Bill Hanifin
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The “Offer Industry” has taken on a distinct identity as retail brands have sought to execute promotional campaigns with higher efficiency in digital channels. Moving towards these goals, the preferred mediums for offer delivery have transcended email and ecommerce sites heavily populated with banner and pop-up ads.
Offers today are delivered in full frontal fashion courtesy of Groupon, Living Social, and Amazon Daily Deals but also are delivered in a more mysterious manner through card-linked offers from the likes of Cardlytics, Edo, and Swipely. Add to this the favorite tool of search networks Google and Yahoo, stalker ads known as re-targeting, and you have an overview of the Offer Industry.
As a marketer, it’s easy to become consumed trying to figure out the best combination of channel and technology to deliver your offers. Listening to a few bright minds talk about the future of the Offer business, I agree that we might be missing the point. Separating your brand from the pack of competitors online might have less to do with channel and technology and more to do with how you use data to make fundamental change in offer structure.
Alex Rampell, CEO TrialPay made a great presentation about the evolution of the offer business at the Retailer Roundtable sponsored by CashStar this past month. He questioned how offers should be driven in the future and insisted the model has to change from “push” to “pull” to build sustainable economic models in the future. Alex made clear the future of the offers business is critically dependent on the ability of organizations to make this shift happen in their business.
As he explained, his opinions are influenced by a growing acknowledgement that consumers are aware of the value of their personal data and won’t opt-in as easily for offers where personal data is exchanged as a trading currency. TrialPay has taken its stand, establishing an alternative e-commerce payment system in which a consumer gets an item for free from a participating merchant in exchange for buying or trying out another product or service from a TrialPay advertiser. Based on this profile in Crunch Base, the company has raised about $55 million in investor funding, so it has plenty of resource upon which to prove its point of view.
At the same event, both Alex and Mark Bonchek, Founder ORBIT advocated for “purposeful data collection”. Brands adopting this practice could more intelligently use data to predict “not just what I do like, but what I might like” as a means of organizing and executing promotional offers. Mark suggested the legacy language of “targeting customers” makes the average consumer feel threatened as if they were a deer wandering the woods during hunting season. That’s not the feeling you want to impart to your customers each time they type in a Google search, or flip on a smartphone when walking the mall.
Mark talked also about how marketers can create a branded currency through the combination of coupons, gift cards and loyalty points to create a valuable asset for consumers. The concept of branded currency combines purchasing power and brand preference in a highly liquid and available means of transacting commerce, and is described in this Harvard Business Review article.
Creation of effective offer strategies in the future will leverage latent data to expose assumptions about current understanding to create new predictive models, and will acknowledge the personality as well as personal lifestyle of the consumer. The execution journey will reinforce in real time each step of the personalized customer journey, provide (near) instant feedback, and reinforce valuable behaviors for the brand.
It all might sound a bit philosophical at this point, but if you are interested in building engagement, conversion, and brand loyalty with your customer base, the top-line theme is worth an afternoon or two with your marketing team and a large white board.
