In this month’s publisher spotlight, we talk with David Ayre, Country Manager of Smarter Click, who provide technology that assists advertisers in engaging with their customers while on site, providing an end to end site conversion optimisation tool.
David Ayre is a seasoned veteran in the affiliate industry having experienced life on all sides of the market place; client side, agency side, network side and now technology side. He recently joined Smarter Click (SID: 3197327) as Country Manager. In this article, we ask Ayre what makes Smarter Click unique, what his experiences have been within this industry and five top tips for he has learned
Tell us about Smarter Click
Smarter Click is a fast-growing, market leading technology company that specialises in full user journey remarketing services. We work alongside affiliate networks and agencies to maximise the conversion rates of advertisers’ websites. Using a range of tools from ‘Site Abandonment Overlays’ and Programmatic Retargeting’ to ‘Insights and Reporting’ we help advertisers understand their site and their customers in more depth than ever before and therefore engage with them at all stages of their journey to purchase.
We are London based, but have an international reach, working with advertisers across the globe to help drive online marketing efficiencies.
You mention that you assist advertisers “in more depth than ever before” – can you explain how you are able to do this?
Yes, from the very beginning our founders Ennis Al-Saiegh, Henry Boyson and Joe Gilmore, wanted to bring something unique to the market that we built from scratch ourselves. We wanted it to maintain the principles of the affiliate industry and be a trusted tool for advertisers.
There are other products out there that are “off-the-shelf” or built on existing technology, but we always wanted to build something that was our own and therefore very adaptable in real time with an easy to use and easy to understand interface.
Transparency has become a major buzzword in our industry for the last few years and the push for more transparency has led to us to be always striding ahead of our competition and opening up our vast amounts of data to our clients in an easy to digest format.
The data we now collect for clients, allows them to understand the performance of their campaigns we are managing, understand what offers their customers respond better too, but also understand in a predictive manner what individual customers are likely to do.
For example, if John Doe comes to the site from a certain traffic source, has been on the site for 5 minutes browsing and looked at certain product pages, the ability to push him a specific, personalised offer in real-time is within the advertiser’s hands with Smarter Click’s technology – it is like being in a physical store facing the customer – powerful stuff.
Powerful stuff indeed, why do you think this is so important to our advertisers?
Conversion rate has always been a challenge for clients online, imagine a bricks and mortar store on the high street, if you have a customer in-store and that customer goes to leave the store, any salesperson worth their salt would not allow that customer to leave without first interacting with the customer in some way. Why does online have to be different?
Our role is to replicate this experience, to provide the customer with a choice – this is often in the form of a discount (something that works well in store as well as online), or often just a more informative message about special offers coming up – it can be as forward or not as their brand requires – it could even just be a thank you for stopping by.
Our programmatic technology takes this one step further and ensures your brand is front of mind even after the customer has left the store.
Too often, site abandonment technology has been made to be too aggressive and pushy giving the customers a poor experience of the brand – one of my key recommendations to clients is always to stay within the confines of your brand with any of this activity and always think of the customer first.
So, this is one of your recommendations, what other top tips do you have for advertisers considering working with you, or indeed working with similar?
My top five tips for advertisers are:
- Always think of your customers’ experience online – we have worked with a wide range of brands across travel, retail, finance to name a few and from high street to designer brands – we have a solution for all that fits with your brand guidelines and ensures positive customer experiences.
- Test, Test and test again – as a child, my parents always encouraged me to be inquisitive and I was re-assured that you never stop learning. This is as true today as it was then, it is also true of brands – I have seen articles online about this being the time to stop testing and do something – poppycock, you should always be testing – your customers and the technology available to you is constantly changing, so keep testing.
- Use a technology that supports your growth – I always recommend clients should benchmark all options available before making a choice, so bear in mind when choosing; commercials and support – can you afford the tech and will you get ongoing support from them once launched to scale?
- Transparency – I have said it before and I will say it again – transparency is key – always work with a partner that provides you with full transparency into your data that allows you learn and scale as required.
- Collaborate – All of our clients work closely with us to develop their campaigns – we are constantly optimising the activity for our clients to ensure the best results – we get our best success stories through close collaboration.
So, your advice to advertisers is to benchmark all options before making a choice, what makes Smarter Click unique against your own competitors?
We are unique because we understand our advertisers’ customers, we are not just showing our overlay product for example to anybody on site without any thought for the customer’s journey or the brand, so we trigger the marketing message at a point we know that the customer is more than likely going to a competitor site or hunting for a deal – thus retaining customers on site at a much higher rate than our competitors do. (Ask to see our case studies on like for like performance)
Our commercials are also unique – we don’t insist on lengthy contracts, we don’t charge minimum monthly fees and there is no tech set up costs or design costs – we are purely focused on performance based models. This is often the point clients ask, “Where is the catch?”. That’s the point – there is no catch.
We believe that by working on performance model, we have to constantly challenge ourselves to deliver over and above on solutions clients can get from our competitors at fixed costs. If we don’t perform, then there is nothing stopping our clients moving away from us. So that is the catch – we want to work with all of our client’s long term and not just be a short-term “flash in the pan” solution.
It is good to understand your proposition and the performance element is certainly interesting for our clients, can you describe your company in one word?
Innovative (can I have another word please – approachable – anyone who knows me knows I can’t just answer in one word!)
Thanks David!
To find out more about partnering with Smarter Click, you can contact David by email on david@smarterclick.co.uk or speak to your Rakuten Marketing account representative for more information.
