How A UID Added $2M In Revenue

It might seem improbable that something as straightforward as UID tracking on exit traffic could significantly boost a business's revenue. Yet, with substantial volume flow, sometimes even minor tweaks can determine whether a marketing funnel thrives or lags behind competitors. Through such incremental changes, I crafted the world's leading coupon funnel for search and display. Let's dive deeper...

What Is A UID?

A UID, or Unique Identifier, is a unique code made of numbers, letters, or a mix of both. It allows you to pinpoint a customer within your database effortlessly, making it a breeze to track their interactions throughout your product or service. When collaborating with third-party affiliates, a UID is particularly useful because it enables you to anonymize customer data, enhancing security. For instance, if you track whether a customer completed a purchase through an affiliate link, the affiliate can report back to you using only this UID. No names, emails, or other personal data. This avoids any breach of personal information. You can then match the UID with your own database to map out the customer's journey. This is precisely the method all cashback partners use in their collaborations with retailers today.

The Magic Of A UID : Improve Your Customer Experience

To explain this better. Let’s use an example: When you sign up to a website, “Mumble” they assign you a unique digital tag, which could be something like “311fano1438.” This isn't just any random set of numbers and letters; it's your unique shopping identity within Mumble’s database.

Say one sunny day you decide to treat yourself to some online shopping. You've had your eye on a Keurig Coffee Maker for a while. You click on the Amazon link from Mumble's platform. Unbeknownst to you, as you're whisked away to Amazon through an affiliate program, Mumble discreetly appends your UID “311fano1438” to the Amazon link. Alongside this, Mumble also adds its unique publisher code. Now, this publisher code is like Mumble’s UID with Amazon. It’s given by Amazon's partner affiliate program. That’s how they are going to track deals and commissions Mumbles makes.

How Publisher ID Reporting Works With An UID

Once the customer, aka “311fano1438,” finalizes the purchase of that sleek Keurig Coffee Maker along with those 24 essential replacement cups for $229, Amazon's affiliate system kicks in to report it back to Mumble: "Customer 311fano1438 made a purchase totaling $229, earning you an affiliate commission of $12."

From Mumble's perspective, this data is gold. Not only does it provide insights into individual shopping choices, but when aggregated, it offers a broader understanding of shopping trends and campaign effectiveness. For instance, if Mumble realizes that the same list of 20,000 customers was directed both to a campaign featuring Keurig Coffee Makers on their page and directly to Keurig, but only the former yielded $200 while the latter resulted in a big zero, it's time for some strategic rethinking. Why did one campaign succeed while the other didn't?

While this imaginary journey with Customer A may have been a basic example of anonymous UID tracking, it’s illustrative and precisely the kind of thing UID tagging and tracking is designed for. It transforms a shopping experience or transactional data into actionable insights for the company.

Data and the proper use of it is where the power of the UID truly shines. It allows businesses like Mumble to map profiles to individual customer behaviors.

How Can a UID Make a Business Revenue?

If you're still curious about how a UID can make your business money. Let’s look back at the original question of how a UID earned my clients business $2,000,000. By implementing an unique identifier string on each of their customers profiles coming in, my client was able to monetize their existing exit intent traffic they were sending out to an affiliate partner. Below I’ll break down exactly what their story was (being sensitive to their privacy) along with why they desperately needed a UID.

The Problem A UID Could Solve

This challenge presented itself in a pretty straightforward manner: My client was channeling a significant volume of their traffic to an affiliate. In return, this affiliate would give them a report on the successful sales and those that, for one reason or another, didn't materialize into a sale. If you're familiar with any of the affiliate marketing lingo, you'd probably recognize the terms "scrub" or "reject rate". My client had a significant amount of customers being scrubbed on a daily basis. That is they saw on average approximately 600 of their customers get rejected daily from an offer they were trying to qualify for.

My client was looking for ways they could monetize this reject traffic that originated from their site. Let’s call it Site A. Looking through their user journey, I realized that their “rejected” customers on Site A were actually perfect for the product they were trying to sell on another property they owned, Site B.

My first thought for them was to reach out to their affiliate from Site A to see if they could, within ethical boundaries, provide any personal data alongside of those rejected leads. This would give my client insights into whether or not Site A could do targeted marketing campaigns designed exclusively for Site B’s product.

However, as often happens in the intricate world of business, there are dead ends. When I reconnected with my client the following week, they confirmed their affiliate couldn't share the reject file in the way that would be helpful to them.

