Kathleen Booth is the Chief Marketing Officer at Clean.io, a digital engagement security platform that helps businesses protect their user experiences, revenues, and brands. Top Rank names her as one of the 50 top B2B marketing influencers of 2019. She’s the host of a long-running The Inbound Success Podcast. Before being with Clean.io, Kathleen was also an agency owner and operator for 11 years.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- [02:16] How Kathleen Booth got into marketing
- [04:39] Kathleen talks about how Clean.io is protecting eCommerce sites
- [8:09] Are coupon extensions profitable for your business?
- [13:46] How and why dynamic coupons do not entirely solve the coupon extension problems
- [16:44] Kathleen shares how to stop coupon extensions on your eCommerce site, maintain a great user experience, and keep high conversion rates
- [23:12] Why coupon extensions are harmful to your business
- [25:32] Who can use Clean.io?
- [27:34] The future of digital engagement security
In this episode…
Many eCommerce brands assume that coupon extensions are great for their sales. Yes, in some respects, they are when you consider the 5% bump in the beginning. But where it gets dicey is when retailers then partner with coupon extensions and pay them for the sales they think the extensions are generating.
However, new data shows that coupon extensions don’t affect purchase behavior at checkout in many cases. How so? And how can you control coupon extension use on your eCommerce site without impacting the user experience and still retain high conversion rates?
On this episode of the eCommerce Profits Podcast, Joshua Chin talks with the Chief Marketing Officer at Clean.io, Kathleen Booth. They discuss how Clean.io is taking digital engagement security to the next level, giving granular site control to eCommerce brands and protecting their business from the threats posed by coupon extensions. You don’t want to miss a second of this short but packed interview.
Resources Mentioned in this episode
- Joshua Chin on LinkedIn
- Chronos Agency
- Clean.io
- The Inbound Success Podcast
- Kathleen Booth on LinkedIn
Sponsor for this episode
This episode is brought to you by Chronos Agency.
If you are a direct-to-consumer ecommerce brand that wants to unlock the optimum customer lifetime value through email marketing, then look no further than Chronos Agency!
Our team of passionate email marketing experts has helped hundreds of brands generate over $70 million in return from email alone, and our clients receive an average of 3500% ROI from our efforts.
Chronos Agency has worked with a variety of brands, including Truly Beauty, Alya Skin, and many more. Our mission is to help real businesses achieve real results.
If you want to take your revenue to the next level using email marketing, be sure to email our team at sales@chronos.agency or visit chronos.agency to learn more.
Episode Transcript
Intro 0:04
Welcome to the eCommerce Profits Podcast where we feature top founders and experts in the e commerce industry and take an in depth look at the struggles and successes in growing ecommerce brands profitably.
Joshua Chin 0:21
All right Josh Chin here, I’m the host of the eCommerce Profits Podcast where we feature top experts in the e commerce industry. And we go behind the scenes of the struggles and successes in growing a brand. Now this episode is brought to you by Chronos Agency, if you run a direct to consumer ecom brand that is ready to scale and to double your customer lifetime value, true lifecycle and retention marketing, Chronos is your company. Now we’ve helped hundreds of brands scale profits with email, SMS, and mobile push marketing, while getting an average of 3500% ROI from our efforts, with worked with brands like Truly Beauty, the Oodi, Alias Skin, and many more. Now the next step is to email us at Sales@Chronos.agency or you can go to Chronos.Agency to learn more. Today’s guest is Kathleen Booth. She’s the Chief Marketing Officer at Clean.io, a digital engagement security platform that helps businesses protect their user experience, revenue, and brands. She’s also one of the 50, top b2b marketing influencers of 2019, as named by Top Rank. She’s also the host of a long running Inbound Success Podcast. Before before being a part of Clean.io, Kathleen is also an agency owner and operator for 11 years. I personally think That’s incredible. Kathleen, welcome to the show.
Kathleen Booth 1:53
Thanks so much, Joshua. That was such a lovely introduction. I really appreciate it.
Joshua Chin 1:59
It’s a It’s a pleasure to have you on and tell tell us a little bit more about your background. And we’ve been talking a little bit before we click on hit on record. You were traveling the world, advising countries and different organizations. What do you do before marketing.
