Acquiring new high-intent customers is a critical challenge for any business, especially in the finance market. Customers rely heavily on word-of-mouth and take many factors into consideration before converting, making the stakes even higher.

Traditional marketing strategies often miss the mark, struggling to hit the sweet spot between ad spend and customer quality. This is where outcome-based marketing (OBM) comes into play. OBM revolutionizes customer acquisition by offering a more effective, performance-based approach, positioning brands to access previously untapped high-intent traffic, all while sharpening their competitive edge in the financial services landscape.

What is Outcome-Based Marketing (OBM)?

Outcome-based marketing (OBM) is a results-driven strategy ideal for financial services marketers. With OBM, you only pay when specific KPIs crucial to your business are achieved, such as acquiring a qualified lead, loan application submissions, or new account openings. Campaigns are tailored around these down-funnel events, enabling you to test performance across various channels and pinpoint the most effective placements for converting traffic into customers.

Overcoming Customer Acquisition Pain Points with Outcome-Based Marketing (OBM)

Discover how an OBM model helps tackle common obstacles in scaling customer acquisition in the finance industry.

High Costs per Acquisition: OBM helps manage high acquisition costs by ensuring you only pay for specific, measurable outcomes such as qualified leads or completed applications. This ensures every dollar you invest drives growth. With continuous optimization, OBM pinpoints where your best customers come from, enabling you to scale effectively without overspending.

Inefficiency in Targeting: OBM enhances targeting by using placement-based strategies across digital channels, geo-targeting specific locations, and dayparting for optimal ad timing. For finance marketers, this means precisely directing ads to high-potential leads. AI-driven optimization further refines targeting, continuously uncovering new customer acquisition opportunities and improving campaign efficiency.

• Working with an outcome-based marketing expert like Perform^[cb] connects you with top-performing partners to reach your ideal consumers. For example, a national mortgage marketer achieved a 481% increase in biannual growth and a 78% boost in conversions in just one quarter by leveraging Perform^[cb]’s expertise in tracking KPIs, managing volume, and analyzing competitive payouts.
• Investing in a performance marketing solution that can accurately track cross-channel conversions while protecting consumer data and complying with industry regulations is especially important for finance brands. A privacy-centric tracking platform like TUNE can ensure that every conversion is measured, whether it takes place in a web browser or a mobile app, without using third-party cookies or storing sensitive customer information.

Regulatory Costs: OBM allows you to work with partners who understand and adhere to financial regulations. These partners handle compliance aspects related to their marketing efforts, reducing the costs and risks associated with regulatory adherence.

• From FTC and SEC advertising laws to content compliance and bank regulations, Perform^[cb] ensures brands’ campaigns are protected through enhanced compliance monitoring, in-depth partner vetting process, and patented, built-in anti-fraud technology.

Measuring ROI: OBM prioritizes measurable results, simplifying ROI tracking even with complex customer journeys and multiple touchpoints. By paying for outcomes, you gain clearer insights into which channels and partners are delivering value, improving your ability to evaluate and optimize marketing effectiveness.

Lead Quality vs. Quantity: OBM emphasizes paying only for leads that meet specific criteria and convert into customers. This is especially crucial for financial services brands, where high acquisition costs are exacerbated by a significant portion of unqualified leads. By focusing on quality over quantity, OBM helps mitigate these costs and ensures a more efficient allocation of ad spend.

How Financial Services Brands Can Get Started with Outcome-Based Marketing (OBM)

Here are a few tips on how financial marketers can begin testing on a 100% performance-based model:

1. Define Clear Outcomes: Set specific goals like acquiring qualified leads or increasing conversions. This helps measure campaign effectiveness and ensures you’re focusing on high-quality metrics.
2. Leverage Data and AI: Use tools like Google Analytics for segmentation, Salesforce for predictive modeling, HubSpot for behavioral tracking, and Perform^[cb]’s PerformSense AI to enhance traffic quality and conversion rates by filtering out non-converting traffic based on extensive data. Choose a tracking platform like TUNE’s that offers real-time measurement and a library of dashboards and reports to get insight into what’s working and what’s not. For finance brands with business intelligence tools already in place, consider using a fully automated event delivery service such as Firehose to live stream data into proprietary systems.
3. Optimizations to Scale Incrementality: Regularly review and adjust campaigns to measure and scale incremental impact. Perform^[cb] uses advanced methods to isolate and test traffic, accurately assessing the impact of your marketing efforts. Set goals for key metrics like conversion rate, then use performance automation tools to automatically optimize campaigns based on those goals.
4. Consider Speaking with an Outcome-Based Expert: Connect with performance marketing partners experienced in financial services who offer robust targeting and transparent reporting. Perform^[cb]’s Outcome Engine leverages a performance-based model to acquire new customers alongside your existing marketing channels. TUNE’s expert team is knowledgeable about the challenges of marketing for financial services and can share learnings and best practices from years of experience.

Cutting Costs, Boosting Results

Outcome-based marketing offers a transformative approach to customer acquisition in the finance and insurance sectors. By focusing on measurable outcomes, leveraging precision targeting, and utilizing advanced tracking and analytics, marketers can significantly reduce spend without losing out on qualified customers.

Are you a financial services marketer eager to dive into outcome-based marketing? Connect with Perform^[cb]’s team of customer acquisition experts and get started today!

Email TUNE’s Partnerships Team at partnerships@tune.com to learn more about performance marketing for financial services brands and how the right tracking platform can help.

Earnings per click is the be-all end-all performance metric to affiliates.

