GDPR in digital marketing Archives

Affiliate marketing is considered one of the best performance-based marketing in today’s world. In this marketing, a business offers rewards to the affiliate(person bringing or recommending your brand) whenever visitors arrive on the website with the help of that same affiliate’s marketing efforts.

A person who promotes any brand’s product is known to be as an affiliate and the practice of promoting products through different channels is called marketing. When a visitor clicks or visits that same channel and reaches to the company’s website, the affiliate earns a commission from the company.

The marketing methods that affiliate marketing includes are:

Organic Search Engine Optimisation: SEO
Paid Search Engine Marketing: PPC(Pay Per Click)
Email Marketing
Content Marketing

Affiliate marketing drives significant sales and revenue to the business. Actually, it is beneficial for both i.e., the business and the affiliate marketer. In fact:

At present, 84% of the publisher and 81% of companies support affiliate marketing and this statistic will continue to grow as affiliate marketing is increasing every year consistently. (Source: WebMarketSupport)
The spendings on affiliate marketing have increased by 10.1%. And, with all calculations, it will reach till $6.8 Billion by 2020. (Source: MediaKix)
38% of marketers consider affiliate marketing as the best customer attracting methods. (Source: WebMarketSupport)

Want to know why and how? Let’s check out the latest trends of affiliate marketing that you can apply to your business.

Well Balanced Affiliate Reporting & Attributes

Most of the affiliate campaigns work on last-click attribution. In this, the affiliate marketer gets the final click before the sale receives complete credit for the conversion. But now it is actually changing.

With the help of latest attribution models and analytics feature provided by affiliate platforms, you can now easily track every affiliate marketer’s tactics working together. It even allows you to take a complete check on marketing funnel and cross channels.

Test & Optimise Conversion rates Regularly

Let’s imagine you are promoting a product through an affiliate link on your promotion page. If you receive 5000 visits per month on a 2% conversion rate, you will be having 100 referrals.

However, your target is to get 200 referrals. In this case, you have two options, either to concentrate on attracting 5000 more visitors or you can increase the conversion rate by 4%. Whichever of the options seem good for your business?

Rather than consuming time in blogging and guest posting for building your website’s domain authority and generating organic traffic, it will be a good option to increase the rate of conversion by 2%

For increasing the conversion rate, you can optimise your website’s landing page, test Call-To-Action buttons and can optimise various strategies for conversion rate. After optimising and testing your website, you will be getting improved results in less period of time and efforts.

The Change In GDPR

GDPR(General Data Protection Regulation) was effected on the 25th of May, 2018 and brought a new set of regulations that strictly governs the organisation’s usage of personal data across the European Countries.

Now, because this GDPR new regulation, the affiliates who are not located in Europian Union are also forced to retrieve user’s data via opt-in consent.

So, it’s better to follow FTC guidelines as per new GDPR regulation and openly disclose that you are receiving commissions for practising affiliate marketing with the name of organisations.

Affiliate Marketing Now Getting Smarter

Organisations or merchants are receiving a huge amount of profits with the help of their affiliate marketers. And most of the companies are now depending on their affiliate partners.

Well, this can be a great moment for all the affiliate marketers to understand their importance as this can lead them to get good deals and higher commissions.

It does not matter whether there are commission structures like CPA, CPL or CPC, there are many affiliate programs. That can make you earn a good amount of commission.

Conclusion

Affiliate marketing is like a huge playground where you can practice your marketing skills in different patterns. However, the only aim of every marketer is to earn a higher commission. And to earn it, you will have to follow the latest trends in digital marketing.

So, with these above-mentioned affiliate marketing trends, you can update your knowledge and can apply on your further marketing plan.

And, if you are still left behind somewhere, feel free to contact us.

The arrival of General Data Protection Regulation(GDPR) has been in the horizons for a while but now as the start date for this upcoming regulation has been set for May 25^th 2018; it has become crucial for businesses engaging in digital marketing to be well prepared for this eminent change.

In this article, we have planned to take an in-depth approach while explaining GDPR, for those of you who are seeking clarity on the nitty-gritty details. Having said that the interpretation and perspective built around this regulation can be quiet variable.

Any marketer knows that user info is the currency that determines the success and failure of any marketing campaign. The main intent behind GDPR is to protect the data privacy of the users so that the information provided by them is used responsibly by digital marketers. This implies that everything from an email address, to a name, IP address, photo and more are included when it comes to customer information.