Kathleen Booth 2:18
So I have a very non traditional career path for a marketer. I did do an MBA in marketing. But I also did a master’s in international politics. And so I sort of had these two directions I could go in my career. And I spent the first 10 years out of school, working in the field of public private partnerships, specifically water utility, privatization. And so I spent a decade working with organizations like the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank on how to introduce private management for public water systems. And that actually led me back into marketing. Because halfway through that time, I realized that a lot of these big projects, which were very needed, because I tended to work in places where nobody had good water, a lot of these projects were getting derailed because of very poor communication on the part of the government. And so people wouldn’t understand the the the intent, you know, a lot of organizations would oppose the involvement of private companies, and the projects would fall apart. And as a result, nothing would happen and the water systems wouldn’t get fixed. And so about halfway through my career, I actually used what I learned in my MBA in marketing, and started working and training governments and multilateral development bank’s on how to do what at the time, we were calling stakeholder consensus building, but it was really just sort of like a specialized form of marketing or strategic communications. And so then when I got married and decided to have kids and couldn’t travel the world anymore, I came back to my marketing roots and started an agency. And that was a great kind of transition back into it.
Joshua Chin 3:49
And you’ve done it for 11 years.
Kathleen Booth 3:52
I did it for 11 years. And then I sold the business in 2017, to a friendly competitor. Yeah. And he worked there for a couple years, and then kind of left and pursued what I had always wanted to do, which was going in house as head of marketing for early stage VC backed technology companies. And so that’s what I’ve been doing ever since. But I’ve spent my career marketing to marketers, and so I love speaking to ecommerce marketers and ecommerce business owners, and I’m really excited to be here.
Joshua Chin 4:23
That’s awesome. And tell us a little bit more more about Clean.io. We talked a little bit about coupon extensions and how, what is what it’s all about and how it may not be as good as most people think. Like for merchants.
Kathleen Booth 4:39
Yeah, so Clean.io is we call it a digital engagement security platform. And really what that means is, is the world as we all know, you know your listeners are in e commerce, the world has shifted to a very digital first model, especially in the last year with COVID. I think that’s sped it all up so much and What used to be interactions with customers and buyers in stores or in offices has been, you know, replaced with interactions with customers on our websites. And as marketers, we were always taught that we own our website, right, like, we don’t own our Facebook page or Twitter account, they can change the rules of the game. But we’ve always been told we own our website. And my mind was kind of blown when I came to this company, because I realized it’s really not true, we do own a lot of what happens on that website. But because of the nature of the way websites are built, because of the way the modern internet functions, there’s a lot of third party code that operates on our sites that we don’t have control over. And some of that code, we allow it in the form of the CMS, we might choose to build our website on or the plugins we put on it or the scripts, things like Google Analytics that we had. But some of it, we don’t allow it. And that’s, that’s really where we come in. And we have two products, one has to do with controlling the risks inherent in the code that is introduced through programmatic advertising. That’s our product clean ad. And then the other is the one that is really more relating to e commerce called clean cart, which has to do with the risks associated with third party browser extensions. And so this is actually really interesting. I never knew this. And I used to work as a marketer in cybersecurity. But when you are a user, and you put a browser extension, like in your Chrome browser, or Safari or whatever browser you’re using, because that’s added by the user, the it has an elevated level of permission to run script on the websites that you as a user visit. And so except the example you mentioned, if coupon extensions as an e commerce business, you build your website, again, you think you own it, and you can control the user experience. But what happens is, the user comes to your site, and they happen to have a coupon extension, the two most common being funny and Capital One shopping. Those extensions, because they live in the user’s browser are have permission, essentially, to execute code on your website. And they do it by injecting auto injecting coupon codes at checkout. So there, they are putting code into your checkout experience, and testing to see which coupon code will have the biggest discount in order to save the user money. So that’s where we come in as we help ecommerce brands control that by preventing the auto injection not stopping people from entering coupon codes, but stopping what I like to say, are robots, putting coupon codes into your website?
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