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ADVERTISING
Performance marketers are the heroes ad platforms didn’t know they need
Have you noticed any trends among all the earning reports from Google, Twitter, Facebook and Snap?
We’ll remind you: They all saw a significant slowdown in ad demand in early March, but recovered to see more stable and promising data in April. Only Twitter seems to lag behind more.
This ongoing recovery is driven by performance marketers and their direct response methods that focus on driving actions now.
We believe more marketers should have this in their arsenal. More platforms agree with us too, pointing to a bright future for those who make performance marketing a key pillar of their strategy, according to this piece by CNBC.
Everyone loves performance marketers
- Morgan Stanley analysts believe performance marketers were the most material contributors to FB this quarter, with video games and e-commerces taking advantage of the lower CPMs.
- Google said direct response advertising had substantial year-on-year growth through the entire quarter, while brand advertising growth accelerated in the first two months of the quarter before starting to slow in mid-March.
- J.P. Morgan analysts also agree that brand spending has weakened while performance-focused spend has been resilient.
- Even so, performance-focused spend still only accounts for 20-30% of YouTube’s ad revenue, so there’s plenty of room for growth.
- According to CEO Jack Dorsey, Twitter is focusing on building “world-class performance ads products”, starting with its Mobile Application Promotion (MAP) product.
How big of a shift from brand advertising to performance-focused we will see is hard to say, but we can clearly see where the trend is pointing.
AMAZON
Amazon grew like wildfire in Q1. All Q2 yield to fight back COVID-19
Amazon reported its Q1’2020 results and it looks pretty interesting. It gives us a good insight into how the current pandemic has affected the shopping behavior and the e-commerce industry in general.
The stats
- Total revenue: $75.45B (Up from $59.7B in Q1’2019).
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) revenue: $10.22B (up from $7.69B in Q1’2019).
- Net income: $2.5B (down from $3.5B in Q1’2019).
- Earnings per share (EPS): $5.01 (down from $7.09 in Q1’2019).
Reading into the report
Even though sales were up around 30%, this growth came at the expense of marginality. For reasons you likely already know, Amazon had to increase spending on operations with lower product margins during the quarter.
Beyond the results
The biggest news coming out of this report is Amazon’s plans to spend all of its net margin from the second quarter, an estimated $4B, on responding to the pandemic.
“If you’re a shareowner in Amazon, you may want to take a seat, because we’re not thinking small. Under normal circumstances, in this coming Q2, we’d expect to make some $4B or more, but these aren’t normal circumstances.”
What’s up with advertisers on the platform?
The company did have a strong quarter in terms of advertising revenue and the growth rate of advertising held steady from the last quarter. The pullback from some advertisers during the pandemic hasn’t turned out to be significant.
Going into April advertisers are continuing to advertise at a high clip, though advertising prices are still on the lower side.
The company has also suspended more than 10k sellers from its platform for violating policies against price gouging.
Have you ever thought about video popups?
Sooo do you want to level up your email game? Here are some practices to get more leads and sales via email.
Fighting boring popups
You probably have some sort of popup on your store website that shows up and asks for that all-important address.
Kurt Elser shared a popup example that we’ve honestly never seen before:
Video pop ups – You can see the example here.
So instead of having a common popup window, you integrate a video in it. Since it’s something very unique, at least for now, it can definitely increase the conversion rate of the opt-ins.
Little warning: It could harm your loading speed.
9 email campaigns to squeeze your list
Once you have those leads, it’s time to nurture them. This is where you (hopefully) convert those email addresses into customers.
Giving you some inspiration, Chase Dimond shared nine email campaigns you can send to your list.
- The celebrity/influencer partnership email: In this message, you feature the influencers and celebrities that purchased your product. Be careful to get the influencer’s permission here.
- Educational/blog content related email: Craft a message that is relevant to your audience. Tie your content in to relate to the challenges and problems your customers are going through right now.
- The bundle email: Bundles are good to spike AOV up. Why not push them via email?
- The current event email: Write an email based on some important events that are happening in the world. The SuperBowl, events important for your niche, etc. Mind that here we are not talking about the holidays and celebrations that every business leverages, such as Mother Day, Black Friday etc.
- The giveaway email: You can partner with other brands to run a giveaway, including products from all the brands involved. These kinds of giveaways are good for expanding your audience, so you definitely want to shout about it in your emails.
- Flash sale: Communicate a limited time offer to your prospects.
That’s it! We said nine campaigns, you’re right. But we limited ourselves and only shared the less obvious ones.
The nice thing about this thread, however, are the examples that Chase Dimond provided for every campaign. So, if this subject is of interest, you should definitely give it a closer look.
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
- LINKEDIN: You might now be able to reach out to more users in Brazil as LinkedIn announces the rollout of Stories.
- CONTENT WRITING: Looking to sharpen your writing skills in 2020? Check out these 25 tools that can help you upgrade your written communication.
- BROWSER: Mozilla’s new email relay service lets you provide an email alias so that you don’t have to give out your actual address.
- TIKTOK: After opening up their self-serve ad platform, TikTok have green lit their API to their first partner, Sprinklr.
BRAIN TEASER
I pass before the sun, yet make no shadow. What am I?
You can find the solution by clicking here.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
The weird world of dropshipping gurus
Apparently, Bali is not only la Mecca of influencers, but it’s also becoming famous in the dropshipping scene.
All is not always as it seems though. Sometimes, even when the scene looks idyllic from afar, the closer you get the faker it seems.
And this Wired article walked us through the weird scene of these self-proclaimed dropshipping gurus.
One of the entrepreneurs interviewed is Mike Vestil.
Vestil, who moved to Canggu in 2018, is a dropshipper and YouTuber who teaches the ins and outs of the business. He confirms that he has made $400k in his dropshipping career but, when asked for evidence, he says that he doesn’t keep records…
But things get even more interesting when Wired journalist Sirin Kale interviews Michael Craig, the founder of famous coworking space business Dojo.
Being the owner of the coworking space, he’s in touch with these people very often. His thoughts on the matter can be summarized in this quote: “It’s bullsh***. They claim to be making dough, but they can’t prove it.”
Michael even got to the point of banning these gurus from the coworking space:
“The thing is with these gurus is that they make money and then start selling courses, and they’re posing in front of a Lambo [Lamborghini]. So people are like, shit, how did he afford the Lambo? But they just rent the Lambo out for the day. That’s the problem.”
Old stories, new tropical scenarios…