Practical Ways to Improve Brand Awareness

Brand awareness is one of the most important pillars of corporate communication strategy. Developing brand awareness means improving business visibility and increasing sales. But this is not enough, brand awareness has to be positive in order to turn it into an advantage for the business.

Here are some practical ways to improve brand awareness:

Improve your website

Your website is basically your business card in the online environment and nowadays is an essential tool for business owners. Even if you don’t own an online store, a website is a space where you can display your activity, your services or your products. Your website must have a graphic identity to attract your visitors and eventually to turn them into clients. In order to do this, you can encourage them to share your website with their friends (by means of social media, email, etc.), to create refer-a-friend campaigns or even to leave some comments on the website. Engagement marketing through your website may improve brand awareness by establishing a relationship with your customers.

Take care of your social media accounts

Social media is a must for promoting your business and a great way to make your company visible to the public. You can use social media to create a community that will share your posts or leave comments and thus, they will contribute to your brand awareness. It’s important to take care of your community by replying to their comments, even to those that give negative feedback. You will show your (prospective) clients that you care for them and that their opinion matters to you.

Create high-quality content

Creating quality content is a nonintrusive way of drawing attention. You can propose content that is not directed towards commercial advantage by creating informative blog posts that would be interesting for your readers, but also related to your business. Through your blog you can present to your prospective clients the latest news from your field of activity, pieces of advice or other information you may find appropriate. The main objective is to establish a close relationship with your public and to build customer loyalty. In order to reach this goal, it’s important to customize the way you communicate with your clients and to try to understand what their expectations are with regards to your business. A brand who pays attention to its customers’ needs will improve its awareness.

Work with influencers

Brand awareness can be boosted with the help of influencer marketing. This strategy may work even better than brand-created content as influencers can deliver great results by using the power of recommendation. If your online presence is not a great one or if you simply found an influencer that promotes the same values as your business does, then influencer marketing is a great solution to raise awareness of your brand. They will use their followers and make them engage with your brand and you can also use referral programs with the influencers to maximize the outcome.

Start and affiliate program

Affiliate marketing is a great strategy to get your business recognized by as many prospective clients as possible. Starting working with an affiliate network will bring you a lot more traffic to your website and also, will increase your brand awareness. The exposure you get by runing an affiliate program will allow you to reach new audiences and boost brand visibility.

How affiliate marketing can help online businesses to boost their sales

The benefits of affiliate marketing cannot be ignored when it comes to driving sales for your business. If you hit a plateau or you want to reach new customers, then affiliate marketing is a solution that you should consider in order to engage your audience and consolidate your brand.

Affiliate marketing consists of a company (advertiser and affiliate) who uses an affiliate network to promote their offers according to some commercial terms (affiliate program). An affiliate network hosts a large numbers of websites/blogs/promoting platforms (publishers), creating the right place for the affiliate to start partnerships with the publishers in order to increase sales funnel. The publishers are rewarded with a commission every time they generate a sale through the affiliate links and the affiliate reaches its goal of driving sales. There are several ad models that may be used, CPA (cost per action), CPL (cost per lead)and CPC (cost per click) being amongst the top 3 most popular pricing models. With affiliate marketing, both parties win following a cost effective strategy.

3 reasons why you should use affiliate marketing for boosting sales

Advertising more efficiently and at a lower cost

Working through an affiliate network with publishers is a strategy with low ongoing costs as the fee they charge from the advertisers is a small one. By using an affiliate network you will have access to a large number of websites that you can use to promote your products/services or to propose exclusive codes or discounts, all this with a shorter research time. You can also choose the publishers that are relevant for your business. For example, if you have a website that sells beauty products, you can choose to work with influencers that create content relevant for the health and beauty sector.

Reaching new customers and raise brand awareness

One of the most important features of affiliate marketing is that you can rely on the publisher’s audience to reach new customers. Publishers deliver traffic to your website, that eventually will turn into sales. Choosing the right publishers can also help improve your Google search ranking and your brand awareness. Affiliate marketing makes you visible to a relevant public with active interest in your business that maybe you could never reach in other circumstance and that is more willing to buy from your website without having to convince them, like in traditional advertising.

