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E-COMMERCE
How to implement your return policy
Unsatisfied customers, returns, damaged products and wrong sizes. It’s all part of the business.
Shopify shared a post about transforming these problems in a nice experience. Both for you and your customer.
Returns can impact your earnings. And shoppers check a website’s return and exchange policy before making a purchase. That’s why having a smooth return policy will attract more buyers. Plus, it will make them come back for more purchases in the future.
Now that you know why a return policy is important, we can go on. Let’s jump to the suggestions from Shopify. And create a customer-centred refunds and exchanges system.
- Return vs Exchange: It is important to distinguish early on in your system which of the two categories the customer falls into. A return request means that the customer is unsatisfied. An exchange means that they were satisfied with the product, but chose the wrong item.
- Writing a return policy: The first step is to formalize your policy so that it speaks clearly to the customer.
Rules avoid the tendency to handle things on a case-by-case basis. Which is less productive and more expensive.
- Where to surface your policy: After having a written policy, is important to have customers read it. Include links to your policy in several hard-to-miss places throughout your website. This will help you save time going back-and-forth with customers who did not see the policy.
- Choose a service to power your process: There are many services that can help you handle your returns. Having one of them can help you save time and release stress.
- Making returns profitable: You can apply similar strategies to make your returns less painful.
- Turns returns into exchange: With an exchange, the loss is smaller than a return. There is a common way to encourage exchanges over returns: offering to cover the cost of return shipping if the customer chooses to exchange the product.
- Sell product warranties: It can take 2 weeks to have the product back in stock. Besides, the product can get damaged on the way. And for more expensive items, you can consider selling product warranties to customers. This can protect you from paying for damaged items. And avoid disputes on whoever is to blame.
- Upsell or cross-sell on exchange requests: It might be a good idea to look at upselling or cross-selling on exchanges.
When a customer comes back to your website to use their store credit, there is a chance to show them new products. And transforming the exchange in a more profitable transaction.
It doesn’t matter how good your products are. Or how much effort you dedicate to your customers. Refund requests will arrive. And having a system to manage them will assure you don’t lose too much money and time over these transactions.
It’s important to deal with these conflicts in the best way possible. To make sure those customers come back. And to maintain a good reputation on the market. A small daily effort in exchange for long term earnings!
AFFILIATE MARKETING
Mastercard permission to subscription: only applied to physical products
Yesterday, we shared a post talking about Mastercard blocking CC trial and subscription offers.
Well, Mastercard made a mistake, not specifying that that update was for physical products only.
In fact, yesterday the company shared a blog post, clarifying that their update won’t apply to digital services. Only physical products.
A Mastercard spokesperson said: “There’s a lot of fuzziness in health care products, skin care products, vitamins… those physical products are where we’re seeing the most complaints.”
Facebook updates option to create Dynamic Ads in multiple languages
Facebook is enhancing on a global feature which was rolled out some months ago, allowing you to go global: Multiple languages auto-translated in Dynamic Ads.
Facebook’s ideal world is a borderless, united society. And this update is released with that direction in mind.
Facebook’s Dynamic Ads show the right products in the right language, to the right people who have expressed their interest on your website.
This addition enables businesses to upload additional language options for their product catalogue. If the user viewing the ad is in a region which speaks that language, the ad will then default to the relevant language option.
When you add secondary language and country feeds to a catalogue, you can create a dynamic ad for multiple languages and countries from that single catalogue. The information on the secondary feeds overrides your default language or country when the relevant audience sees your ad.
This update is just another step to help us marketers go even further and adapt our ads to our target audience.
What are our thoughts? Facebook has already helped many entrepreneurs break their geo limits. And create businesses everywhere in the world.
This update is just another step to help us marketer go even further and adapt our ads to our target audience.
A personalization method adapted on a global scale!
SEARCH
Bing Ads launches page feeds for easier Dynamic Search Ads management
Bing is taking a leaf out of Amazon’s and Google’s continuous stream of updates for Search Ads.
Today, Bing announced the launch of Page Feeds for managing Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) easier for your campaigns.
What does this mean for you?
- No need to create manual targets for specific URLs or groups of URLs in your Bing DSA campaigns.
- If you are already using Page Feeds for Google Ads, Bing’s Page Feeds are also compatible with Google. Hence, you can use the same Page Feeds across both platforms.
Interested but unaware of its workings? Here are the steps:
- Sign-in to your Bing Ads account.
- Upload a new Page Feed from the Business Data in the Shared Library. Or you can upload Page Feed and their respective page feed campaign associations directly from Google Ads.
- You can enter single URLs into Page URL Option.
- For bulk URLs, use “Custom Labels” to group URLs into dynamic targets.
- You can also group URLs by product type, sale or promotion, seasonality etc.
- Link Page feeds with relevant DSA campaigns using “Use URLs from my page feed only”.
- Assign dynamic ad targets from the custom labels you set up in your page feed.
PS: In the DSA search terms report, which shows the queries that triggered your DSA ads, Bing Ads will also show you whether a Final URL came from a page feed or not in a new “Feed URL” column.
