Solving a superficially simple, but complex and costly problem.
Brands have used a variety of solutions to roll out marketing campaigns across digital channels for years, leveraging promotions to motivate customer purchases. The methods range anywhere from digital coupons, to bespoke codes and other offers. Marketers usually use what are called “point solutions” for each promotion, which are out-of-the-box coupon capabilities run by certain marketing technology companies ranging from email service providers, workflow tools, or ecommerce providers.
On the surface these seem shockingly simple, but the ways to circumvent them are complex and costly.
In the digital age, most of these solutions serve up unique promotional codes that lack security features and are tied to a single channel. What’s the use in having a single promotion for email, a single one for social, and an additional one for display if a marketer can’t track engagement across all digital touchpoints? What’s more, they also usually lack smart capabilities to connect a customer’s final digital behavior — what is known as closed loop measurements that track initial interest, enticing shopping, and the end sale.
They’re too simple for their own good.
This makes it easy for bad actors to strike, using fraud techniques to force brands to end up wasting valuable dollars — something that is normally the most important aspect of marketing campaigns, but has taken on a mission-critical status for struggling brands during the COVID-19 pandemic.
So how can brands know when they’re serving promotional materials to the right customers as opposed to fraudsters willing to siphon key revenue at every turn? PromoTech provides the lucrative connective tissue between providers to weed out your regular deal-seekers versus dedicated fraudsters.
Smart Offers
Single-use codes are pervasive and, largely, ineffective when it comes to being adequately secure. They’re often siloed at various points across the marketing ecosystem, which makes them a key offender when it comes to sharing and misuse.
By equipping each offer with a dynamic one-to-one code, fraudsters will be barred from doubling and sharing the promo with other customers, while brands will be able to track and measure engagement across the entire paid, owned, and earned marketing stack. Brands can even link these with legacy point of sale systems without costly upgrades to ensure seamless security.
Smart Distribution
Speaking of being siloed — brands that haven’t integrated their channel and device solutions ought to get up to speed. Optimizing audiences via DMP integration is one of the key ways brands can identify new and existing customers versus fraudsters.
This sort of technology optimizes not just the brand’s visibility of the overall customer experience, but ensures the appropriate experience across devices to track every customer engagement attribute all the way to final sale. Control activation caps the total budget for particular offers while making sure they are only available to the right customers from the desired flow.
Smart Insights
The process of separating actual customers with fraudsters isn’t just an open and shut case — it’s an ongoing cycle.
Capturing all relevant path-to-purchase data creates an invaluable first-party data asset that lets brands continually optimize for increased results. By consistently monitoring real-time digital engagement data such as campaign parameters, audience segments, offer variants, and more, brands will be able to have an actionable and ambitious competitive advantage against promo fraud.
An OMP like RevTrax is able to help seamlessly integrate campaigns across the marketing stack for brands to make smarter decisions against fraud. The sad fact is that there is such industry fragmentation that leaves a void that fraudsters are more than willing to fill. To combat this, RevTrax provides valuable connective tissue between marketing and advertising technology providers.
We’ve helped hundreds of brands over the past decade protect their offers and enhance their discounting and promotional strategies. If you’d like to learn how RevTrax can help seamlessly integrate campaigns across your digital channels, contact us to speak to a specialist.