Building customer confidence by working with trustworthy publishers

If you pay attention to the publishers you work with, you may boost your reputation. Usually the customers have the tendency to rather trust people that recommend the product than the seller. By establishing partnerships with people that have a public that trusts them it will be easier for you to gain an audience that will have the same trust in your products. Don’t forget that the publishers represent your brand, so you must choose them wisely if you want to mirror your values and image. If you succeed in doing this, you will be building customer confidence and in the same time gaining visibility in your niche.

Conclusion

Affiliate marketing is a great strategy of boosting sales, beneficial for both the advertiser and the publisher. It helps advertisers reach new audiences at a low cost and gives them the opportunity of raising brand awareness.

Synced.io simplifies the process of simultaneously working with multiple affiliate networks and offers to the publishers a series of advanced tools that they can use in order to choose the best affiliate programs for their business and also keep track of their performance.

Applying to programs through our API

Your work is now easier than ever

Yes, you got it right from the title. Synced.io has a new important feature that allows our clients to apply to affiliate programs directly from our API, without having to browse through all their affiliate network accounts.

Applying to programs is a really time consuming task. Searching and choosing the affiliate programs that you want to work with usually means browsing through all your affiliate networks accounts. Not anymore! From now on, you will only use your Synced.io account to do this.

In this way, we can help you save even more time. The API function gives the possibility of searching for the program that you want to apply to, send the application and also track the status of the application. Thus, Synced.io becomes even more compact by offering our clients a complete service that will make their work as easier as possible.

We are your connector!

What is Cashback and how rewards and loyalty companies work with affiliate cashback?

The concept of cashback has been around for years and has been used in many ways to attract customers in online shopping and also to encourage incremental sales.

One of the most popular type of loyalty systems, cashback means receiving back a part of your money spent on online shopping. Beside the obvious advantage of saving money every time you purchase something online, cashback is beneficial for all the parties involved in the process: the advertiser, the publisher and the customer. Everyone wins.

Cashback sites are the most common form of using this reward system and also the most profitable type of publishers within the affiliate marketing industry. The logic behind a cashback website is based on displaying a wide range of online stores (advertisers) with which the cashback website has an affiliate relationship so that every time a member of the cashback website clicks on the affiliate link and is redirected on the advertiser’s website and buys something from there, he/she will receive back a percentage of the amount spent. Building a cashback website requires a lot of work, especially when the developers have to build from scratch the process of tracking the transactions via the affiliate networks. This is where one of the most important players of the affiliate marketing enters the scene: the affiliate networks.

Affiliate networks are the place where the advertisers meet the publishers and where all the tools necessary for the affiliate marketing are displayed : discounts, voucher codes, cashback, affiliate links, banners, transaction reports and many more. Each and every affiliate network have their own way of sending this data.

A cashback website requires a sort of transfer of the above mentioned data from the affiliate networks. The easiest way to do this is by using a service that processes the data and makes it ready to use for the cashback website.

Affiliate cashback is a tool used by companies to build loyalty programs and stay ahead of the competition. From customized cashback platforms for employees to platforms that turn cashback into points or websites that use cashback for charity, affiliate cashback is one of the most versatile tool of the affiliate marketing.

Synced.io works with any type of these platforms. Whether we are talking about loyalty programs, editorial media, rewards and cashback or employee benefits, we make it happen.

We are your connector!

Synced.io platform updates

At Synced.io we’ve always been fascinated by the dynamics of affiliate marketing. Staying on top of the trends can be challenging, especially when acting as a bridge between the publishers and the affiliate networks. 


Understanding the logic of each affiliate network and curating big loads of data is what defines us, but, besides that, we’re constantly paying attention to what features we can develop to make our clients’ work easier and also to increase the efficiency of our service.