Need more help? Check out their Support page here.
SOCIAL
State of Social: 2019 Report
Buffer released its annual report on the “State of Social 2019”. Providing you with some insights to fuel your strategy for the year ahead.
The report contains responses from more than 1800 marketers surveyed across various niches, from small to large businesses.
Here’s a quick snapshot from the report.
Stories:
- Brands are riding the organic stories wave. Stories ads are the next frontier.
- 1B accounts now use Stories globally.
- 57% of brands believe that Stories have been “Somewhat effective” or “Very effective”.
- 62% have yet to thoroughly test stories ads.
- 61% plan to use Stories in 2019.
Messaging:
- Messaging apps are still overlooked by almost 75% of brands.
- Surprisingly, 71% do not yet use any messaging apps for their marketing.
- 50% are not planning on using messaging apps in 2019.
- Of all messaging platforms, WhatsApp groups see an open rate of over 98% and a click-through rate of 25%.
Influencer Marketing:
- Influencer marketing is an effective strategy for brands, but guidelines need to be clearer.
- 37% of brands have invested in influencer marketing.
- For 68% of them, it’s been “Somewhat effective” or “Very effective.”
- 88% of all brands plan to continue with Influencer marketing in 2019.
Video:
- More and more brands turn to video content. Facebook still leads the way.
- Just 14.5% brands don’t publish any video content.
- More than 36% publish video content monthly.
- Around 24% publishing video content weekly.
- Facebook at 81%, is the most popular channel for businesses to share video content.
- YouTube is second at 62%, Instagram third at 57%, Twitter fourth at 45%, and LinkedIn is fifth at 32%.
- Early data shows that videos on LinkedIn are getting shared 20+ times more than any other content.
- The majority of brands don’t use IGTV. And have no plans for it.
You can check out the complete report here.
SECURITY
2.7B email and password combos exposed: A total of 1TB in data
What’s data breach news for us at WTAFF and our readers? Maybe, just another news, right?
Well, named as the Mother of all breaches, this one may make you sit up and pay attention.
It’s the largest ever public data breach with 773M unique Emails, 21M unique ‘dehashed’ Password exposed. The hackers claim to have 6 more batches of yet unreleased data.
This time, the victim was a popular cloud service, MEGA. Around 12K files and 87GB of data was uploaded to MEGA and then posted on a popular hacking forum.
Using a technique called “Credential stuffing”, this impacts anyone who has used the same username and password combo across multiple sites.
As usual, if you’re curious if your emails and passwords are part of the breach, you can check at HIBP. You can also manually search to see which of your passwords have been exposed.
CC data has been exposed too
Moving on from email/password breach to CC data. Especially, if you are a Fortnite player…
The most popular game, which made revenue figures of $2.4B in 2018, left its players vulnerable to some shady characters that wanted a piece of it.
While the game is free to play, gamers can and evidently do spend money on in-game items using their CC info.
The fact that there were so many players in Fortnite spending money, made the game look like a big, juicy target.
Though the creators of the game insist that they had already patched the issue and reiterate their stance on security, more updates are awaited from Epic games to officially confirm the report.
SPONSORED
$7M+ in E-commerce Sales with 21X ROAS using Facebook Ads!
You must certainly have seen his name in this newsletter before. Depesh Mandalia is a regular feature because he excellent insights into Facebook Ads. And he has insider info from Facebook HQ that he shares regularly.
It’s no different this time. Depesh has put up one of the most massive Facebook Ads case studies out there. And it’s all about what works NOW, not 2-3 years ago!
Here’s the low-down of what he and his team achieved:
- 21X ROAS in November 2018 generating $7M+ revenue with $341K in ad spend.
- 48X ROAS on Thanksgiving Thursday turning $5K ad spend into $240K+ in revenue.
- $15M+ revenue achieved in 3 months.
And in this in-depth 28-page case study Depesh reveals everything. FOR FREE!
Everything’s revealed… The brand store, the products, the best ads, the ROAS improving split-tests and more. Instead of you having to “hack his funnel” for this, it’s all served on a silver platter! With all the thought process that went into it!
It also includes:
- Testing strategy – goals, number of campaigns, ad sets and ads.
- Scaling methods to reach 8-figures revenue.
- Automated rules used to save time.
- High ROAS creatives using mind hacks to get 8.5x ROAS on cold traffic.
- The GT-CBO method.
As we said, it’s one of the most interesting FB Ads case studies out there. We strongly encourage you to head over and get it for free right here!
If you’ve been following Depesh and were wondering about his hands-on training program, head over here to find out more about how he can help you!
Or, if you have a brand and what to work with Depesh and his agency, head over here to get in touch!
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
YouTube’s prank ban deepens the expanding rift with its creators
It looks like YouTube wants to pull out of our Poolside stories…
YouTube content is filled with pranks and dangerous challenge videos like TidePodChallenge, BirdBoxChallenge etc.
Hence, YouTube has changed its guidelines to prohibit such kind of dangerous content on its platform.
Want to get your fix of silly stunts and pranks? Not on YouTube anymore!
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