Ecommerce spending surpassed $1 trillion dollars in the US for the first time last year. As mobile spending continues to tick upward (doubling desktop spending), brands seek to optimize mobile marketing ROI. Marketers can leverage partnerships to reach larger audiences through a mobile experience—but they need the right technology to drive partner initiatives.
The impact.com Tech Partner team sat down with Amanda Greenwood, Senior Director of Strategic Partnerships and Alliances at Button, to find out what drives mobile partnerships, why are they crucial for marketing success, and what tech stack should be considered to scale your program.
Button’s mobile deep linking solutions and AI-powered experience engine help retailers, influencers, and publishers, improve customer shopping experiences, performance, and attribution. Trusted by the best, including Uber, Expedia, Sam’s Club, and many of the world’s largest marketers, Button has driven over $9B in mobile commerce.
Key takeaways:
- Marketers need to quantify the value-driven on mobile devices to optimize ROI
- Optimizing for the best user experience, the mobile app is often the easiest way to boost ROI overnight
- Keep the end user top-of-mind when evaluating partners for mobile marketing
- Marketers need to dig deeper into metrics, such as iOS vs. Android, to understand consumer behavior
- The right tech stack and integrations will help drive greater revenue
Can you highlight one of your favorite examples of mobile marketing done right?
The joint success of their PostTap product, as seen with Uber, is a testament to the power of their platforms. According to a case study by Button, Uber saw a 2x increase in affiliate revenue after launching PostTap with Impact and Button. This success is due to PostTap’s ability to integrate affiliate marketing into the mobile experience seamlessly. By leveraging deep links, PostTap enables marketers to drive conversions directly from the app, resulting in higher conversion rates and increased revenue.
Why is it important to optimize ROI in mobile marketing?
E-commerce surpassed $1 trillion in the U.S. last year for the first time, and the key force behind that growth was mobile spending, which grew at twice the rate of desktop e-commerce. Positive ROI, and ongoing improvements to that metric demonstrate that a marketer clearly understands what’s important to their brand–positively growing their bottom line and introducing cost savings wherever possible.
As mobile growth continues to make up a larger share of ecommerce, outpacing other platforms, it’s even more important that, as a marketer, you can quantify the value you’re driving on those devices with the spend allocated to your channel. Especially in today’s economy, as we see budgets get tighter across marketing teams, it’s crucial to show a positive return on your investments so those budgets aren’t reconsidered or reallocated. Maximizing ROI in affiliate and influencer marketing is also always a top priority for CMOs; if a brand doesn’t have the right technology to ensure they’re providing a strong customer experience on mobile or to track those sales downstream, ROI is guaranteed to be negatively impacted.
How should mobile marketers approach partnerships?
Whether dedicated to mobile or not, marketers should consider the customer experience within the context of their campaigns and the impact that experience will have on their KPIs. People engage with affiliate and influencer campaigns on their mobile devices throughout their days.
As a consumer, if you’re unable to jump from one post or article to another or from one experience to another (e.g. web browser to app), you will feel frustration and potentially abandon that journey. That means as a marketer, you’re losing out on a sale, the main metric most of your partnerships are measured on. Keeping this experience top of mind when investing in a partnership and the technology supporting it is necessary to guarantee its success.
How should mobile marketers evaluate tools for their stack?
Each brand will have unique needs when deciding what partners to add to their tech stack. First, consider your customer base: who are they, and how are they currently engaging with your brand? Identifying current gaps in reaching your target audience and motivating certain shopping behaviors will allow you to better optimize your campaigns to meet your goals.
Next, consider your challenges in measuring your campaign successes or failures. Are you active in the right channels but unable to track sales on specific devices or platforms? Having visibility into bottom-funnel interactions and conversion events are key to understanding what growth levers are at your disposal. You may need additional budget or resources to bring on a new partner, but investing in the right technology to support your needs will pay dividends.
How should they identify the right partners for my program?
Each brand will have its preference for the types of publishers or creators they want to work with based on their goals, brand voice, and target audience. As a marketer, it’s your job to understand what types of partners are the right fit for your brand. You can then use the data at your disposal to validate whether continued investment into those existing partnerships are worthwhile—while leaving room in your budget for regular experimentation and expansion to new partners as your program and branding guidelines evolve.
What should they be measuring to gauge success?
Brands should look at metrics like sales, revenue, and conversion rate, not only on the aggregate level but broken down by platform and publisher. Digging deeper—to understand consumer behavior on desktop vs. mobile, web vs. app, and iOS vs. Android—will allow marketers to become more competent in promoting their products, commissioning their partners, and reaching their consumers most effectively.
In this exercise, marketers have uncovered that mobile apps drive the highest-value users. So optimizing your campaigns to drive more customers into your app should be an essential focus area for every brand. Ultimately, it’s to a marketer’s benefit to drill down into every consumer touchpoint and possible checkout flow across their partnerships to adjust the current strategy and yield better results appropriately.
What are some solutions that can help drive collaboration with partners?
Button and impact.com expanded their strategic partnership to offer more revenue from every click on mobile, changing how marketers approach affiliate and influencer marketing. Button’s PostTap technology, integrated into impact.com’s Partnership Management Platform, allows brands to easily enable deep linking and in-app tracking, and optimize the consumer journey, without any effort required by the partners in their program.
As an extension of that integration, Button and impact.com are working to mirror this implementation and improve user experience in impact.com’s new Creator platform. This ensures influencers, often plagued by nuances that mobile social apps introduce in how links work and attribute, can feel confident in how they route their audience, knowing that they are providing a seamless path to purchase and will earn commission for those sales they refer.
Learn more about how Button can works and how it integrates with impact.com