Thus, we’ve developed new features to Synced.io that will open new possibilities to our clients:


1. Establishing affiliate relationships with merchants that don’t work with affiliate networks
You set up a partnership with a merchant that cannot be found in the affiliate networks and want to track sales? We can create an in-house merchant and build all the tracking processes on our side. Easy, hassle-free and ready-to-use.


2. Product feed
At Synced.io it’s all about aggregating content from the affiliate networks. While other services on the market focus only on grabbing a part of the data from the networks (reports, discounts, commissions), we work on making available through our API all the data from the networks, including product feeds. Forget about using several services for your business, Synced.io is all you need!


3. Possibility of adding sub-accounts
Taking into consideration the emerging world of influencers, we came up with a solution that would be practical for platforms that are built especially for them. Thus, we developed a feature that allows our clients to create sub-accounts directly from the API. Each sub-account can add, edit and delete their own network configurations. 


4. Creating claim requests for missing transaction directly from the platform
Some of the affiliate networks offer the possibility of sending transaction inquiries through the API. Instead of browsing through your affiliate networks accounts each time you want to make a claim request for a missing transaction, you can submit it directly from your Synced.io account.


5. Applying to affiliate programs directly from our API
Applying to programs requires quite a lot of work: going through each and every affiliate network, searching for the programs and applying to it. Why not replace all this work with applying directly from our API to the programs you wish to join? Use your time for other things, we’ve got you covered. 


At Synced.io we give our best to stay ahead of our client’s needs and to be up to date to the changes that the affiliate marketing sector brings. 


Synced.io is your connector!

5 Loyalty Programme Trends to Watch

loyalty-trends-2016

5 Loyalty Programme Trends to Watch

The loyalty programme landscape is continually changing, with trends coming and going as quickly as Chipotle’s catastrophic ‘Chiptopia’ scheme. For brands and businesses, the secret is to gain insight on what’s got staying power, and what’s simply destined to crash and burn, Chipotle style [to read more about where Chipotle went wrong – check our post here]

So what’s caught our attention this year? Here are five bona fide loyalty programme trends to watch, and our commentary on what makes them such a success.

An experiential focus 

Millennials crave experiences, which has led to the development of loyalty programmes that offer customers tangible rewards. Marriott Hotels is blazing a trail in this department, with its recently launched Experiences Marketplace that went live in April 2016. Not only can guests redeem points on hotel rooms, but they can also use them to book unique experiences like culinary tours, sporting match seats, concert tickets and more. Starwood Preferred Guest Moments offers a similar service, as does the Wyndham Rewards programme.

Mobile friendly platforms

The UK is now a nation of smartphone loyalists, and rewards programmes are beginning to reflect this trend. Going beyond outdated plastic membership cards, an increasing number of brands are starting to offer their customers mobile-friendly platforms where they can manage their points balances, explore rewards and engage with the loyalty programme, at their fingertips.

Engaging the Centennial

Aka Digital Natives and bona fide Gen Z-ers, Centennials are turning 19 which means they’re perfectly positioned to start flexing their buying power. Analysts estimate that in the US alone this demographic is worth a huge US$44 billion in spending power, which makes them impossible to ignore. As a result, loyalty programmes are refocussing on capturing the attention of Centennials, with the spotlight shining firmly on relevance, immediacy and digital allure.

A focus on philanthropy

Despite their selfish reputation, the latest statistics from Nielsen reveal that modern consumers value companies with a social conscience. As a result, we’re seeing an increasing number of companies weave philanthropy into their rewards programmes, with brands like TOMS offering consumers the option of donating to causes close to their heart in lieu of redeeming their own benefits.

Internal analytics

As new technologies emerge, brands are starting to leverage the power of customer data. O2 is at the forefront of the internal analytics movement, and relies heavily on predictive analytics to better understand the needs and wants of its customers.

