Affiliate marketing is attaining more volume than ever. Affiliate expenditure will reach over $ 6.8 billion by 2020, up from $ 4.78 billion in 2016, according to CJ Affiliates. It is due to numerous causes, including the rising number of people who rely on publishers and influencers to test their shopping habits.
Affiliates and influencers have built the trust of their audience. It leads to attracting not only quality users but also advertisers. Overall, in the past two years alone, we’ve seen an increase in affiliate networks’ participation in content delivery by 175% and revenue from publishers increasing by 240%.
From an advertiser’s perspective, if you don’t use affiliates in your marketing mix, you could lose quality traffic and scalability. Here are my seven best practices for scaling down your affiliate marketing program.
For advertisers, if you are not consuming affiliates in your marketing mix, you might be missing out on quality traffic and scale. Here are 7 Best Practices for scaling an affiliate marketing program.
1. Comprehend your objectives.
One of the foremost reasons affiliate marketing drives so well is because it is performance-based. You can pay off your strategic KPI (key performance indicator) and start with minimal investment. Don’t be anxious to start with a lower CPA than you might otherwise think. It is easier to start small and then gradually upsurge through incentives. Just make sure you have a clear understanding of your LTV (loan to value ratio) and retention metrics once your affiliate partners can prove that they can provide quality users, upturn payouts, and scale from them.
2. Hire the right affiliates.
Recruiting is one of the greatest challenges and time-consuming aspects of developing an affiliate program. If you don’t recruit consistently, you lose a lot of traffic. While it takes a long time, here are some simple tips to get you started:
- Google Alert. Set up Google alerts for brands similar to yours. Find out which blogs are generating content for them and contact them.
- SERP: Use SERP results. Enter various keywords related to your brand to classify potential partners.
- Affiliate Programs: Use the Affiliate Program to identify affiliates in your ecosystem.
- Recruitment Schedule – Inaugurate a recruiting schedule. Ultimately, you’re showing affiliates the value you can provide them. Sending an email won’t work, so feel free to refer to it multiple times. In the email, talk about your brand; explain your offer and how you can help them earn extra money.
3. Communicate often.
Finding and accepting affiliates will only help you partially. You will have to communicate constantly with your affiliates to keep your brand in the spotlight. Communicate on the launch of new products, when a new creative product is presented, and share customary best practices for promoting your brand. Weekly newsletters are ideal, but only once a month.
4. Give direction.
Guide your partners on how to communicate your brand and values in the best possible way. It can be a media kit or a branded book. Some affiliates may possibly not exactly know how to position your brand, so it is always better to give as much information as you can. Give them as many directions as possible to point them on the right track.
5. Help encourage your affiliates depending on segments.
Do not be reluctant to incentivize your partners. You can do this in a variety of ways, but ultimately define your goals to understand what makes more sense for your business.
- New affiliates. If the new affiliate has not posted yet, give an additional bonus to begin creating content.
- Silent affiliates. Do you have affiliates who previously created content but stopped working? If so, to have them posting again, reach out with a small incentive.
- Performance-based. Continuously review your affiliates performance. Ideally, you will pay based on your main KPI but look at LTV. If some partners provide higher quality users with higher LTV, make sure to reach out and offer a promotion or higher payout for the extra volume.
- Measure the additional impact. Measure the effect it has on the increased number or quality of users for each incentive bonus to make sure each additional dollar meets your goals.
6. Update your ad creative.
The creativity you provide to affiliates should preferably be analogous to the one you use for your performance-based channels. Does your ad creative communicate the significance of your app? Does it even include a CTA? Make sure you provide your affiliates with innovative direct response ad creative.
7. Maintain visibility.
As with digital technology, it tracks and analyzes everything. Ensure you’re getting the right metrics for your data, so you know which ads, partners, and content are performing best. If partners don’t want to share this information, think again if you should work with them or not.
What tools can you use to scale up your affiliate marketing?
Now, to truly scale up your affiliate marketing business, you should consider creating an affiliate marketing toolkit. Let’s have a look at the best tools available for affiliate marketers.
1. AdPlexity (Ad Spy Tool).
This tool is best suited for: Developing an advertising campaign strategy.
Description: AdPlexity is a data-driven tool that enables users to gain insight into what commercials are effectively run by their competitors.
This spy tool will save you a lot of research time and money by delivering complete data on profitable mobile and desktop advertising campaigns.
Using AdPlexity, you will gain insight into what types of ads are suitable for certain keywords, advertisers, and even affiliate networks.
As a beginner to affiliate marketing, this tool may require some training. You will have a huge amount of data to work with to develop a unique strategy.
To get ideas for your own unique approach, you will get insight into what the most successful and effective affiliates are doing with this tool’s help.
2. SimilarWeb (Competitor Research).
This tool is best suited for: Conducting competitive research.
Description: Similarweb.com helps you to understand better the analytics of competitors and their online marketing strategy. With this tool, you will get an overview of the referral traffic of your competitor, as well as the sources that they send traffic to.
You may also use this tool to your benefit as an affiliate marketer.
The search solution allows you to better understand your competitors and target audience by observing which media channels they use the most.
Comprehensive audience demographics give users a clear idea of who is engaging with their content.
With SimilarWeb, you can compare your websites directly to your competitors. It allows you to identify gaps and create more effective strategies for your audience.
3. SERanking (Website Audits).
This tool is best suited for the following purposes: SERanking is great for checking websites for improving overall functionality.
Description: SERanking is a complete SEO solution, but we think this tool is really good for site auditing. If you are unaware of what side audit term is, let us explain.
To find possible problems that might inhibit your progress, a site audit is simply a complete scan of your website.
For an affiliate marketer, using a site audit tool is an extremely effective way to spot problems on your site and address them directly.
This site audit tool will help in identifying faulty images, slow loading speeds, technical errors, number of internal links on the site, and missing Meta tags.
4. Mailchimp (Email Marketing).
This tool is best suited for the following purposes: You can use Mailchimp to create email marketing campaigns and increase conversions.
Description: Mailchimp is a reliable email marketing service that allows you to create effective email marketing campaigns.
As an affiliate marketer, you should get started right away if you are not using email marketing.
It is one of the best ways to build your relationship with your audience, generating quality leads, and making more conversions.
Mailchimp is amazing if you are new to email marketing. This service provides useful email templates, personalized domains, and A/B testing.
5. Hunter.io (Email Finder).
This tool is best suited for the following purposes: You can use this tool for finding email addresses behind the websites.
Description: This is perhaps the most distinctive tool on this list. Hunter provides a tool that helps you keep track of the email addresses behind websites, businesses, and professionals.
You may question yourself, why is it so important for affiliate marketing? Well, the ability to communicate effectively with people has many benefits. This tool can link to relevant websites for guest posts, collaborations, and expert reviews.
This type of content not only escalates your reach to your audience but also gives you the opportunity to get more backlinks.
All you need to do is type your domain name for using this tool, and it will provide you a list of results.
These were all the tips and tools for scaling with affiliate marketing. Hopefully, these tips will help you grow your affiliate business.