This key performance metric is your average revenue for each individual click you are driving to an advertiser. And if you don’t think this is the one affiliate marketing metric to keep your eyes on, allow me to explain.

But first, ask yourself a few key questions. Are you studying the metric? Do you know how it is calculated? Are you using it to strategically influence business decisions?

If you answered no to any of the above questions, you are leaving money on the table. And if that isn’t enough to persuade you, let’s cover a few other reasons why this metric matters.

Earnings Per Click Is Your Most Valuable Metric

Earnings per click is an agnostic statistic.

[bctt tweet=”At the end of the day, affiliates want to maximize their profit.” username=”tune”]

The metric doesn’t care how high your conversion rate is. It doesn’t care that exclusive partner payout you may have or the sheer number of clicks you generated. Earnings per click cuts through the clutter and gives you the exact amount of money you can expect to receive for every click you purchase based on historic performance. With that knowledge, it is just up to the affiliate to get their cost per click under their earnings per click to be profitable.

The true potential of the earnings per click metric is fully unlocked when utilized in a paid supply side cost per click or cost per thousand impressions environment. If you can extrapolate a cost per click for every click you drive to your paid advertisements, then you can directly compare this against the earnings per click that is calculated in your tracking software. If you subtract your cost per click from your earnings per click, you get your net profit per click.

(Calculating it looks like this: Net profit per click = earnings per click – cost per click.)

This is key. This is what affiliates thrive on when it comes down to it. Forget conversion rates. Forget click-through rates. Forget payouts. If your earnings per click is higher than your cost per click, you are making money. It’s as simple as that.

Most supply-side advertising platforms will provide you your cost per click, or a way to calculate your cost per click per ad by default. For instance, during my college years, I was operating as a high volume social media affiliate. The self-serve media buying platform I was pushing clicks through offered line-by-line reporting for each of my advertisements and their respective cost per clicks. To harmonize with this, my tracking platform offered earnings per click breakouts by sub ID. This meant that as long as I passed in the creative ID into a sub ID in the tracking links behind my ads, I could directly determine profit for each over any period. Split-testing on easy mode.

How to Calculate Earnings Per Click

Earnings per click is calculated by taking the total earnings you have generated over a period, and then dividing that by the number of clicks you have generated for that same period. This gives you an estimation of what you can expect each individual click you are generating to produce in earnings. This is a figure that is invaluable in a cost per click environment.

(Earnings of an individual click is calculated as total earnings over period “x” over the number of clicks over period “x”.)

3 Tips for Earnings Per Click Campaigns

1. Shop smarter. Let’s say a network approaches you with the same offer you are currently running, but with a higher payout. An attractive offer, right? In reality, this actually means nothing. Sure, the payout is higher — but what if the conversion rate is much lower? You could actually be losing money by running with this new network. This is where earnings per click becomes vitally important. If your EPC is higher on this new network than the old, you are now making more money. The conversion rate doesn’t matter. The payout doesn’t matter.

2. Test quicker. Having one metric to use as a baseline to measure performance makes split-testing a breeze. You now have the ability to juggle multiple networks, or constantly swap out links, while only having to focus on the earnings per click of those campaigns. In such a fluid, fast flowing industry, time is your most valuable asset. Calculating earnings per click gives you back time you were spending performing tedious calculations.

3. Feel safer. Fraud is, and will always be, a nagging, frustrating problem in the performance marketing world.

[bctt tweet=”Monitoring earnings per click as your anchor point facilitates a simple sense of security and control.” username=”tune”]

It is a trivial task to record and chart trends by hour, day, month, when you are only relying on a single key metric that pulls from both your gross spend and earnings. Effortless trend monitoring breeds obvious trend outliers. This empowers you, as a marketer, to focus your time on what’s critically important — performance.

A Final Thought

Running as an affiliate business means spending a lot of time looking for and testing offers. If your main goal is to make as much profit as possible, you need to optimize where you spend your time. Getting lost in numbers and metrics is easy, and if you’re not analyzing the right things, you’re wasting time and losing money.

Focusing on earnings per click may seem like too simple a solution, but it’s a quick way to ensure that you’re making money efficiently.

For more tips, check out TUNE’s Ultimate Guide to Partner Marketing.

This article was originally published in August 2016 and has been updated with new information and insights.

Traditional PR firms are fading into the sunset, and with so many big-box stores and small- and midsized businesses transitioning to an online business model to stay afloat, partner marketing has re-emerged as one of the most successful revenue-generating solutions for brands to incorporate into their partnership strategies.

To keep up with client-side demand, some PR agencies are redesigning their business models to offer full-service marketing plans and affiliate program management. This has been a bit of a challenge for them, mostly due to a broad lack of education in affiliate marketing, while at the same time, having limited or no experience with the important tools and data analytics required to manage partners on SaaS-based platforms. Looking for more immediate, but effective results, brands have begun cutting out the middleman by shifting their focus and media budgets into developing direct partnerships with digital content creators and social media influencers.

Why? Because these individuals possess a full awareness of the nuances and challenges associated with performance-based metrics, data analysis, KPI targets, and of course, customer engagement.

The Year of the Influencer

According to leading industry experts and sources, brands are projected to spend $15 billion on influencer marketing in 2022.

While average consumers are enjoying the new freedoms of working and shopping from home, some have found ways to turn their personal hobbies and creativity into lucrative business ventures as content creators and influencers. Social media has become the new Hollywood, and brands are learning the value of “partnering under the influence.”