“With Priority, for example, we use our internal analytics to understand which customers will be interested in music-related offers. At the end of last year, we saw a tenfold uplift in conversion through better use of customer data. This is an area where we are evolving our capabilities,” comments marketing and consumer director Nina Bibby.

O2 complements its insight with broad rewards, with some customers choosing to cash in on its Monday £1 lunch deal, while others prefer to use points to access music gigs.

It’s fascinating to see how trends play out, and how brands make them their own. Our guess is that this batch will stay strong in 2017, but no doubt they’ll be challenged by a brand new flood as the new year unfolds.

Synced.io is a service that lets you easily connect with multiple Affiliate Networks. To request a demo click here.

 

Chipotle Wraps Up a Catastrophic Rewards Program, and Dishes Out a Lesson in What NOT to Do…

chipotle-mexican-grill

Chipotle Wraps Up a Catastrophic Rewards Program, and Dishes Out a Lesson in What NOT to Do…

For the most part, globally recognised brands serve as inspiration for small businesses. But sometimes, instead of learning positive lessons from observing the big guns at work, small fries can clue themselves up on what NOT to do…

Cue Chipotle’s disastrous ‘Chiptopia’ rewards program that launched earlier this year. The cult Mexican fast food chain may know a thing or two about how to whip up a mean burrito, but when it comes to loyalty programmes the company’s efforts were lacking serious flavour.

In-house customer relations experts spent millions developing and launching a fresh new summer rewards program, which was hailed as one of the best in the restaurant business. It was tied to the frequency of visits, and offered customers the chance to score a smorgasbord of free food. Basically, if a customer guzzled 12 burritos in three months, they were rewarded with four free burritos. This gave the program a returns rate of around 33%.

But despite this, Chipotle’s Mexican loving clientele couldn’t seem to care less about the three-month seasonal offer. So where did Chipotle’s ‘Chiptopia’ campaign go wrong? And what lessons can brands learn from its disastrous attempt to mix refried beans with rewards?

  • Failure to understand customer perception

One of the biggest factors Chipotle failed to address was that in order to launch a deliciously successful rewards program, customer perception needs to be high. Even the most tantalising of rewards programs will crash and burn if customers simply don’t want the product in the first place. The company’s main downfall was the fact that it launched ‘Chiptopia’ right after it was hit with its catastrophic E. coli outbreak scandal that saw sales drop by 30% in the first quarter of 2016. It hadn’t quite recovered, and was still struggling to earn back the trust of its customers. So, despite the fact that it spent millions on developing a stellar rewards program, customers just weren’t all that excited about cashing in on potentially contaminated burritos. YouGov BrandIndex data confirms that consumer perception was suffering on Chiptopia’s July 1 launch date, with brand quality sitting at a dismal 9.4 on a scale of -100 to 100.

  • A backwards approach

In September Chipotle launched a new campaign focussing on addressing the E. coli scandal, and convincing customers that its food is safe. Ideally, the chain should’ve launched this campaign first, and followed up with Chiptopia.

  • Confused customers

Chiptopia was clearly aimed at diehard Chipotle fans, as its three-tiered system was overwhelmingly confusing. While the program did help to increase loyalty from regular customers, it failed to appeal to the 75% of consumers that make up its customer base.

Unsustainable and unappealing

With a returns rate of 33%, Chiptopia simply wasn’t sustainable in the long run. It’s three month run period was clear about the fact that it was a seasonal promotion, so unless customers started scoffing burritos in July, it wasn’t worth their while to get involved. The company has since realised its mistake, and has confirmed that it’s now working on a new, more permanent program.

So, while the concept of a rewards program is intriguing, even the most established of brands can still get it oh so wrong.

Synced.io is a service that lets you easily connect with multiple Affiliate Networks. To request a demo click here.

