Category: Affiliate Marketing Tips

At the end of last year, many of us produced content pieces with our 2020 industry predictions. Well, we are over halfway through 2020 and it’s safe to say that no one in the industry, or outside it, could have completely foreseen the events of 2020. Nonetheless, the affiliate channel is adaptable, innovative, and perhaps, most importantly, a channel which delivers ROI. Just like it has done during other times of economic uncertainty, affiliate has the stamina to survive and thrive during this period.

Many of these events have created enormous challenges. And opportunities. It is important that we strive to look for ways to diversify our affiliate programs, especially as consumer behavior changes so quickly.

Luckily, the channel continues to evolve and expand as more brands increase their investments in partnership and affiliate. We have seen a variety of new partner types enter the market and the channel is being recognized as a contributor to multiple stages of the customer journey, not just the moments before a purchase. Here, with contributions from our friends at Silverbean, we look at ways to drive affiliate program growth through diversification.

Expand influencer engagements 

More and more, influencer programs are becoming the responsibility of performance marketing teams. Brands are realising that influencers need to deliver on performance-based metrics such as CPO and CPA as well as the traditional influencer targets such as clicks. Advanced tracking and attribution available today enable better ways to prove influencer program ROI, which is critical for today’s marketers. 

On this topic, Dan Hull Senior Affiliate & Influencer Manager at Silverbean says “Over the past year we have seen the contribution of social commerce, and in particular influencer’s activity within this, play a greater part in the affiliate programs we manage. With all social platforms taking the steps to ensure content can be fully monetised for the creators utilising them, this is something we only see becoming more prevalent.”

“An affiliate program can be an incredibly effective way of cultivating relationships with your brand’s key advocates, inspiring loyalty and – in our experience – greatly increasing the level of organic content brands can receive as a result. Even through the uncertain climate of this year, our client base continues to expand their influencer campaigns; both within their general affiliate strategy and with standalone campaigns.”

Winning SEO with help from affiliate

The partnership channel is in a unique position to leverage other areas of your marketing efforts. A great example is utilising affiliate programs to aid SEO. Through the alignment of keyword search terms, your affiliate traffic can run alongside PPC and SEO initiatives and drive greater results.

“We have seen some real success in driving content partnerships to strategically increase online sales through search,” said Nicholas Yates, Performance Account Director at Silverbean. “By collaborating closely with affiliates, we have seen tremendous results for brands who focus on ranking for key search queries that have high conversion rates or that use content to support search queries further up the user journey.”

Working with affiliate partners alongside in collaboration with other digital channels helps you expand your partner mix and drive sales volume. Together with Silverbean, we saw one brand adopt this strategy and drive upwards of 70% of their affiliate sales through content partners.

App promotion campaigns

Within app marketing, there are two types of campaigns the affiliate channel can look to support – in-app sales and app installs. It’s well known that consumers who purchase through a brand’s app have higher customer LTV and loyalty, so creating programs that commission partners specifically for these actions is a great diversification play.

Brands should work with affiliate solutions that can track in-app conversions accurately and that also integrate with mobile measurement providers that use fingerprinting as a means of tracking app installs. 

Explore brand-to-brand partnerships

Brand-to-brand partnerships are not necessarily new, however automation makes it easier to quantify their impact.. One of the major benefits of brand partnerships is that they allow you to be more creative in your marketing approach. You get to leverage the innovation of two teams to inspire and persuade prospects. You aren’t limited to a short list of traditional affiliate promotional options – instead, the sky’s the limit.

There are multiple ways you can use brand partnerships to meet specific business goals. Whether you are trying to drive increased revenue or attract more or specific kinds of customers and purchases, brand partnerships can be shaped to achieve your objectives. Partnering with a brand that has an aligned audience and fielding a co-promoted consumer experience, can help you both gain brand awareness with each other’s customers AND garner a nice increase in your database of prospects. 

Emerging partner types  

Finding new, perhaps non-traditional, partner types is probably the most obvious and simple route to diversify your affiliate offering. 2020 has been a big year for bringing these new partner classes to the forefront. Earlier this year, for example, we saw a travel brand partner with a digital fintech app as a great way to broaden their existing performance program.

One increasingly popular partnership type is card-linking. Whilst these partners come in different forms, their general premise is that they have agreements with a specific payment card or service provider in order to track consumer purchases. This, in turn, enables brands to offer consumers a discount or loyalty benefit that is automatically applied when they purchase. This is an easy way to target mobile consumers and acquire new customers. 

New partner types are emerging all the time, and platforms and agencies continue to recruit these new types of publishers to programs. Keep an eye out for ones you can team up with to generate results.

Despite recent events, the affiliate channel is set to grow. As we enter a new era of e-commerce, it is crucial for brands to ensure their programs are effective, varied, and innovative. Organisations must work in partnership with agencies and tech providers, who offer unrivalled access to a wealth of knowledge on how best to optimise and diversify programs to exceed KPIs and ensure continued success. 

