If you are looking to take a fresh approach to your marketing or affiliate program, we are delighted to bring you our new series, Unlocking Growth. It’s all about ways brands can unlock areas of growth through partnership. At Partnerize, we are in the business of growth. It’s what we do best. Time and again we have helped leading brands drive revenue and uncover great new business opportunities to innovations in partnership.
For brands that currently aren’t fielding affiliate programs, we work with you demonstrate the value this channel can deliver.
There are lots of opportunities to leverage in the months ahead, and with a combination of great strategy and technology, you can be very successful. In that spirit, please read on.
When it comes to managing partnerships, there’s an ongoing debate around which is the better approach: relying on affiliate networks or managing via technology platforms.
Managing your partnerships through technology can open a lot of doors. You gain access to a much wider variety of tools and capabilities, start to really use your data, identify new opportunities via a richer understanding of our customers and partners, and take greater control of your customer experience. You can also integrate partner management and data with other technologies like your mobile measurement platform or influencer platform to enhance your insights and capabilities. Collectively these all add up to more ownership of the channel and more opportunities for growth.
We put together this eGuide to showcase five key ways you can use technology to unlock growth for your affiliate marketing program. We hope it helps you find new ways to increase growth.
Leverage the Power of Automation In Your Affiliate Program
If you want to unlock growth, you need to be able to invest time and resources into developing new growth opportunities. Whilst this may sound simple, many affiliate marketers spend so much time doing manual tasks that there isn’t time left in the week for real strategy.
Enter technology. One of the core benefits of using a platform to manage your partnerships is that it takes care of a lot of the manual tasks for you, far more efficiently. Manual validations become automated, checking over conversions to detect fraud becomes AI-powered, and reporting on performance and devising optimization is made simpler and faster.
All these automations can save you significant time. It means employees can stop cutting and pasting into Excel and instead, connect with partners to identify and deploy new growth initiatives.
Use Data To Plan Your Affiliate Program’s Strategy
Many affiliate marketers tell us that they have only limited access to the marketing data they need to better understand programs and devise new growth strategies. Historically, affiliate networks have acted as service providers, providing little more than basic reporting to clients. While there have been some improvements in this area, many still have data limits that can hinder your insight. For example, many networks have a set number of data parameters you can use – some as low as five – and this makes it quite difficult to use that data to drive growth.
With a technology platform like Partnerize, you can pass back an unlimited number of data parameters that you can use not just for reporting, but for commissioning too. With all those additional data points and a flexible commissioning tool, your options for commissioning are virtually limitless. Additionally, access to more and more timely data can help:
- Understand what shoppers are buying so you can deliver better offers and creative
- Analyze the mix of new and repeat customers so you can align your affiliate programs to your KPIs
- Understand and commission on the margins of what is sold so that you can drive profitability
- Learn which messages and offers really work best and optimize
- Unlock data to help make better decisions and drive the right growth
Leverage Your Affiliate Software To Prevent Fraudulent Activity
There is the potential for fraud and non-compliance across every step of managing your program. Working with the best technology is a great way to thwart efforts of bad actors.
Safely Onboard New Partners
Setup a thorough sign-up process that allows you to check the viability of partners before they’re onboarded to your program.
Identify Fraud
If something doesn’t look right, you can utilize fraud tools within your platform to alert you as soon as something is wrong. This can also help you identify potential fraud risks before the activity even happens.
Drive Partner Compliance
Once your partners are signed up, you can integrate other technologies, like monitoring and compliance platforms, to ensure partners stick to your terms and conditions, particularly when it comes to brand-bidding and compliance. On top of this, you’ll be able to monitor their activity and receive automatic alerts if they break these conditions.
Ensure Transparency
If you’re still working with sub-networks or affiliate networks, you can track these as a partner within your technology to provide added program transparency.
Use AI To Find New Affiliate Publishers and Partners
Whether you’re working with an affiliate network or a technology, adding new partners to your affiliate program is always a priority and something you can very easily do, if you have access to a partner discovery tool. However, all partnerships are not the same. Some will fit your brand and target audience and reach a critical mass of prospects. Others won’t be as effective at building your business. The key is to find the best partners so you can focus your time and energy on those.
One of the key benefits of working with Partnerize is that you can make decisions on recruiting new partners based on empirical data on brand fit and scalability. Our platform leverages AI and machine learning to examine tens of thousands of potential partners and filter them to recommend the best and most scalable options.
Use Your Affiliate Management Software To Update Your Measurement Approach
In recent years, changing browser policies have caused quite the headache for affiliate marketers. But that doesn’t have to be the case.
While you may currently be using a cookie-based tracking approach, a technology platform can give you a more future-proofed solution to ensure you stay compliant but also ahead of the curve when it comes to browser policies and tracking. Partnerships rely on ensuring that your partners are compensated for every transaction they drive. If you miss conversions because of incomplete web, mobile, or app tracking, you limit the success of your affiliate programs.
With Partnerize, there are multiple offerings to help you stay ahead of that curve. Whether you still want to use cookies but only from a first-party perspective, or you want to completely move forward with a server-to-server approach, your technology can support.
Conclusion
These are only some of the benefits of working with a technology platform and there are many more avenues you can explore to help you unlock true partnership growth. If you want to transform your affiliate program, truly take ownership of its results, and drive unprecedented growth, then now is the time to act.
As a first step, use this eGuide to conduct a review of your program and identify where the gaps are. If you’re seeing too many, it’s definitely time to evaluate your options. We hope you’ve found this eGuide useful and have some helpful tips and strategies to unlock your partnership growth potential.
We welcome comments on our content. Please reach out to info@partnerize.com with your thoughts and ideas.