I was reviewing this problem with a colleague of mine and he brought up some questions and stories that brought me back to our early days of working together as an email marketing agency. To give you a sense of how far back I’m going here, think of the times when Google would actually permit you to embed an email within a URL string for analytics tracking.

Side note, I can only think of how foolish that all was for sooo many reasons. 😬 Anyway, I digress…

Entering The Solution - The UID

After a brief discussion with my colleague, I got back on a zoom call with my client and explained how about slapping a UID onto each customer profile as they sign up is going to be their saving grace.

After a quick run-through, my client and I laid out two scenarios. Plan A was all about attaching a UID to every customer that rolled in and then utilizing that UID to anonymize the customer’s data and provide meaningful insights for future campaigns.

If their affiliate partner couldn't or wouldn't send back that UID data, Plan B kicked in: creating a special field or question to capture this crucial info with their affiliate. That way, they'd get their hands on the data they needed to make some magic happen as their customer left their site.

Thanks to the UID, my client now had a cheat sheet, knowing who closed on what product from their affiliates and who bailed. This was like cracking open Pandora's box, but in a good way, making way for a whole new level of customer data optimization.

Breaking Down the Math of UID

First up, it’s important to call out that this case study is only considering the clients exit-intent traffic. It does not dive into how much adding a UID benefited this company overall. It’s a way to complex to quantify that in such a short conversation. So it’s best we focus on the 600 daily rejections they got through their exit intent traffic sent off to their affiliate.

As a recap. My client implemented a UID for all their customers. They had 2 websites with entirely different products. On Site A, where they got the bulk of the volume. They would send off customers to affiliates to generate revenue. Those affiliates would send back a report of their traffic along with how many customers were closed sales or rejected along with the corresponding UID.

My client then created a campaign targeting these UID’s from Site A with a super-targeted email campaign for Site B’s product. This product was built for these specific customers, it should do well. If Site B were to close sales from this campaign. Those sales would be worth $175 a month, month over month for approximately a year.

So how’d it do?

They started with ~600 emails that they would send daily as they got their report back from their affiliate. That email campaign had an open rate of 50%. This meant that 300 customers of theirs were looking beyond the subject line of the campaign.

Of those 300 openers, 10% click would click on the campaign. This is known as the campaigns click through rate (CTR), which now meant they had 30 potentially hot buyers hitting their landing page. Of those 30 hot buyers, 3 would convert, becoming actual paying customers for them. All from traffic they were previously throwing away.

Now, I know what you are thinking.. Sometimes when we have 1,000’s of customers daily. Three sales may not seem like much of a gain or loss. After all, out of 600 people, only 3 conversions? Really? I agree, that doesn’t seem like much. But, remember this was traffic they were already getting that was getting flushed away.

When we crunch the numbers on those 3 conversions, they prove themselves to be incredibly valuable. Each conversion is making my client $150 per month. When those customers stick around for a year it starts to add up. In fact my client could claim they just added $175*3*12 or $6,300 every single day they ran this campaign.

Even better, this campaign is set to run entirely with automation daily. Meaning they just added ~$2,300,000 in revenue and all they had to do was implement the UID and campaign and let it run day after day.

The Power of the UID Doesn’t Stop There

Remember, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Further campaign optimizations to the subject line may lead to initial increases in the day 0 email or subsequent emails open rates. Now with more eyes on their product, optimizations of the messaging could lead to significantly more eyes on their landing page. And… You guessed it, optimizing the landing page could prove to even more conversions.

What if they were able to convert 3-4-5x their initial number just by A|B testing this autoresponder? What if they added a series of autoresponders to the customers that didn’t open or click or convert on the first campaign? Imagine what the numbers would look like then. Again, this is only looking at the exit intent traffic and one campaign to reach $2,000,000 in annual revenue.

The Underestimated Power of Marketing & Product Innovation

Isn't that wild? Just think about the potential they have now in all facets of the business. If you are a small business and competing against big fish advertisers that like to splash around budget like it’s going out of style. Even a handful of conversions a day can tip the balance between thriving and barely surviving. In today’s landscape, the traffic is expensive and there’s not an endless amount of it. So, you've got to play smart and make every visitor count.

Being scrappy with your resources and finding novel ways to assist your customers without stepping on their privacy toes is key. And in this story? My client nailed it. The UID became their secret weapon, allowing them to sift through the masses, cut down on redundancy, and zero in on the audience that mattered.

Sometimes, an outsider's perspective, built from a vast expanse of experience, can shake things up and bring in game-changing ideas.

Got some thoughts, critiques, or simply want to drop in a question for me? Dive into the comments or shoot me a message. Thanks for reading, until next time!