Director of Marketing
Content at GRIN
Welcome to the GRIN gets real podcast, the show for people who want to maximize their marketing potential. From influencer marketing to eCommerce strategy and everything in between, each episode will feature industry experts that share their insights and provide actionable tips to help you achieve your marketing goals. Subscribe and stay tuned!
Vice President of Marketing at clean.io
Kathleen Booth is the Vice President of Marketing at clean.io and a startup marketing expert. She is also the host of The Inbound Success Podcast and a board-level advisor for tech startups. Her marketing security career includes government and public sector consulting on strategic communications, as well as co-founding a marketing agency with her husband.
Kathleen advocates for digital engagement and marketing security. She also dedicates much of her time guiding startups to help them meet the evolving demands of 21st Century digital retail.
“Unfortunately, the gap is that marketers haven’t been taught anything [about cybersecurity]. We’ve been thrust into the situation where we’re responsible for it, but we don’t have the tools to manage it.” – Kathleen Booth
In a world where anything is possible when it comes to customer personalization and online shopping, the same is true for hackers, malware, and various cybersecurity threats.
Kathleen Booth, VP of marketing at clean.io, joins this podcast episode to advise marketers on what kind of threats exist today. Furthermore, she shares different ways that brands can identify these threats, protect their customers, and partner with sustainable solutions for long-term growth and safety.
The main topic of discussion on this episode is the risk pertaining to coupon code extensions and malvertisements. Most ecommerce brands want to be able to provide discounts to new and loyal customers, but there are many ways in which people and organizations have abused the coupon code system.
“We’re very pro discount because they can be used really strategically by marketers and ecommerce brands to incentivize behavior… But there’s been this proliferation of deal sites that have popped up over the years (Retail Me Not, Coupon Cabin, Honey, Capital One Shopping, etc.).”
Kathleen explains how deal sites represent one common security threat unique to ecommerce brands. Deal sites make use of browser extensions, and these extensions can engage or interact with your site without your permission.
“All of a sudden you start to realize that there are thousands of extensions out there and all of them are able to operate on our websites without us having any control over them, unless we take specific action to control them.”
Coupon scraping services (such as Honey and Capital One Shopping) don’t just impact your site’s checkout process, they can also complicate your relationship with affiliates and influencers. More importantly, you will lose significant revenue without being able to track where and how your limited-use discount codes exist on these deal sites.
Kathleen talks about ways that brands can mitigate these risks, as well as:
“If you don’t get security right, what’s at stake is your company’s brand reputation, the user experience you’re delivering, and revenue. Those three things are central to our ability to succeed as marketers.”
“If the extensions are scraping these codes and sharing them broadly, all the sudden, your control as a brand goes out the window. What you think are going to be limited use codes are not. And worst of all, your affiliate codes are getting out and you’re comping your affiliates on sales they didn’t drive.”
“What’s blowing my mind is how many times merchants said, ‘I didn’t even know that that code existed.’ And I think it’s because they have a lot of different platforms they’re working in that are generating codes.”
“Know your data and watch for irregularities. We should probably be doing that anyway as marketers, but that’s the first thing that’s gonna tip you off if you have a problem.”
Director of Marketing
Content at GRIN
Welcome to the GRIN gets real podcast, the show for people who want to maximize their marketing potential. From influencer marketing to eCommerce strategy and everything in between, each episode will feature industry experts that share their insights and provide actionable tips to help you achieve your marketing goals. Subscribe and stay tuned!