How rewardStyle Turned Instagram into an Affiliate Marketing Wonderland

rewardstyle

How rewardStyle Turned Instagram into an Affiliate Marketing Wonderland

From the vision of a 23-year-old fashion blogger to a critically acclaimed content monetisation platform, rewardStyle has completely revolutionised the way top tier style influencers and brands connect with consumers. Today, the platform is used by more than 9000 global style setters, who leverage rewardStyle’s turnkey ecosystem of services to maximise their presence, and their profits. Alongside easy to use tech products, strategic consulting and education services, rewardStyle offers its members access to its avant-garde mobile publishing and distribution platform. Cue the LIKEtoKNOW.it insurgency…

LIKEtoKNOW.it – How it works

Like all social media platforms, LIKEtoKNOW.it is an absolute dream to use. Simply like a photo featuring a liketk.com tag, and LIKEtoKNOW.it will send a curated list of ready-to-shop products straight to your inbox. From fashion and homewares to beauty and lifestyle, Instagram users are able to recreate their favourite looks, in just a few clicks of the mouse. The customised, image centric ‘wish lists’ include direct links to retailers where showcased items can be purchased.

For Instagrammers, it eliminates the whole “where can I find this?” drama and replaces it with instant access to featured products, at their fingertips. Now that’s something everyone would like to know. For digital style influencers, LIKEtoKNOW.it represents a chance to earn meaningful revenue on their content, and monetise their accounts into thriving small businesses. Basically, it’s a consumer facing, ready-to-shop, mobile friendly platform that empowers millions of socially inspired shoppers, across the globe. To date, it’s drummed up more than $100 million in sales to retail partners, and scored more than 1.9 million Instagram followers that can’t get enough of its content.

Where did rewardStyle go right?

Not all businesses get it right, especially when it comes to navigating the complex and multifaceted social media arena. So where did rewardStyle go right?

  1. Influencers are the new ‘brands’. LIKEtoKNOW.it was the first platform to leverage the fact that Instagram fashion influencers are now just as powerful as the brands they wear. The latest research proves this point, with MuseFind revealing that 92% of consumers trust an influencer more than a traditional advertisement or celebrity endorsement.
  2. A sense of elitism. What really defines rewardStyle is its invitation only model. This underpins it with a sense of exclusivity, and ensures that members feel honoured to receive an invitation, as opposed to hassled.
  3. Instagram exclusive. Social media has reinvented the way brands communicate with customers, and Instagram is at the forefront of the movement. Today, research shows that a huge 96% of US fashion brands are on Instagram, which really comes as no surprise given that fashion is such an aesthetically dominated market. For brands, Instagram unlocks opportunities to entice followers with stylised lifestyle snapshots of their collections, and tap into the intrinsic human infatuation with imagery.
  4. What Instagrammers want. Following the fierce success of LIKEtoKNOW.it, rewardStyle went on to launch LIKEtoKNOW.it.HOME. Amber Box, rewardStyle co-founder explains, “As a company, we started in fashion, but as our influencers grew up, and they and their followers started to care about dressing their homes, and brands and retailers in other verticals began to recognize the retail demand generated by our Influencers, home became an obvious extension.”

When it comes to case studies that make our hearts flutter, rewardStyle’s LIKEtoKNOW.it launch is definitely up there.

Synced.io is a service that lets you easily connect with multiple Affiliate Networks. To request a demo click here.

 

 

The Times They Are a Changin’: How to Earn Loyalty in a Millennial Dominated Market

loyalty-programmes

The Times They Are a Changin’: How to Earn Loyalty in a Millennial Dominated Market

Bob Dylan’s poetic lyrics may be timeless, but when it comes to earning customer loyalty, the times are consistently changing. While in the past baby boomers may have been thrilled to collect stamps on a paper business card, millennials demand a new kind of TLC. In America alone, the country’s eight million millennials represent a quarter of the entire population, and a huge £160 billion in annual buying power. For retailers this means one thing. Winning over millennials should be at the top of the priority list.