In the past, many brands sought relationships with big-name celebrities and mega-influencers (those with 100K+ followers) to post and share branded content. The results were less than stellar, mostly due to a heavy reliance on vanity metrics, such as a high number of followers. Popularity didn’t always equal profitability, and slumping sales were the proof. In fact, many of those followers turned out to be bots and bogus accounts.

In 2019, influencer fraud, which included the creation of fake personas and followers, cost brands an estimated $1.3 billion. Advertisers suddenly found themselves confronted with an eye-opening truth: most celebrities and mega-influencers didn’t necessarily manage their social media pages. They were usually maintained by personal assistants or paid social media managers. Many of them also had no direct interaction with their followers, or used the products appearing in their posts. Loyal audiences scrolled and swiped in search of personal glimpses into the private lives of their favorite personalities, not because they were interested in making purchases. All of that changed when COVID-19 suddenly appeared the following year and made the world a different place for all of us.

At the beginning of the pandemic, consumer demand for basic necessities spiked, but as people shuttered indoors, brick and mortar businesses suffered significant losses. Brands and agencies were also no exception. Those who were able to operate with limited resources lowered costs by eliminating “non-essential” services, which in most companies, included PR and marketing budgets. As a result, ad spends were reduced across all traditional and digital media platforms, but with more people turning to social media for inspiration, things would soon change again. In an unexpected turn of events, the hole created in the advertising space would soon give rise to a new group of marketers and smaller influencers, while simultaneously exposing brands to a new pool of talented content creators and niche influencers.

The Value of Content Creators

Content creators have an artistic connection to the work they produce, and spend countless hours producing work that inspires audiences to like, copy, and share with others. Whether it’s a new dance challenge, vegan chili recipe, or new home-fitness workout, regular people have turned their smartphones and their respective app stores into high-quality, low-cost production studios.

By sharing original work (user-generated content, or UGC) on platforms such as Instagram and TikTok, these creators are attracting new followers and boosting engagement algorithms with no specialized industry training. Even pets have dedicated media channels with thousands of subscribers, thanks to daily uploads of cuddly moments shared by their owners. By working with content creators, brands can be exposed to a potentially limitless pool of talent and creativity, but more importantly, they can tap into the high engagement rates in social communities across multiple platforms.

What Niche Influencers Bring to the Table

Micro-influencers have followers anywhere between 10,000 to 100,000. They may not have the same reach as mega-influencers in terms of scale, but their audiences are dedicated followers who tune in for occasional social commentary or inspiration.

Nano-influencers have a follower count in the range of 1,000 to 10,000. While some promote affiliate links and pages in their social media profiles, they mostly create personal content based on special moments or hobbies most likely to resonate with “regular people.” Their audiences are typically made up of people with similar interests, but who also want a personal opinion or review from someone with whom they can relate.

Regardless of the title, what these creators lack in followers, they undoubtedly make up for in visibility and that is what ultimately leads to sales. Customers are more likely to buy products if they are recommended or seen being used by people they like and trust.

More often than not, many of today’s niche influencers are business-savvy entrepreneurs; because of their smaller size, they often dedicate more time to developing brand-centric content, while simultaneously promoting their personal brand and influence. They also understand that performance and engagement (rather than vanity metrics such as follower count) are what matter most.

Social app platforms are also making it easier for creators and niche influencers to collaborate with brands. By using built-in analytics and creative tools, both sides can gain measurable insights into content acceptance versus performance and use them to drive deeper partnerships and measurable results.

What Are You Waiting For?

In conclusion, influencers are here to stay. Brands still have a long road ahead of them in terms of full economic recovery, but perhaps now the road to success won’t be so lonely. 

Let me know what you think about brands working with niche influencers in the comments below!

Ready to learn more about affiliate partnerships and niche influencers? Download our Ultimate Guide to Partner Marketing.

Welcome to Part 3 of our Ultimate Guide to Partner Marketing series! In this series, we are exploring strategies found in The Ultimate Guide to Partner Marketing and bringing them to life through modern brands and use cases. If you’re just discovering the series, head over to Part 1 and Part 2 first.

So far, we’ve covered how to plan out a winning strategy for a partner marketing program. In this third post, we’ll focus on how to build it, starting with recruiting partners and onboarding them to your program. We will also take a look at recruiting tips from some of the world’s top employment companies and how you can apply them to your partner program.

From Partnership Plans to Program Actions

Now that you know how to plan a partner program, it’s time to go out and build it. Up next in the TUNE In Framework is the Operationalize section, which covers how to translate strategic marketing ideas into real partnerships and results.

Before you can see any results, however, you need marketing partners (like influencers and affiliates) to bring them in. That’s why our first order of business is to explore ways to successfully recruit and onboard new partners.

The Partner Recruitment and Onboarding Process

Attracting the right kinds of partners and engaging them in a program takes time, strategic thinking, and more than a little elbow grease. We recommend breaking down your recruitment strategy into four phases.

Each recruiting phase is designed to cover essential program elements and minimize partner-related risks. And while these phases are generally time-consuming, it is better to make the effort now to secure quality partnerships and a diverse program, rather than waste time later vetting poorly-matched candidates and optimizing sub-par performance.

The four phases are as follows:

1. Phase I: Set partner approval criteria.
   Thoughtful approval criteria attract the right kinds of partners, right away. Be sure to incorporate your marketing policies into the sign-up process, and require partners to accept them in order to be approved for your program.  
2. Phase II: Build the foundation of your partner portfolio.
   In many partner programs, 20% of the partners drive 80% of the revenue. This phase is about securing that 20%. Craft a pitch, share a clear value proposition, and show how your program benefits the partner’s business. Personalization is key here.
3. Phase III: Find and fill gaps in partner coverage.
   Are there partners who are not in your program and are driving results for your competition? Research what it takes to make and keep these partnerships, and then reach out on a one-to-one basis to start a conversation about why they should be working with you.
4. Phase IV: Identify partners who climb the charts.
   Monitoring your program for top performers and rising stars is an ongoing effort. In addition to keeping top partnerships happy, look for opportunities to nurture those on the rise. Often, these partners need only a little nudge to reach their full potential.

