Mobile Commerce
“Optimizing affiliate campaigns for mobile devices is no longer just an option—it's a necessity,” said Coady Joy, Head of Affiliate and Partnerships Education at impact.com, on our recent panel at iPX.
This is the sentiment that Button was founded upon–we built our market-leading solution, PostTap, to help marketers more easily incorporate app into their campaigns to optimize their mobile user experience and improve performance from their paid channels.
Why did we focus on mobile specifically? As Coady mentioned, mobile isn’t an optional component of the user experience. It’s crucial to reach consumers where they are, and more often than not, that means on their phones. Shopping apps, specifically, provide brands a unique opportunity to reach a highly engaged consumer base who have already expressed their affinity for your brand by choosing to install your app. The app is the best shopping experience a consumer can have on the internet - faster load times, payment credentials stored, and persistent authentication (no logins required)!
Incorporating app into a brand’s marketing strategy is guaranteed to:
Still, so many brands that have an app haven’t considered these benefits, which means they aren’t currently routing users into their app or tracking downstream app conversions from any of their affiliate or influencer partners, creating a lot of friction for those partners and consumers alike.
Because this challenge is widespread across the industry, impact.com invited us to speak at their annual Partnership Experience, iPX, an event for their brands, publishers, and partners like Button to come together to discuss new trends they’re seeing across the industry.
As a first-time attendee, I was impressed by the companies in attendance, the quality of the sessions, and it didn’t hurt that we were able to enjoy beautiful waterside views from the event space at Chelsea Piers!
The first day’s schedule was filled with impact.com’s Partnerships Experience Academy workshops, where I had the pleasure of presenting alongside impact.com and PartnerCentric about the power of mobile postback tracking. Given that it was the first session after the doors opened, I initially wasn’t sure how many people would be able to join, but was pleasantly surprised by a full room of people eager to hear about mobile tracking! As it turns out, both brands and publishers are starting to feel the burden that mobile complexities present for their consumers, as well as their bottom lines.
It’s ensuring that transactions on mobile web and app are reporting correctly within your affiliate or influencer program, and that sales are being attributed to the correct referring source (publisher, influencer, etc.).
Affiliate and influencer marketing is predicated on a brand’s ability to track and commission on sales or leads, and yet many brands today have apps that aren’t setup to attribute those actions appropriately. That means that marketers often don’t know how their customers are engaging with their brand, or which channels (and publishers) are helping to drive sales on mobile.
We also know that more and more shoppers are interacting with brands on their mobile devices, but some brands are unable to link users into their app, even if that user already has the app installed. For brand marketers, that means you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to engage your customers and generate new revenue.
Just take a look at a few of these recent findings to see what we mean:
Put simply, if you have an app and it’s not part of your marketing strategy, you’re failing to account for a significant, and growing, portion of your customer base, and whether or not you’re able to measure the impact of those shortfalls, it’s guaranteed to hurt your bottom line.
Publishers may not need to do anything from a technical standpoint to solve for mobile routing or tracking issues, but that doesn’t mean they should be passive participants.
We’re seeing more publishers and influencers starting to put pressure on brands to ensure their program’s are equipped to provide a strong customer experience, and importantly, that they are able to assign commissions against each sale that an affiliate or influencer partner is helping to generate.
As a publisher, influencer, or influencer network, you have the power to motivate brands to invest in their mobile strategy and convince those partners to account for their app experience within their affiliate or influencer programs.
Coady, my fellow panelist, summarized the opportunity perfectly:
“To thrive in the mobile-driven landscape, affiliates must embrace responsive designs, create mobile-friendly landing pages, and implement innovative tracking solutions. By tailoring their content and offers to mobile users, they can capture the attention of on-the-go consumers and drive impactful results.”
To learn more about how you can optimize your current mobile marketing strategy with Button’s PostTap technology, contact us today.
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