Bob’s Weekly Reading Picks
2019.2. 22- volume 7
Content
1. The Truth About Coupon Affiliates
2. MarTech Interview with Jim Nichols, CMO, Partnerize
3. Everything You Need to Know About ePacket Shipping: ePacket Delivery Explained
4. 6 Ways You Can Work With Influencers
5. Ecommerce Marketing in 2019: Trends, Tools and Tactics to Be Across
6. We Analyzed 912 Million Blog Posts. Here’s What We Learned About Content Marketing
7. The 15 Most Popular Online Payment Solutions
8. Resale Revolution: the new wave of secondhand retail apps in the US market
1. The Truth About Coupon Affiliates
4 type of coupon affiliates
- Coupon aggregators, who supply consumers with ALL the coupons; these are traditionally what people think of when they say “coupon sites.”
- Paid search arbitrators with coupon sites, which includes affiliates who want trademark terms to bid on and drive the vast majority of their traffic this way; a better way to describe them may be “search affiliates.”
- “Best of web” deal sites, which cultivate the best deals on the web for many categories; these guys rely on this cultivation to create an environment where consumers discover new brands and products.
- browser plugins like Honey
4 main problems
- They don’t provide incrementality.
- They don’t actually do anything to win the user for the brand.
- Users have been trained to go back to Google and search for a coupon after they have made a decision to purchase, increasing the advertiser’s cost and providing no value for that cost increase.
- They lessen the brand in the eyes of the consumer.
Metrics: Time to Conversion, New User, Coupon used in transactions
2. MarTech Interview with Jim Nichols, CMO, Partnerize
But over the past decade or so, the world of partnership has opened up to new segments. Influencer marketing has grown to something like $4B in spend. Loyalty partnership is now extremely common.
Affiliate is about an $8B business by my estimation. Influencer is more than $4B. Other segments are as big or sometimes even larger.
Challenges to Forming and Managing Partner Relationships
- Partner Discovery: It’s hard to find the right partners with and at the scale you need using a manual process
- Partnership Creation: It’s hard to negotiate and set up partnerships because the process is too manual
- Partner Payments: It’s incredibly difficult to pay partners at scale, without software or a service provider to execute it all. Ask your Finance team if they want to cut a cheque for 8,000 partners every month. And throw in international payments and currencies and you have a big money headache.
Performance Predictions: It’s difficult to predict the future performance of a partnerships - Partnership Growth: It’s challenging to keep the channel growing without significant investment of people and resources.
Data
Many of our clients are heavy users of DMPs, DSPs, CRM tools, Marketing Automation products, ad servers, BI, attribution tools and the like. And they integrate all of these tools to get that holistic customer view.
Marketing and Sales Automation tools
We’re a Salesforce shop, and we use HubSpot, This is my first experience with HubSpot. I’ve worked with Eloqua, Marketo and Pardot in the past
3. Everything You Need to Know About ePacket Shipping: ePacket Delivery Explained
What is ePacket shipping?
ePacket is a shipping option offered by merchants in China and Hong Kong. It allows these merchants to provide a fast and affordable shipping option for light packages.
Requirements to use ePacket delivery
The maximum length of the package can only be 24” (60cm) and the total length, height and thickness of the package cannot be more than 36” (90cm). Additionally, the package cannot weigh more than 4.4 lbs (2kg) to qualify for ePacket delivery and the merchandise being shipped cannot exceed $400 in value.
How Long Does it Take?
It depends on the destinations. US 10-20 days
How to Track?
Customs/Duties/Taxes?
It’s also best to check with your local laws to see when you would have to pay duties/taxes on imported purchases and for what kinds of items.You should also ask the merchant shipping the item if there may be any duties or taxes owed on arrival.
4. 6 Ways You Can Work With Influencers
- Sponsored content
- Reviews
- Competitions and giveaways
- Product and content collaborations
- Long-term ambassadors
- ‘Takeovers’ on your platforms
Competitions and giveaways can include:
Engaging with the influencer’s post itself, such as:
‘Liking’ the post
Commenting on it with a certain phrase, hashtag, or photo
Tagging up to 3 friends in the comments
Engaging with the brand outside of the post, like:
‘Liking’ or following the brand on their social media channel(s)
Going to the brand’s website to sign up via a form or mailing list
Submitting photos, stories, or other types of ‘entries’ to be judged by the brand
5. Ecommerce Marketing in 2019: Trends, Tools and Tactics to Be Across
- Social: Stories will take over the newsfeed
- Advertising on Marketplaces
- More video, more easily
- Think mobile first for digital and SEO
- Voice Search
- Data driven influencer marketing
- Omni-channel, not multi-channel marketing
- Single view of the customer
- Packaging — pretty, personal, eco-friendly
6. We Analyzed 912 Million Blog Posts. Here’s What We Learned About Content Marketing
Here is a Summary of Our Key Findings:
1. Long-form content gets an average of 77.2% more links than short articles. Therefore, long-form content appears to be ideal for backlink acquisition.
2. When it comes to social shares, longer content outperforms short blog posts. However, we found diminishing returns for articles that exceed 2,000 words.
3. The vast majority of online content gets few social shares and backlinks. In fact, 94% of all blog posts have zero external links.
4. A small percentage of “Power Posts” get a disproportionate amount of social shares. Specifically, 1.3% of articles generate 75% of all social shares.
5. We found virtually no correlation between backlinks and social shares. This suggests that there’s little crossover between highly-shareable content and content that people link to.
6. Longer headlines are correlated with more social shares. Headlines that are 14-17 words in length generate 76.7% more social shares than short headlines.
7. Question headlines (titles that end with a “?”) get 23.3% more social shares than headlines that don’t end with a question mark.
8. There’s no “best day” to publish a new piece of content. Social shares are distributed evenly among posts published on different days of the week.
9. Lists posts are heavily shared on social media. In fact, list posts get an average of 218% more shares than “how to” posts and 203% more shares than infographics.
10. Certain content formats appear to work best for acquiring backlinks. We found that “Why Posts”, “What Posts” and infographics received 25.8% more links compared to videos and “How-to” posts.
11. The average blog post gets 9.7x more shares than a post published on a B2B site. However, the distribution of shares and links for B2B and B2C publishers appears to be similar.
7. The 15 Most Popular Online Payment Solutions
https://due.com/
https://stripe.com/
https://www.dwolla.com/
https://www.apple.com/apple-pay/
https://www.payoneer.com/
https://www.2checkout.com/
https://pay.amazon.com/us
https://squareup.com/us/en
https://www.payza.com/
https://www.skrill.com/en-us/
https://venmo.com/
https://pay.google.com/about/
https://go.wepay.com/
https://quickbooks.intuit.com
https://www.authorize.net/
without PayPal??