As always, you can find more information, including additional partner recruitment best practices and onboarding tips and tricks, in our free Ultimate Guide to Partner Marketing.

Best Practices for Recruiting Partners

When it comes to tried-and-true advice for recruiting affiliates and marketing partners, why not trust the experts? The LinkedIns, Indeeds, and Monsters of the world have proven that certain recruiting strategies lead to success, no matter the industry or position. The same goes for marketing partnerships. (Sometimes, the obvious answer is the right one.)

Let’s take a page from the books of leading employment-centric brands, job boards, and career professionals on recruiting best practices. LinkedIn, for example, suggests the following to complement their data-driven approach to recruiting:

• Look beyond the obvious candidates and sources. (In other words, find out where the talent is, and search there for similar partners.)
• Leverage technology to reduce friction points.
• Emphasize what candidates want to know. (Share information up front to answer the questions that are most important to your partners, and not just the questions you want them to ask.)
• Be clear and concise.
• Remember mobile device users. (Partners are all about optimizing experiences and performance; if you disappoint them in a key area, such as mobile offers for Instagram influencers, your partnership may end before it even begins.)
• Consider career paths and growth opportunities. (Communicate to potential partners how your program will benefit them — the goal is to build a mutually beneficial business partnership, after all.)

Recruiting Niche Partners

For more niche programs, it’s wise to look to the brands that serve niche audiences, such as TUNE customer FlexJobs.

FlexJobs provides an online job board specifically for part-time, gig, and freelance work. They also connect businesses looking to fill these specialized roles with the individuals searching for them. When it comes to recruiting, tips from FlexJobs apply just as well to affiliates and marketing partners as they do to gig economy workers.

For example, this advice from an article on recruiting for flexible jobs:

1. Be specific.
2. Know who you’re looking for.
3. Know where to look.

Simple, but vital tips when searching for partnerships that will help to grow a program instead of taking your time away from it. Here are a few more recruiting words of wisdom from FlexJobs that hit the partner marketing nail on the head:

• Every interaction with a company (or a partner) is a reflection of you (and your program).
• Be consistent across your (program) brand.
• Mind your (partner) correspondence.
• Slow and steady does not win the race (when it comes to onboarding).

But perhaps the best advice of all is this: Think as a partner thinks. If you understand what drives your marketing partners, you will be better equipped to meet their needs and motivations. Even a small insight can lead to better relationships and do wonders to set a program on the path to success.

Next Up: Talking the Talk and Walking the Walk

With partner recruiting and onboarding in the bag, we are ready to move on to communication and compliance. We’ll cover the most important elements of a partner communication strategy, methods for enforcing compliance without alienating partners, and examples of programs that are excelling at both. Check back in two weeks for our next installment!

What is your biggest challenge in recruiting or onboarding partners? How have you solved it? Let us know in the comments below!

If you’re ready for your own partner program, get started by requesting a consultation with a TUNE expert.

Learn how to plan, build, and grow cross-channel partner programs with our Ultimate Guide to Partner Marketing series. Follow along as we introduce strategies from the Ultimate Guide and bring them to life through leading brands and advertisers.

• Part 1 – Planning Your Partner Program Strategy
• Part 2 – Determining Partner Payouts and Marketing Policies
• Part 3 – Recruiting and Onboarding Partners
• Part 4 – Communicating for Partner Compliance
• Part 5 – Managing Partner Offers
• Part 6 – Partner Payments
• Part 7 – Program Analysis and Optimization

Photo by Lost Co on Unsplash

If as an advertiser you’ve been building your performance marketing program for some time, you may run into a positive challenge: it’s no longer time to build — it’s time to scale. But to do it right, you want to be sure you have the strategy, team, and resources in place to succeed. In this blog post, we discuss what you should consider when scaling your performance marketing program.

First: Are You Ready?

Here’s the thing: many people scale too soon. Thought leader Charles Ngo recommends ensuring your campaigns have at least a 50% ROI before you scale them higher. The last thing you want to do is spend money on an under-performing campaign, because when you start scaling every single dollar is amplified — and even a few percentage points can make an exponential difference dollar-wise.

If your campaigns are struggling to get to the 50% benchmark, consider cutting bad placements and/or partners. Not everything you test is going to do well, so if some campaigns or partners have been struggling, don’t see if more money and scale will help. Invest only in the ones that perform well with a small amount of budget first. You can also up-level poor performance by improving your targeting and optimization for campaigns. Test different audiences, ads, landing pages, and CTAs. Small adjustments can make a big difference, and it’s best to find out what works before going big.

How to Scale Your Performance Marketing Program

When you’re ready to scale, you can scale vertically, which means you expand your campaigns with existing traffic sources, or you can scale horizontally, which means expanding outwardly with new audiences.

Here are the most popular ways to scale:

Bid higher

Increase your spend to increase impressions or clicks.

Go international

If it makes sense for your brand, consider testing in new markets. You’ll want to pay close attention to cultural nuances and taboos, but if your product or service does well in one country, chances are there are at least a few others with similar cultures and/or languages where similar ads will also do well.

