Tips & Guides — 09 May 2023
Automated Affiliate Marketing Strategies
Businesses are increasingly turning to AI and RPA (robotic process automation) marketing tools to streamline their workflows, take over repetitive tasks, and boost efficiency, productivity, and campaign effectiveness. You need only browse Amazon or Shopify for a few minutes to see how much automation is used in modern-day business.
With the ever-increasing use of automation, where does it find its place in your performance marketing strategy? What sort of automation should you consider, and where will it fit within your affiliate network? Being aware of the advantages it offers can help you make an informed decision.
Performance marketing automation encompasses a range of tech and automation tools that can carry out tasks, especially repetitive ones, with minimal human input so that your marketing team can focus on creating value and boosting affiliate sales.
These help you track and manage your own affiliate program, monitoring your results in real-time and equipping you with complete control over your campaigns. This enables you to match highly converted offers with the suitable audience, run campaigns at the most beneficial times, and avoid broken links and fraudsters. It also allows affiliates with limited tech knowledge, such as bloggers and influencers, to operate efficiently.
There are a few primary aims when integrating automation into your affiliate marketing strategy:
Depending on the size of your affiliate programs, there is a lot to take in. You may have multiple campaigns running and aim to assess the effectiveness and success of these simultaneously- by monitoring referral programs, link tracking, and analyzing metrics and KPIs.
By automating many of your affiliate program processes, you can collect all relevant data in real-time so you can make informed changes to your campaigns when needed or link to relevant affiliate offers. Brands can provide training and support via automated systems and even automate any part of the payments and payouts processes.
As you’ll already be beginning to realize, there are loads of potential advantages to automating affiliate marketing. Here are just a selection of the most notable ones:
It can improve the quality of data analysis, the effectiveness of campaigns (by determining the effectiveness of content—do webinars, infographics, FAQ lists, templates, or case studies resonate well with your audiences, for example?), and the success of mobile advertising.
When customers visit an online store or a specific landing page, they may often have similar queries or want more information than provided in the product description. Their question may even be related to other aspects of the sale, such as shipping times. The problem is, for whatever reason, you may not have human staff available to answer those questions.
This is why chatbots are one of the fastest-growing automated tools in eСommerce and affiliate programs. You can integrate pop-up chatbots into any part of your website or even into social media platforms. In fact, the use of chatbots has grown 92% since 2019 and continues to grow.
For affiliate marketers, pop-up chatbots can be a great tool. They can offer your customers more basic support and info while freeing up staff to solve more complex, unique issues. They can also boost your lead generation by collecting pertinent info from your customers or supplying affiliate links to relevant queries. You can also utilize them to provide information to potential new affiliate partners.
Smartlinks, also known as AI Smartlinks, is a powerful monetization tool that allows affiliates you work with to get only one link for all offers. Smartlinks works by using a ML algorithm that decides which offer is shown for each specific user. The algorithm takes data about a user, and analyzes all the information received in order to send visitors to an offer that is most likely to be converted.
There are many benefits to using Smartlinks, for both affiliates and merchants or program managers. First and foremost it’s both time and cost-efficient. Affiliates don’t have to spend an age searching for or testing offers. Those routine, manual tasks get handled, freeing up affiliates to focus on more important, complex tasks.
In practice, that means affiliates can send traffic to a single tracking URL, and let Smartlinks detect the offer with the right EPC potential. That helps improve conversion rates (CR) as well as EPC and makes a major impact.
One of the major issues in affiliate marketing is expired or broken links, as they lead to traffic and revenue losses. Apart from it, URLs should be short and easy-to-remember, as potential customers do not always click the affiliate link the moment they see it. With automated link shorteners, such as Affise ShortLink feature, you can transform lengthy URLs into concise ones in a single click.
As well as shortening your links, Affise makes it easy to check and eliminate any broken or out-of-date links. Affise offers both manual and automatic checking so you can stop losing money on any broken links, check all your current offers, and get insights and analytics on redirects so you can see which campaigns are your most profitable.
Another major issue that has accompanied the growth of online business is the growth in various types of fraud.
In affiliate programs, there are many other types of fraudulent behavior, including:
With fraud becoming more and more of a challenge, marketers can’t fully protect their campaigns with rules-based fraud prevention methodologies. Thus AI also steps in here. Under the AI-driven fraud prevention methods, dozens of campaign metrics and connections between them are analyzed by machine learning algorithms. Hence the decision to stop specific traffic comes from the machine learning algorithm, which in turn, ensures a high level of fraud detection accuracy.
Affise values the security of its clients and partners. For that reason, it has in place many robust fraud prevention techniques. These include careful verification of new affiliates, ban of suspicious IP addresses, in-house click-level fraud prevention, conversion rate optimization, minimum time to conversion reports, etc.
Affiliate management software means you can easily carry out affiliate tracking. No matter how many programs you are partnered with. It helps to measure the total traffic and related revenues generated by each program you are a part of.
No matter the type of products involved, from SaaS to clothing, good management software gives you the ideal overview of performance.
Depending on your business model, you want your software to do some of the following tasks:
Fortunately you can access all of that, along with any other programs and automation tools you need from Affise’s single dashboard, to entirely streamline your affiliate marketing program.
With simple user management and helpful tutorials, you can assign different roles or admins for each affiliate partnership.
Affise harnesses the power of automated performance marketing. The ultimate aim of anyone involved in affiliate programs is to optimize performance, functionality, and revenue across all their digital marketing efforts.
Affise also recognizes that this is an area where innovation is an ongoing and ever-evolving process, so they keep up to date with new developments to integrate into their platform.
Automation is one of the critical factors when it comes to affiliate success. It means you can be involved in more programs and see a more significant revenue stream.
Both the use and complexity of automated processes will continue to grow. Good partnerships between brands and agencies, as well as affiliates, are the foundation for good profits to be built on.
Effective affiliate marketing campaigns driven by automation can boost conversions and affiliate commissions. The key automation areas we’ve discussed — chatbots, Smartlinks, fraud prevention, and link checking and shortening — are just the principal places where automation can boost your affiliate marketing.
To stay in step with the affiliate industry and take advantage of all the cutting-edge tools AI has to offer, consider adopting Affise as your all-in-one platform.
Written by
Affise Academy
Affise is a partner marketing platform for brands, advertisers and agencies to scale via all possible performance marketing channels. Synergy of technology and our long standing experience lets you expand your partnerships, automate every step of the campaign lifecycle and make data-driven decisions.
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