It’s a big month for us, as L’Oréal – the world’s largest cosmetics company – launches a new customer acquisition programme using the Buyapowa platform. We’ll be helping some of their best-loved brands to bring peer-to-peer selling – a cosmetics industry tactic ever since Victorian times – beautifully up to date.
Well as parties go, this year’s Black Friday weekend was ‘one huge sales party’!
We are not going to bore you by repeating all the stats about how many billion dollars of sales were made, how many million parcels need to be delivered or what was the average response time for the Argos or Target website. Let’s suffice it to say that US$4.4bn spent online in the US and £1.1bn spent online in the UK is a big party in anyone’s vocabulary.
After a difficult decade for the global magazine industry, beset by competition from abundant free content online and peer to peer sharing of copyrighted information, 2015 was predicted to be the year that digital revenue gains finally outweighed falling print revenue. So it is encouraging to see the UK, with its long and illustrious history of printed magazines and pamphlets, leading the way in adopting innovative solutions to drive subscriptions growth across print and digital, as seen in the recent PPA ABC Consumer Magazines Report in August 2015.
If you have been following the business pages lately you cannot help being struck by the huge changes underfoot in the online gaming industry with mega-mergers between Betfair and PaddyPower and GVC beating 888 Holdings to acquire Betwin.
These gaming behemoths have sought scale as a response to spiralling customer acquisition costs, as well as increased tax and regulatory burdens. A profitable customer can often cost hundreds of dollars to acquire. It is refreshing to see a leading online gaming business like Welton Holdings’ Fun88 take an innovative approach to reducing customer acquisition costs.
As we are now officially in Autumn (a.k.a. ‘Fall’ for our US readers), you are probably starting to turn your attention towards this year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday promotions.
With so much riding on these key sales dates, as well as meeting with your IT team to make sure your site stays up and external courier companies to ensure parcel deliveries, you will be probably also be firming up your advertising budget and deciding on the key messages you want to get across.
When looking at Refer-a-Friend or ‘RAF’ schemes, potential clients often ask us: ‘Why should we not just build this ourselves?’
Or, where a brand or retailer has already built a simple invite-a-friend scheme in-house, the question is often: ‘Why should we not just add these features to our existing RAF scheme?’