Improve your CTR

The higher your click-through rate, the more traffic you’ll get for the same amount of money. People become blind to repeated ads, so you’ll want to have a process in place for testing, uploading, and measuring the effectiveness of new ads. As you get more sophisticated, you can also test personalization to see how customers react to ads designed just for them.

Test different types of ads

Many platforms offer multiple types of ads. Instagram, for example, runs ads in both feeds and in Stories. Facebook runs ads in news feeds and as banners on the right-hand side of feeds. If one format performs well for you, try another and see how it compares.

Consider niche advertisers

Yes, everyone is advertising on Facebook and Google. But there are tons of other advertisers and publishers out there with untapped audiences. Research where your audience reads, shops, visits, or hangs out in their spare time. You just might find a whole new set of customers that you would have never reached via the duopoly and other major platforms.

Other Considerations

Before scaling your performance marketing program, consider a few things about your platform and processes, too.

• Is your measurement dialed in? There’s no point in scaling if your measurement isn’t absolutely on point. Otherwise small amounts of money could be falling through the cracks here and there, adding up to thousands or even millions of dollars per year.
• How much can one person handle? If you’re scaling your budget, you may want to consider scaling your team. What one person could handle will change as more audiences, ads, and platforms come into the mix. You also want to ensure your team has enough time to stay on top of industry trends and test new opportunities.
• What’s the opportunity cost? Every campaign requires a certain level of attention. As such, you want to measure whether it’s worth tending to a few larger campaigns, or a lot of smaller ones. Only your data will reveal the best path for your team.
• Do you have the technology to scale? With more ads, money, and measurement inherently come more opportunities for human error. As such, it’s important to let technology do what it can with the heavy lifting. Prioritize getting all of your campaigns, partners, and metrics into one platform that lets you analyze, iterate, and optimize in real time.

Marketing Like a Champ

Scaling will reveal not only how much money your campaigns can make and how fast your business can grow, but where the opportunities are for improvement in your process, systems, and team.

To learn more about how TUNE lets advertisers, publishers, and networks manage their performance marketing programs all in one place, contact sales@tune.com or request a trial today.

This is a guest post from the team at Applift.

For the longest time, mobile user acquisition and retargeting have been viewed as separate stages of the mobile funnel. The traditional mobile app advertising approach has taught app advertisers to first start with user acquisition focusing on install volume, and then think of re-engagement and retargeting as an afterthought, or at a later stage when user interest starts diminishing.

Looking at the needs of advertisers today, the urgency of shifting marketing spend toward the mobile channel cannot be ignored. In order to reach and convert their users, advertisers have to reach them where they are; statistics show that this is increasingly on their mobile devices, which is why acquisition and retention matter.

In the short history of mobile advertising, advertisers have increasingly sought ways to spend their budget to deliver tangible returns for their app. In the initial days, installs were the key focus, cost per install (CPI) pricing a preferred payout method. For advertisers coming to mobile after decades of cost per thousand (CPM) pricing on desktop, CPI was the model of choice. With this approach, the marketing funnel stopped at the install.

By 2015, post-install quality and return on investment became the metrics to watch out for. No longer did marketers just want users to click on ads and download apps; they wanted users who would engage and stay connected to ultimately become customers. Marketers were now interested in knowing where exactly their dollars were being spent, creating a shift in mentality and emergence of action-based payouts (CPA) with a focus on lifetime value.

True results, however, don’t stop at user acquisition. This is why a natural step for advertisers, with the goal of maximizing ROI, is not to just reach those users and connect with them, but also to activate them and turn them into loyal customers.

The user journey on mobile takes on the traditional marketing funnel of AIDA, where after the initial steps of Awareness, Interest, and Desire, the steps of Action and Results follow to connect and activate the users. This user journey on mobile begins with a potential user viewing an app, clicking on it, and installing the app. It is post-install that an acquired user can become a loyal customer.

The following infographic delves deeper into why engagement should be a top priority for marketers over installs, and how performance-based pricing has evolved.

This article relates to our Attribution Analytics product, which was acquired by Branch in September 2018 and is being integrated into Branch Universal Ads. To learn more about Branch Universal Ads, please visit branch.io/universal-ads/.

Today TUNE is launching new technology to help mobile marketers understand one of the hidden secrets in the mobile app install ecosystem: a massive fraction of app installs are actually reinstalls. Those new downloads in your marketing dashboard? Many of them are actually re-downloads.

We’ve been testing and studying this phenomenon for six months while in development.

Here’s what we’re seeing:

• in some app categories, reinstall percentages are as high as 75%
• 98% of smartphone owners have reinstalled an app
• search drives 65% of all app reinstall behavior
• games are reinstalled 55% more frequently than non-game apps
• large brands own 70% of the most-reinstalled apps on the iOS App Store

Get the full free report
App Reinstalls: A Sleeping Giant in Mobile User Acquisition

This is not just about cheap phones with limited storage in emerging markets. Germany is at 38%, Belgium at 40%, and Canada is at 34%. And in the United States, 27% of “new” app downloads are actually re-downloads.

Using new deterministic data straight from the iOS App Store and Google Play, TUNE is able to identify the proportion of people installing an app who have previously installed it, then deleted it, and subsequently have chosen to get the app again. We’ve also surveyed those people, and the reasons are not exactly what mobile experts would expect.

Get the full report for all the details, but here are some highlights of what we found.

Reinstalls Are About More Than Cheap Phones

The first question about the nature of reinstalls is obvious: Aren’t they simply the result of lower-end phones with insufficient memory that force users to delete apps for space, then reinstall them later when more space is available?

