In Part 1 of this series, we looked at innovations reshaping the business landscape of B2B emails and ESPs (Email Service Providers). This sequel examines how these innovations disrupt another crucial element in the marketing landscape – AdWaste.
We start with why AdWaste exists.
Why is AdWaste even a thing?
Five words: Wrong acquisition and wrong reacquisition. And it’s a $200 billion problem.
About 50% of newly acquired customers (across industries and brands) don’t actually add any value after being brought into the fold. They either uninstall the app, bounce off the site after a couple of days, or, as it sometimes turns out, they become existing customers that need to be reactivated. AdWaste is a messy and inconvenient marketing reality that makes everyone (except the advertising platforms) unhappy.
However, there is a possibility to reset Adtech to reduce AdWaste. But first, marketers (and their stakeholders) need to understand why and how so much money is spent.
The usual reason is this – marketers spend money to acquire customers, hoping to turn them profitable on their digital assets (site and apps). But real life does not usually go according to plan.
More often than not, people hardly ever come back to a brand’s properties unless marketers have somehow imprinted the brand identity on the user’s subconscious — which is incredibly rare. So, marketers must constantly shoot off multiple arrows in succession, hoping one will hit the mark and bring the customer back for more.
A few such ‘arrows’ are: messages pushed to our already flooded inboxes, along with nudges and recommendations when consumers click through.
How often do these arrows work? Take a look at your own inbox (especially the ‘Promotions’ tab), and you’ll have the answer. These approaches have numbed consumers long ago, and most ignore every bit of such business communication.
This ‘attention recession’ spells doom for marketers. SMSes, emails, and push notifications are getting ignored. Teams keep pouring money into communication efforts that cost more and deliver very little. All of it leads to more ads, more retargeting, and further diminishing results.
And that’s how we have AdWaste.
Okay, that’s depressing. Is there a solution to AdWaste?
Absolutely. All-In-Email is the solution.
To quote from Part 1:
“Visualize this: Every action the marketer imagines can be completed inside the email. From search to shop, pay to play, form fills to feedback, browse to bookings, chat to cart management, surveys to spin-the-wheel – users can do everything within emails.
As a result, brands can cut down AdWaste drastically. Such emails get people’s attention all the time and solve problems of data poverty. ESP can offer AMP emails and integrate them with the other resonant innovations: Atomic Rewards, AI, Progency, Prime, QuizMails, and Micronbox.”
Note: To better understand what an All-In-Email is, please read Part 1 of this article series.
All-In-Emails combine interactivity and incentives into a single message marketers can push to customers. This convenience and excitement (search and buy products without ever leaving your inbox!) drive up customer engagement to a significant extent. When existing customers buy more, brands have to spend less on Adtech to get new customers.
All-in-Email (with WhatsApp in some countries) can “convert the unidirectional push channels into two-way rich interactive Hotlines, finally enabling marketers to bridge the chasm between new customer acquisition and attracting traffic to their properties.
Such two-way Hotlines are the gateways to building deep and lasting relationships, a win-win for both brands and customers.”
Reallocating AdWaste
When you’re wasting less money on ineffective advertising, you have more to invest in other profit-maximizing strategies. We’re talking about the SHUVAM framework.
We recommend you look into the SHUVAM framework in detail at ProfitXL: Supersize Profits with the SHUVAM Framework.
In a nutshell, the SHUVAM framework drives profitable growth, not just growth. It focuses on making customers happy, keeping them loyal, and laying the foundation for early adopters to gain serious profits.
SHUVAM ensures a ‘profits monopoly’ or, rather, a ‘profipoly’ that is actually sustainable. You can take a page out of the books of tech giants like Microsoft’s Windows and Office, Google’s Search, and Apple’s iPhones, all of whom have created ‘profipolies’ that have helped them invest in new businesses. Modern marketers can use the exact same strategy in hypercompetitive business ecosystems.
So, now to the meat of the matter: how do we disrupt Adtech by reallocating AdWaste?
That $200 billion waste (growing at 25-30% annually) should be split three ways.
– Reward customers for their attention, data, reviews, rating, and referrals
When you reward and retain your existing customers, you don’t have to spend 10-100X more to acquire new ones. So, pay your existing customers instead of Big Adtech.
This is among the easiest ways to build deep, enduring relationships with your current customers. Additionally, the All-In-Email simplifies the process by converting 1-way messages into 2-way Hotlines.
– Invest in better Martech and create a new business unit for ‘Best Customers’
To keep up with modern customers, marketers need a unified stack, not point solutions that give them only ONE view of their customer activity across channels. They also need better technology for search, personalization, and recommendations.
Audit your customer base, find their lifetime value, and identify what unifies your ‘Best Customers.’ These ‘Best Customers’ deserve a specialized, personalized brand experience because they add the greatest possible value to your brand. Create loyalty programs that deliver more exclusive rewards, ease of shopping, and access to better experiences for those elite few.
But you will need the right tech to find these ‘Best Customers’ in the first place, which is where the aforementioned unified stack comes in.
– Brand profit and loss perspective
Invest the money you’re saving on AdWaste into R&D and new business acquisitions. This, rather than trying to acquire new customers, is what lays the foundation for sustainable, profitable growth. The assured result will be a ‘profipoly’.
The All-In-Email becomes a multi-faceted industry disruptor as well as your first step toward eliminating AdWaste and supersizing profits.
Embrace and master the change
As this article depicts, innovations are reorienting all business domains by cutting out AdWaste and reaching users more efficiently. And the domino effect of such innovations will eventually eat into Adtech revenue, leaving brands to invest more where it counts – the customers that give you actual business and let you mine their data.
Digital advertising has long become the primary way to reach customers. With internet usage and email traffic increasing exponentially, brands must adopt disruptive innovations – the old ways are dead; the new way is the only way.
Jim Barksdale said, “There are only two ways to make money in business: bundling and unbundling.” Google and Meta bundled free services in search and social to monetize attention for marketers seeking growth. It is now time to unbundle and divest.
It’s now time to eliminate your AdWaste while making your customers happier.
This is the second and final part of the article comprising excerpts from the blog ‘Resetting ESP and Adtech Industries’ by Rajesh Jain. He is the founder and Group MD of Netcore, a bootstrapped SaaS company that helps brands create outstanding AI-powered customer experiences at every touchpoint.