Essentially the main reason behind the implementation of GDPR is to empower the individual rights for web users to control the personal information shared with companies.

How Would GDPR affect digital marketing & Sale?

1. Permission to opt-in or opt-out

Under GDPR, permission has to be explicit. Companies have to have the ability to supply evidence that an individual has chosen to opt-in into communications and did not only fall onto the record by default such as assessing the unchecked ‘opt-in’ box on a form. ‘Double opt-in’ are also best practice; in which opt-in is followed up with a ‘click to validate’ email.

But for corporate or company information, ‘implied consent’ means marketers can email somebody, provided that individual had the choice to opt-in for the emails at the time of purchase.

Unless you are confident that your database doesn’t have any private data e.g. email, telephone number, our recommendation is that you stay as compliant as possible.

2. The cookie Rule

Cookies fall under the GDPR range, provided that they may identify people through device monitoring, mixing information along with different information or by treating folks as unique.

Will cookies require permission? Yes, and so, clear opt-in. As an instance, if a visitor lands on your own website for the very first time. You need to keep cookies blocked or ignored before the person requires any permission activity. Much like email marketing, permission is subject-specific or purpose-specific and, even if the website uses cookies for various purposes, it must find explicit approval for every one of these.

Website managers need to ensure a smooth user experience when surfing and, at precisely the exact same time, supply top selection for permission in a manner that is friendly and also the least intrusive.

3. Third-Party Conformity

For most marketers, third-party tools and marketing technology providers (i.e. advertising automation platforms, CRM etc) form a majority of their digital database. In cases like this, it’s significant that marketers check that their tech suppliers are prepared and ready for GDPR compliance. With steps in place to store and process, and incorporate information appropriately. Ahead of the May 2018 deadline, it is wise for entrepreneurs to:

Ask providers to detail how they are going to store/process information to ensure GDPR compliance.
Ensure there is a point of contact from each side, plus a procedure in place to handle any information breaches. Both sides must Have the Ability to respond fast to manage, react and respond in accordance with ‘Data breach notification’ legislation.
Be sure to simply collect information that that’s necessary, or falls under a ‘legitimate interest’.
Make sure it is possible to delete information if the user stops the service, also they should be able to download their own data when asked.

4. GDPR Scale

Now that we have made it clear how crucial user data security will become once GDPR is fully applied. Now let’s move on to how much of the user information be allowed to be used by businesses.

As most of you are aware that platforms like Google or Facebook.com have certain functionalities. Asking users to provide their personal info for a variety of reasons, now the question is where does GDPR come into all this?

Well, the answer is clear, GDPR will create levels on the basis of which the type of information. That is being been collected will be determined. And platforms need clearly communicate to the user on the details of how their provided info will be used by the businesses.

Let’s call it the GDPR scale shall we, this scale applies the principle of “purpose limitation”. Under which personal data must only be “collected for specified, explicit and legitimate purposes and not further processed in a manner that is incompatible with those purposes”

5. Rise of the Inbound Techniques

With all the upcoming restrictions regarding customer privacy and data protection, the increase in the application of inbound techniques by the marketers is bound to happen. As Inbound marketing implicitly dictates that the consumer should come to the business, rather than the other way around. Inbound marketing also knows as content marketing aiming to provide the users with a more personalized experience. Hence resulting in improvement in customer service.

Gated content, organic and paid social media, website registration pop-ups, webinars, event subscriptions, etc. Can generate leads, enrich our clients’ adventures or drive sales or conversion. What we must do today is to make our audiences aware of exactly. What we will do with the data we gather and where we store/use it.

Disclosure:

Although the above-mentioned points are the product of the extensive research done by us, however as we have mentioned above as well the interpretation of the regulation can vary from business to business. It is strongly advisable for businesses to consult an advocate beforehand in order to ensure 100 % compliance.

Few final words!

Now it may appear from the above-mentioned points the arrival of GDPR might paint a bleak picture for the future of digital marketing, however, if business to adhering inbound principals the quality of customer service will amplify through leaps & bounds without having to worry about GDPR restrictions.

Now hate to state the obvious but better customer service means a happy customer. Which results in customer loyalty and so on and so forth, we’re sure you get the gist.

Well, that’s our uptake on this, will keep you posted!!