The answer is no.

Reinstalls make up almost 30% of all app downloads in North America, with Mexico at close to 40% reinstalls, Canada at 33.5%, and the United States at 27%.

In Europe, the Netherlands — a wealthy Western European country — has the region’s second-highest reinstall percentage at 45.4%. Belgium, Sweden, and Germany are all near the 40% line. It’s completely clear that the reinstall phenomenon is not just a byproduct of low-quality phones when you consider data from Asia. While Asia’s reinstall average is on the higher side at 39%, Japan is 40.3%, while India is 31.6%. China is the leader in reinstalls at 58.5%.

iOS and Android Reinstall Ratios Are Very Different

Proportionately, iOS apps are reinstalled more often than Android apps.

Out of our sample of 3.1 billion installs, 37% of Android installs were reinstalls, while 47% of iOS installs were reinstalls. Essentially, for every iOS fresh install there’s one reinstall, while on Android there is 0.6 of a reinstall for every fresh install.

Top Categories: Up to 75% of Installs Are Reinstalls

Some of the top app categories for reinstalls are predictable.

Travel, navigation, and transportation apps are near the top of the list for obvious reasons: You download that London subways app for your trip to London, then delete it. When you go back a year later, maybe you need it again.

Social networking is also high, mostly due to the influx of dating apps. When Mr. Right turns into Mr. Wrong, out comes the dating app again.

98% of Smartphone Owners Have Reinstalled an App

Almost everyone has reinstalled an app, with only 1.95% of respondents in a TapResearch poll telling us that they have never deleted an app and later reinstalled it.

Interestingly, 40% of smartphone owners reinstall an app regularly … either weekly or monthly. On the other hand, almost 50% of people surveyed say they very rarely reinstall apps.

72% Installed for Reasons Other Than Lack of Space

Contrary to popular mobile expert understanding, the biggest reason for uninstalling and then reinstalling an app is not limited space on low-end devices. In fact, the biggest reason is simply deciding to give the app another try.

While over 34% say that’s the main reason they reinstalled an app, the other categories are instructive as well:

• 18% say they deleted an app because it was buggy, and they reinstalled to force a reset to a better-functioning app
• 13% say they deleted an app that they later found out they needed … and therefore redownloaded it
• 6% say they deleted an app by mistake, and had to reinstall it
• 1% say there was a sale that required purchase via app, so they reinstalled it

Add it all up, and almost three quarters of reinstalls are not due to space issues.

The full report is available for free here.

Good news gets trumpeted from the rooftops. Bad news gets buried in the backyard.

Welcome to the backyard.

Six years ago when Scott Brinker’s martech landscape was considerably less insane — 350 marketing technology vendors rather than today’s 5,000 — and marketers were considerably less stressed out, Gartner made a prediction.

The “Martech 5000”

By 2017, Gartner said, the CMO will spend more on IT than the CIO.

That might actually have come true.

But it may not stay true, if marketers continue to waste 30% of their budgets. That’s what  American marketers believe will happen in 2018, according to a Rakuten Marketing report that gently landed on the wires with a very light, almost inaudible mini-thud this week.

On the positive side, 30% waste is better than John Wanamaker‘s infamous 19th-century “50% of my advertising is wasted” quote. On the negative, it’s depressing that with over 150 years of technological progress since Wanamaker we’ve only seen a 40% improvement in dollars dripping out of holes in marketing buckets.

(Yep, a 20% absolute change from 50% loss to 30% loss is a 40% improvement.)

Given that marketers think they’re going to be wasting 30% of their budgets, it is not shocking that 44% of U.S. marketers are worried about being able to prove the value of marketing. Plus, 42% are concerned about challenges in establishing a positive perception of marketing as an organization discipline.

My guess is that most departments that believe they’re going to waste 30% of their budget would have similar issues.

What’s the solution?

There’s only one.

Spray and pray?

Smart marketers know it, and have already committed to it: stopping spray and pray. Marketing that isn’t measured, can’t be viewed side-by-side with other channels in a dashboard, and isn’t attributed, is at high risk of fraud, duplication, waste, and general sub-optimal performance.

TUNE can help.

The alternative is not pretty.

We’re already in a scenario where only 9% of marketers have a marketing system of record, where global app install fraud costs app publishers up to $2 billion a year, almost nine out of ten marketers cannot consistently measure their customers’ cross-device activity, even though technology opens the door to twice as many customer journey data points.

Accurate, fast, and integrated attribution is the first key.

Engagement is the second, and mobile is a massive part of that.

But underpinning both is a commitment to measurement that guides investment. There will always be marketer dollars spent on testing new platforms, new ads, new networks, new programs. That’s not waste, however, and it’s not 30% of your budget.

Retaining your customers is not only 5X cheaper than acquiring new ones, but a study by the Harvard Business Review found that increasing customer retention by just 5% can lead to a massive 25–95% increase in revenue.

As Tamara McCleary, CEO of Thulium and a top marketing technology influencer, put it, “It’s potentially lethal to put acquisition before retention strategies. Look at the data: It costs five times as much to acquire a new customer as it does to keep an existing one.”

In this blog post, we explore seven customer retention tactics that you can use to bolster your retention marketing efforts and your revenue.

1. Loyalty Programs

Loyalty programs reward existing customers for their business and incentivize them to spend more. Customers receive bonuses when they purchase a certain amount, and can usually track their progress along the way. Data shows that customers subscribed to loyalty programs buy 90% more often and spend 60% more per sale.