One of the biggest myths surrounding millennials is the fact that by definition, they’re incapable of being brand loyal. Research proves otherwise, with study after revered study indicating that with the right approach, millennials can be turned into high value, repeat customers. In fact, in a recent Bond Brand Loyalty study millennials were pinpointed as a key demographic for brand loyalty programs, with 68% confirming they’d change their shopping behaviours in order to score more rewards. Furthermore, one-third admitted to buying a product they didn’t need or want, simply to earn points or boost membership status. So, despite their negative reputation, millennials can be a hugely valuable market.

Here’s how:

Smartphone savvy

Millennials single handily pioneered the smartphone takeover, so it comes as no surprise that this generation responds well to handheld devices. Thrive Analytics reports that of all millennial respondents sharing their location with businesses, 71% did so in order to receive offers and deals. This means that in order to stay relevant, businesses need to be developing loyalty programmes with a mobile-first focus.

Social media

To millennials, social media is now a primary platform to source information on brands, products and deals. For brands, this means that a dynamic social media presence is a must.

The value of rebates

Fuelled by fast-paced lifestyles and an ‘instant gratification’ mindset, millennials prefer to cash in on high-value rebates over discounts and vouchers that can be used at a later date.

Transparency is key

With smartphones at their fingertips, millennials have become fiercely savvy shoppers. For brands, this means there’s no room for ambiguity when it comes to loyalty programmes, price promises and other big claims.

Giving back

A huge 87% of millennials donate to non-profit organisations, which means that earning loyalty has a lot to do with brand philosophies. Millennials have fallen hard for the concept of a ‘participation economy’ that allows them not just to consume, but contribute to, create and influence the behaviours of brands they love. There’s a reason TOMS Shoes emerged as a cult brand, and it’s not just because its canvas shoes are comfortable.

So, while millennials may seem like a tough and somewhat erratic market to crack, earning customer loyalty is not impossible. In fact, with the right tactics, rewards programmes and communication mediums in place, Gen Y is more than happy to stay faithful.

Synced.io is a service that lets you easily connect with multiple Affiliate Networks. To request a demo click here.

 

Redemption or not?

So you created a loyalty program, you are getting your customers to join. You are even collecting valuable insights from from the data you have on your members. Your loyal members are more loyal than ever. But are they actually using all their points? When participating in a loyalty program, earning points or some other form of currency is only part of the equation. Studies say that one third of rewards points and fly miles go unredeemed every year. Providing a variety of ways to redeem points, cash back and offers keeps your customers satisfied.

From the consumer perspective rewards are the most valuable aspect of a loyalty program. So how do you help customers redeem loyalty points and keep in control of your own financial costs?

Sweepstake entries are a fun way for customers to redeem points, if used with a high amount of times a customer can enter to increase their chances to win, it also captures a gaming element that makes it more fun.

Catalogue rewards or the gift of choice is a good way to give back to your customers who work hard earn their points. You might call this the Ultimate in loyalty.

Donations to charitable causes lets consumers emotionally connect with a brand and satisfy their need of interacting with socially responsible brands. A well chosen cause or multiple causes lets people run points and benefit a good cause at the same time.

Coupon/Discount rewards that helps your customer to save money on the products they love is a favorite amongst customers. You can even offer coupons in exchange for loyalty points. Reward a customer´s next purchase and drive incremental sales.

Free Product rewards about three-quarter of consumers say discounted or free items are one of the most valuable loyalty programs benefits. In this case to allow easy redemption and encourage repeat acton in accordance to a fair value is key.

Partner rewards or perks across brands can let you gain new customers and entrench loyalty from an exciting customer base. According to a study by American express, 72 percent of Americans would prefer multi-brand loyalty programs over a single brand.

Cash is king, especially with consumers. So offering a percentage back of a sale can be a hard thing to pass up. Consumers understand the value of cash back rewards or store credit, and such programs act as an additional incentive to spend with a brand to earn a higher reward return. While it may take some time, consumers who hold on to their cash back rewards can realize a nice payout.

A healthy variety of redemption offers is likely to create more loyalty to your member groups and with your customers. Also creating options for redemption is the way to go in building your loyalty program.

source: Crowdtwist