The post How to Effectively Diversify Your Affiliate Program appeared first on PerformanceIN.

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Firstly, we hope you and the team are keeping well. How are things over at Rakuten Advertising during this time?

Nick Stamos: As a global company, we have worked hard to keep in close contact with all of our employees and learn from our teams around the world. This has been extremely helpful in keeping our staff safe, which is our top priority. We were proactive and sent our staff home in the early stages of coronavirus lockdown. Now, we have extended our work from home policy for most employees until the end of 2020. Our technology roots have allowed us to perform well in this virtual work environment, so we’ve been able to support them in that way too.

Just like every other business, we’ve adapted well to the new workplace, thinking about how to navigate the changing landscape and to pivot to ensure we address the changing needs of our customers. The discussions we had with customers at the start of the year have a different focus now, but we are guiding them through these challenging times. 

The last few weeks has seen the performance marketing industry shift and adapt in response to the Coronavirus pandemic. What are your thoughts on the industry’s response during this period?

NS: The performance ecosystem has done an excellent job of arming clients and publishers with critical consumer insights, strategy and support they need to succeed through this period. Affiliate marketing is uniquely positioned to help brands through these challenging times. As true partners to brands and publishers, we offer diverse traffic and pay-for-performance models, meaning we can reduce the risk for brands and help keep customer engagement high. By doing this, we also aid publishers by helping to create fruitful partnerships.

We’ve seen some notable shifts across our network that we’re constantly working to communicate to clients and provide recommendations on how they can tailor their strategies to meet the environment. For example, the pandemic is impacting markets at different levels of severity and at different times. By better understanding these ebbs and flows, we can gauge audiences’ receptivity for marketing in a way that reflects people’s emotions. While it may still not be the right time to sell hard, it is important to refine market strategies that drive engagement and build brand love. Ultimately, brands that are customer-first in their marketing strategies will come out of this crisis best. By offering valuable experiences, brands can drive future loyalty.

From your perspective, what trends have you noticed in the last few weeks that have affected the channel? (programs, relationships, verticals etc.)

NS: Shoppers are looking to make their money go further. Overall, consumers are regaining a certain level of confidence in spending, but they have also become more selective about what they are buying. Brands should consider partnering with publishers that are able to provide additional incentives to consumers. We’re seeing cashback, loyalty and rewards publishers addressing this need – they are encouraging people to purchase whilst offering value. 

Let’s talk about Rakuten Advertising. Particularly during this time, how has your business adapted to the pandemic and what sort of strategies have you implemented to support your clients?

NS: To say that the environment for our advertisers and publishers has changed in these last few months is an understatement. We’ve sharpened our focus on what we feel is at the core of delivering performance-driven results: leveraging our unique combination of human expertise and proprietary technology, data and inventory. We continue to deliver on the strategy that we set out at the beginning of the year, but we’re looking at it through a different lens. Our clients now have a different consumer landscape to navigate, which is influencing how we do business to best serve our clients and publishers.

We’ve made a point of emphasis of sharing our unique data and insights to help our clients understand consumer behaviour and make strategic, data led decisions on campaign optimisation. We firmly believe brands can use affiliate marketing to communicate messages of care at any time​. For example, brands can partner with publishers to showcase entertaining content that lifts people’s spirits or emotional messages that show the responsibility they are taking. Influencers are helping people find products that will keep them safe. Through authentic partnerships brands can stay front of mind with their customers and publishers can show measurable impact.

With lockdown restrictions easing, what sort of opportunities and expectations can we expect in the coming weeks for the performance marketing industry?

NS: Consumer purchases have changed through the different stages of the pandemic and they will continue to change as we adapt to the new normal. People have become increasingly aware of buying anything deemed ‘non-essential’. In the coming months, affiliate marketing will play an important role for shoppers as they search for ways to reduce the reticence around ‘non-essential’ purchases. 

This will be particularly critical as we approach the final quarter of the year, which is such an important time for clients. Our most recent data shows that while 40% of consumers globally have decreased their household spend due to Covid-19, over 70% of shoppers don’t plan to decrease their spending for 2020 peak shopping days, suggesting that shoppers are positive about Christmas shopping. Even better, 31% are looking to spend more on their immediate family over the winter holidays. 

After a challenging start to 2020, this lack of intent to curb spending during peak shopping periods is good news for brands and retailers. There will be an opportunity to drive revenue success in the second half of the year and into 2021.

Lastly, as we enter the second half of the year, are there any updates from Rakuten Advertising we should keep an eye out for?

NS: Our focus will be continuing to support our clients through the busiest quarter of the year, helping them engage and attract customers. We have stepped up by offering more levels of service, more opportunities to get in front of consumers, more personalised offers and more resources to understand consumer behaviour. To that end, we’ve just released our consumer insight report into peak shopping which includes actionable strategies for brands to employ during this time. 

The post “We’ve sharpened our focus on what we feel is at the core of delivering performance-driven results” — Rakuten Advertising appeared first on PerformanceIN.

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