Sephora even takes it a step further by offering tiers in their loyalty program. Shoppers achieve Insider status for signing up, then can work their way up to VIB status through $350 in purchases per year, or Rouge status through $1,000. With each tier comes additional perks, such as reduced shipping costs, custom makeovers, and invitations to exclusive events.

Source: Sephora.com/about-beauty-insider.

2. Gamification

Gamification isn’t just for video games and mobile apps. You can apply gamification tactics to your retention marketing strategy by making it more fun for customers to purchase your products. Consider incorporating leaderboards, status updates, badges, or challenges into your marketing.

Starbucks, for example, offers challenges that incentivize customers to buy items in order to receive bonus stars. Depending on your business, you can apply this approach to get through certain inventory faster, tempt customers to try new items, or encourage customers to buy more of their favorites.

Source: Starbucks.com/starbucks-rewards.

3. Personalization

Personalization gives customers a more relevant shopping experience by tailoring content based on customer location, shopping habits, and other demographics.

For example, Airbnb sends personalized emails to customers. These emails not only include the customer’s name (good) but also a reminder to revisit homes in specific locations they were browsing earlier (great). An email from Airbnb with a vague subject line might get an open or it might not — but one with a specific subject line and relevant location almost guarantees a second glance.

Source: Airbnb.

4. Customer Support

According to an American Express survey, 78% of consumers have abandoned a transaction due to poor customer service. But marketers need only look to Jeff Bezos and Amazon to find all the evidence they need of the importance of customer support: by being “customer-obsessed,” the internet giant has become the world leader in overall online retail and in overall customer satisfaction.     

To turn would-be consumers into repeat customers, provide at least some level of customer service at all times. You can offer live chat on your app or website, set up automated chatbots on Facebook, or simply make sure it’s clear how customers can get in touch with your support team.

5. Referrals

Customers make the best advocates for your brand because they already love what you offer. They also know which of their friends would, too. Data shows 92% of consumers trust recommendations from people they know. To both acquire new customers and reward your current customers, try a referral program. In the example below, Sun Basket encourages customers to refer friends by offering $40 in credit for each new order placed.

Source: Sunbasket.com.

There are plenty of tools out there to help you encourage and reward customer referrals. Those like ReferralCandy give customers their own referral link, then reward them with cash or a coupon on their next purchase. Others like KickOffLabs gamify the referral process by showing leaderboards of who offers the most referrals.

6. Purchase Thresholds

You can also increase revenue and encourage repeat customers by setting purchase thresholds. These thresholds can unlock discounts or free shipping when a customer spends the required amount. One example: Target offered 10 Days of Deals over the holidays, where customers could look forward to a new set of deals each day as well as save $50 on every purchase of $100 or more.

Source: Target.com.

7. Push Notifications

Sometimes, customers just need a little reminder to re-engage with your brand. You can use push notifications to send customers a coupon, alert them of specials, or even combine with location services to offer a time-sensitive discount when they are near your store. Marketers have seen conversions jump by almost 50% after adding a combination of in-app messaging and push notifications to their mobile strategy.

Make It Your Own

To ensure you’re not just acquiring users who vanish within days (80% do), be sure to test the customer retention tactics above. Data shows that 86% of mobile app marketers who implement a user engagement report see increased engagement, higher revenue, increased conversions, better insights, and higher retention. Chances are, your best customers aren’t waiting to be found — they’re just waiting to be re-engaged.

This article was originally written for the March print edition of Mobile Marketing Magazine.

Peak App. App-plateau. Appocalypse. Call it what you like, the days of relying on mobile app installs as your primary measure of success are over. Why? Research from TUNE shows that between 5 and 8% of installs you buy are outright fraud. Amazingly, the majority of real users, some 80%, have no motivation to use your app and they churn just as fast as they download.

As most newly acquired users churn in the first couple of months, mobile marketers turn to re-engagement and now the challenge lies in measuring the complete LTV of a user who is being re-engaged multiple times by many campaigns. Add in retention and you have a situation where brands are struggling to connect with their most valuable users.

At the end of the day all good marketers want to know who their best customers are because they want to keep them, reward them and build their loyalty. By measuring the LTV of users, mobile marketers can pinpoint their best users and create offers and promotions that reward them and boost retention.

Also with many established brands, the 80/20 rule kicks in, where you see 80% of revenue coming from 20% of users: So, knowing your most profitable customers means you can reward them and retain them. Plus, ultimately the success of an app depends on LTV.

So the real question is this: How do you turn all those new app users into valuable customers?  

This is where setting up your app for success and folding it in to your customer lifecycle strategy is key. At the end of the day, your app customer is your best customer.

Examining deep funnel analytics and retention or app onboarding are key when it comes to  converting new app users to valued customers. App onboarding requires a product tutorial, CRM push and paid advertising. The goal is to build engagement until the magic moment where customers “can’t live without” your app takes place.

Furthermore, brands can learn a lot from mobile gaming companies who have been the trailblazers of mobile player acquisition and engagement for years. They measure the customer journey with pinpoint accuracy all along the way. The goal is to configure the game in a way that leads the players to micro-transactions (e.g. coins to level up). In a similar manner, brands should be focused on creating affinity for their app through configurations that maximize loyalty.

TUNE recommends some useful steps:

• Combine your app store optimization with your paid campaigns for a lower effective cost per install. On average, every paid install drives an additional 1.5 organic installs by increasing app store visibility.
• A/B test push notifications, messaging, features, and navigation flow to determine the best offers, messaging and user experience based on segments you’ve created.
• Add deep links to push notifications and in-app messages to deliver users to specific locations in your app and trigger automated actions like applying a discount at checkout.

