging wave of innovation.
In 2021, the affiliate industry’s performance model for ‘renting’ this technology will offer a new way for online businesses to stay a step ahead of their competition.
Digital dilemmas extend to business too
This lack of digital knowledge is as much a problem for businesses as it is for individuals. The IAB UK’s Digital Skills Gap Survey revealed almost 90% of members find it challenging to recruit staff with up-to-date digital skills.
For Natalie Bell, CEO at media communications agency Manning Gottlieb, this is thanks to the pace of change in our industry.
“When it comes to digital advertising,” Bell states in the survey, “nothing stays the same for long. While this makes for an exciting, fast-paced industry, finding employees that have up-to-date digital skills isn’t always easy and has now become such a transient talent group that I believe it’s stifling industry-wide growth.”
That speed of change was never more apparent than in 2020 when many companies were forced to reconfigure their entire working cultures and business models overnight.
Like the individuals that constitute them, many companies found they were not quite in the best shape to make this sudden transition to online advertising and ecommerce, and lacked the talent, tools or resources to adapt.
And, counter to a growing trend in recent years that has seen large companies lean more towards in-housing as much of their services as possible, the pandemic demonstrated the value of outsourcing some elements of your business; martech being one of them.
Affiliate marketing: A solution hidden in plain sight
As Bell suggests, the pace of change within digital advertising is lightning fast. Today’s cutting-edge is tomorrow’s blunt tool of yesterday. Deloitte reports that in several industries, including marketing, workers must redevelop their skills every 12-18 months just to keep up.
But to do so requires huge capital investments in people, in training and in technology.
What if though, from a marketing perspective, there were some means of keeping up with the latest technological developments in the industry that didn’t require constant retraining staff?
Or which meant you didn’t have to push your own product teams and developers to design new ways of acquiring customers to stay ahead of competition?
Or didn’t involve large upfront costs to acquire a new technology or solution that then needs to be incorporated into your own software stack?
What if you could access such cutting-edge ecommerce technology at the touch of a button and pay for it on a performance basis, only after you know that it works for your business?
And what if you could do this across a variety of different technologies covering an array of different marketing areas?
Well, you can. And the answer has been hidden in plain sight for years: Affiliate marketing.
Our channel’s entire model is largely based on the premise of outsourcing customer acquisition and, more recently, brand awareness.
Historically, that has primarily been in the form of providing qualified traffic. But increasingly this has extended to a collection of more technical partners that can help businesses optimize their on-site capabilities or provide analytical functions they cannot build or create themselves.
Networks like Awin’s have developed universal solutions that can house these partners so a brand can quickly insert them into its own websites with a single click and assess their impact.
Want to personalize the deals you display to your site visitors to ensure only the most relevant promotions are offered? Try Smarter Click or RevLifter.
Want to up-sell related products via AI-powered bundles to drive up average order value? Partner with Increasingly. We spoke to Sri Sharma, Increasingly's CEO, below.
Want to implement a referral marketing tool on your site to encourage your customers to spread the word of your brand post-purchase? Experiment with Soreto.
Surfing the wave of martech innovation
This kind of plug-and-play approach to martech provides an extremely agile tactic to online marketing. It liberates a brand from being weighed down by worries of developing these tools themselves, and instead allows them to focus on improving their own products and services.
The same goes for publisher businesses too. Monetization of traffic is increasingly a space in which similar tech partners can help shoulder some of this burden. Awin’s own publisher tag houses a variety of useful tools.
From Trackonomics’ dashboards that aggregate traffic data from across ad platforms, to Monetizer101’s price comparison tools, and Monotote’s tech for turning video and imagery into shoppable content.
Why spend time, effort and resources developing this technology yourself when you can leave it to those who have real expertise in it? Why invest huge capital in developing something that may be outdated in a year’s time when you can maintain a cutting-edge without committing to it?
Digital advertising is complex and increasingly so. But with the right technology partners at your disposal you can continually surf and benefit from this surging wave of innovation.
In 2021, the affiliate industry’s performance model for ‘renting’ this technology will offer a new way for online businesses to stay a step ahead of their competition.
Awin's award-winning MasterTags offer advertisers and publishers simple, plug-and-play access to cutting-edge ecommerce technology at the flip of a switch. Here you’ll find a round up of some of our favorite technology partners available via the Advertiser and Publisher MasterTags, as well as an introduction to their tech and how it can support your business goals.
Envolve’s Virtual Shopping Assistant uses AI to automatically answer consumer questions - day and night - via a widget on a retailer’s site, providing relevant answers and making contextual product recommendations that yield up to a 17% conversion rate for a brand. Furthermore, Envolve typically increases an advertiser’s AOV by 10-15% and reduces customer service queries by up to 55%.
This award-winning partnership saw real-time personalization expert, RevLifter, support the UK’s very first online smartphone retailer, Mobiles.co.uk, during their all-important Cyber Week campaign.
With the brand eager to not simply pursue a blunt tactic of broad discounting during the campaign, RevLifter’s AI-powered technology provided a way to upsell relevant, personalized offers to site visitors that were also more profitable.
The campaign was an enormous success that led to improved conversions and better margins for Mobiles.co.uk over the course of the event.
With increasing levels of competition in the UK’s smartphone market online in recent years, and this being particularly fierce during the peak period of Cyber Week, leading retailer Mobiles.co.uk sought to find a way of using data to deliver the most relevant and compelling offers to its website visitors.
Smartphone contracts and product pricing can change daily and - in combination with other factors like product margin, individual user behavior, and shopping cart value - there are millions of data points that can be analyzed to present relevant, personalized deals.
Enter RevLifter and 1:1 personalization
Awin tech partner RevLifter provides brands with smart, market-leading solutions that achieve online growth via 1:1 personalization.
With Mobiles.co.uk eager to steer away from the tried and tested methods of conventional incentive campaigns that offer broad discounts to a general audience, it tasked RevLifter with devising a strategy that could upsell to individual customers based on the contents of their shopping carts.
RevLifter used the in-depth data available within the client’s Awin product feed to understand what the various contract and product combinations were and developed a ‘score’ for each selected contract. Then, its technology was able to scan this feed to find a better deal for the selected smartphone that would be both more profitable and result in a better value deal for the customers who were displayed the upsell options.
This innovative approach was then set up to present the customer with an upsell offer within the shopping cart. RevLifter’s RevConvert lightbox overlay would appear to present the better deal to them and encouraging the customer to convert.
The results
Mobiles.co.uk’s partnership with RevLifter proved to be a resounding success across a variety of KPIs during the Cyber Week campaign:
The success that the partnership witnessed also culminated in a series of industry awards, including Best Use of Data at the Performance Marketing Awards 2020 where judges praised the campaign for its “unique way of serving personalized offers that still maximized margin for Mobiles.co.uk.”
This was followed by the prestigious award for Best Performance Marketing Campaign in Western Europe at the International Performance Marketing Awards later in 2020.
Speaking in the aftermath of the campaign’s success, Jay Karsandas - Digital Marketing Manager at Mobiles.co.uk’s owner Dixons Carphone - shared his satisfaction with the partnership:
“Implementing RevLifter, from initial idea generation to technical implementation, has been smooth. Mobile phone purchases are subject to complex user journeys that consider thousands of variations of deals and offers. RevLifter has created a custom journey which drives better value for customers and better margins for the business. We’ve recorded a positive increase in time on site and conversion, while complementing the end user’s experience.”
