Product data feed technology makes it easy for consumers to choose packages and compare prices, increasing sales and profits for Sky and its affiliate partners

Product data feed technology makes it easy for consumers to choose packages and compare prices, increasing sales and profits for Sky and its affiliate partners

Sky operates a multichannel, multi-platform television service that serves more than 10 million households in the UK and Ireland. It offers access to over 500 TV and radio channels, as well as broadband internet, phone, online and mobile TV services.

Digital plays an increasingly integral role across Sky’s business, including customer acquisitions, customer service, brand and marketing, and online products and services. It ranks among the top 10 UK online display advertisers in comScore’s Ad Metrix, and has an extensive network of affiliates forming an essential part of its customer acquisition and sales strategy.

Under Sky’s affiliate marketing programme, affiliates are offered competitive commission for promoting its digital TV and broadband products. They are also paid for customers that upgrade their packages online. This provides significant scope for affiliates to promote particular products to existing Sky customers, but also presents a considerable challenge due to the huge range of content and complexity of Sky’s product set.

Engineering the affiliate channel

Recognising the consumer purchase decision is complicated, Sky wanted to simplify this through the affiliate channel and turned to FusePump to help power its online product marketing.

FusePump builds high-quality data feeds comprising accurate and rich product information such as promotional text, pricing and availability. They can be easily tailored to match the specific content requirements of third-party applications including affiliate marketing, dynamic advertising and pay-per-click (PPC) automation.

“One of our biggest challenges is that we have so many different products a customer can choose from,” says Helen Southgate, senior online marketing manager at Sky. “We recently calculated that there are 18 million potential combinations, which surprised even us! I knew about FusePump’s online advertising solutions through my previous role within the industry and via the IAB’s [Internet Advertising Bureau’s] Affiliate Marketing Council. Initially, we weren’t sure how product feeds could be created and used within our sector, but I was certain that we could better engineer the affiliate channel to drive high-quality sales.”

Previous to working with FusePump, Sky did not use product data feeds. Instead, affiliates built their own product packages using information taken from Sky’s website. With products and pricing updated regularly, this meant there was a risk of affiliates ending up with inaccurate content in their advertising. In addition, affiliates were only able to promote Sky using basic banner adverts with static content.

“We wanted to enable consumers to build their own package combinations online, to see exactly how much they would cost per month, and to be able to compare prices against our competitors,” said Southgate. “This creates opportunity for a slightly different route to purchase. For example, customers select a monthly fee first, then filter data to display the packages recommended within their price bracket; or they select a channel or programme they want to watch and all relevant package suggestions are displayed.”

Changing the way consumers buy online

In a first phase, FusePump extracted rich product information from Sky’s website in order to build bespoke product data feeds for its top two affiliates. Containing accurate and rich product information on Sky’s digital TV and broadband packages, these feeds provided a simple and quick solution to marketing its products via its online partners.

“We had a product feed up and running within a few weeks of the initial engagement,” confirmed Southgate. “That was pretty incredible considering it was such a big project. The challenge in affiliate marketing has always been that creating product feeds is complex and time consuming for the merchant. FusePump has answered this problem with a really simple solution.”

Under a second phase, Sky made a product data feed available to all of its affiliates, together with FusePump’s FeedCreator and WidgetCreator tools. The feed encompasses all of Sky’s products and packages, with FeedCreator making it easy for affiliates to trim the feed and select product information relevant to their target audience. “It was important that affiliates didn’t necessarily have to be technically minded in order to benefit from the data feed,” she added.

Meanwhile, FusePump’s WidgetCreator powers Sky’s individual package selector. Consumers go through the drop down menu and build their ‘Sky bundle’ within the widget. This deep links straight into the basket on Sky’s e-commerce site, pre-populating it with the chosen combinations so that consumers can see exactly how much they cost. “The widgets are in a simple banner format, but deliver more dynamic and interactive adverts that engage the customer with the affiliate website and increase the conversion when they go through to Sky.”

Working directly with Sky’s top partners, FusePump has so far built individual product feeds and bespoke tools for 20 affiliates. It also works with the account management team at Sky’s affiliate network to address the longer tail of sites. According to Helen, FusePump’s consultancy has played a large part in driving the success achieved so far. “A lot of companies out there will quite happily give you the technology, but in my experience that is just half the story. With FusePump, we have a team that manages all of our business. They are really good at being proactive, interactive and coming back with new ideas. They even help us with recruiting affiliates to use the tools, which is a really valuable part of what they do.”

Simplifying the customer journey

FusePump’s data feed technology and expertise has enabled Sky to improve the customer journey. “The affiliate data feed generally converts around 1-2%per cent of all clicks to sales so far. To Sky, this represents good consumer engagement and affiliate earnings per click,” Southgate said.

Using high-quality product data feeds has also enabled Sky to penetrate deeper into the long tail of sites and forge much closer ties across its base of affiliates. “This is where FusePump’s tools can be really useful. We have one affiliate that can deliver a huge amount of traffic, so if you can just increase the conversion rate by a little you’ve suddenly driven a significant increase in sales. That is the real focus for us now, finding how to engage with them and get them using all the different tools available.”

As the first pay-TV platform in Europe to reach 10 million subscribers, Sky is also looking to add value and build loyalty for its customer base. It plans to target data feeds at specific customer segments, different types of product and affiliate, as well as key events. For example, one in every 100 searches in the UK related to Sky Sports in the week running up to the first game of the Barclays Premier League last year. The same week this year would provide the opportunity for affiliates to set a product selector with Sky Sports as a default.

“What we have achieved so far is to solve a very big challenge that we had: to make the customer journey much simpler via the affiliate channel. The next step is to see how we get more innovative with data feed technology to further develop the channel, understand our customers better and to deliver more targeted advertising. We spend a huge amount on online display advertising, so if we could increase the conversion rate by just half a percentage point that would be huge,” Southgate concluded.