Developing customer loyalty and increasing LTV with your app means going way beyond the install. Plus these recommended steps will take you a long way to fulfilling your app goals … especially now in a post Appocalyptic age!

TUNE helps advertisers resolve 3 key challenges that all brand marketers active on mobile face: ASO, tracking, and retention. Learn more about the TUNE Marketing Console here.

Meet TUNE at Mobile World Congress (MWC) February 26th-March 1st!

Contact me directly at chrisos@tune.com should you wish to book a 1:1 meeting with TUNE at MWC.

Paid, earned, and owned media: every marketer worth their salt knows that all three are essential to any marketing strategy. What many marketers don’t know is how to use these elements together to unlock powerful synergies and valuable results. That’s where we come in.

The infographic below dives into some of the data and insights from our Better Together e-book — enough to help marketers begin their own experiments with paid and organic marketing. But it barely scratches the surface. To learn everything you need to find the combinations of paid and organic that work best for your business, download the free e-book: “Better Together: The Elements of Paid & Organic Marketing.”

Ready to get in the marketing lab and start experimenting? Download your copy of “Better Together: The Elements of Paid & Organic Marketing” to get started.

Marketers traditionally think of owned, earned, and paid media as separate. Marketers traditionally also pass up massive multiples of extra success by not synergizing channels.

But how do you synergize paid, earned, and owned media?

How do you make them … better together?

This is the fifth in a series titled Better Together: The Elements of Paid & Organic Marketing.
(Get the full free report here.)

• Part 1: Achieving massive ROI — up to 9X — via channel synergies
• Part 2: Exploring how paid boosts organic, and organic feeds paid
• Part 3: Analyzing all marketing channels by “degree of mobility”
• Part 4: Building paid, earned, and owned into marketing mix modeling

OK, let’s get practical.

Blended and synergistic

Paid, earned, and owned are not separate. They are blended.

You own a website, but you earn good search ranking via SEO strategies and publishing strong content. You own an app, but you earn virality — which prompts users to share it with others — and you earn engagement, which helps keep users in your app. You “own” a Twitter handle with 5 million followers, or a Facebook page with 500,000 fans, but you earn the right to be heard — or shared — by posting things that are relevant to what your followers care about.

And paid is mixed right in.

Some say organic social on Facebook is dead. So you juice a video with paid in your owned channel and hope to see additional earned views, likes, and shares. Your app isn’t getting traction on Google Play, so you run some user acquisition campaigns. The paid acquisition juices installs, which signals success, and users engage in your app thanks to your onboarding strategy, push messaging, and other forms of in-app marketing, which are signals to Google that improve your earned ranking.

“What you own does not even need to be organic,” says TUNE VP of Customer Success Ian Sefferman. “For instance, I own my email list … but that email list could have been bought. Earned is often just considered to be PR, but it’s far more. SEO is definitely earned. ASO is definitely earned. And I don’t own my position on Google or the App Store, but I do earn them!”

Turning insight into action

To not just understand how organic and paid marketing channels interoperate but also take advantage of that synergy, marketers need tools.

Here are a few that matter.

Attribution

As mentioned before, everything starts with attribution. Until brands know what marketing causes are driving which desired effects, they cannot tweak strategies intelligently.

Attribution can be done in multiple ways, but a core requirement is that it be people-based, not device-based.

That means whatever activity a prospect has undertaken — whether it be on the web, in an app, in-person, or via another channel — is attached to the person behind the action, not the smartphone or laptop or other device that they may have used.

Organic analytics

If marketers are focused on building their owned channels, they need to understand how successfully they’re working with those platforms to generate organic buzz and business.

Ideally, your organic analytics tools don’t just report data, they also suggest and enable optimization strategies to improve earned and owned results.

Also ideally, they are hooked directly into your attribution engine, so you can not only see your organic and paid performance side by side, but also see how optimizing owned media results in additional performance lift.

Owned engagement

Organic analytics are nice.

Tools to enable easy engagement with owned audiences are even better … especially in modern channels with extensive two-way feedback. Apps are a great example, but messaging bots are another, as, frankly, are websites with support/sales/service chat channels.

Marketers need mechanisms that give them the ability to nurture and communicate with communities of customers in their owned outposts. And it makes the most sense if these tools are fully integrated into their attribution and organic analytics systems.

Paid optimization

Optimizing Facebook ads is easy. And Google ads is also very, very simple with on-platform tools.

But how do marketers know whether to pour more spend into Google, or Facebook, or sponsoring an email list, or holding an event, or running a TV commercial?

They need tools to compare ROAS across platforms and across partners.

Only by integrating both structured and unstructured data from dozens if not hundreds of ad partners can marketers see normalized return on ad spend that can help them make bigger strategic allocation decisions, rather than small, tactical, platform-by-platform choices.

Summing up: get the full report

This has been a five-part blog series on Better Together: The elements of paid & organic marketing. Get the full free report here.

All marketers intuitively know that channels are interdependent and customer journeys are complex. That paid channels influence each other as well as organic, and that organic inputs impact paid outputs.

The problem, of course, is that for most marketers, not all of this is easily seen.

And so we make mistakes of past attribution and errors in future allocation.

Get the full report to see specific cases in which marketers went the extra mile, discovered dependent relationships, and specifically documented cross-channel lift. The ground-level truth is this: better brand awareness and affinity leads to better marketing in general.

Your challenge is to take these learnings and apply them via attribution tools, organic discovery insights, and engagement opportunities, and paid optimization capability. At TUNE, we’d love to help.