Tips & Guides — 18 May 2023
Which is the best partner marketing platform?
Partner marketing is proving to be a profitable channel to significantly increase business growth with less risk than other marketing strategies. For 20% of brands and digital marketers, it is one of the essential customer acquisition channels. In addition, 59% of brands and marketing agencies already use influencers as partners in their marketing strategies.
Brands that nail partner marketing
See now →Creating a partner program is the first action if your brand wants to take a share of this field. A good set of tactics helps, but an accurate partner marketing tool is crucial for streamlining the process. Having the right platform saves time, gives access to precise statistics, allows you to discover and build long-term relationships, and enables business growth. So, if you are looking for the best partner marketing software for your brand, let’s start by analyzing the solutions.
A Beginner's Guide to the Types of Partner Marketing
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At first glance, the leading platforms for partner marketing may seem quite similar. With a simplified and objective approach, we will learn about each platform and what to look for when choosing one.
This article considers points such as partner discovery, tracking and attribution, integration opportunities, strengths, and so on. The idea is that even those starting a partner marketing from scratch will find a solution that best suits their goals. Below, you’ll see a little more about each platform.
How to Calculate Affiliate Marketing Commissions?
Learn now →Affise Reach is a newly launched software that offers the key features required for a modern and complete ready-made platform. It is designed to manage, optimize and scale campaigns efficiently. Brands and marketers can target partners directly with the help of the platform. Another benefit is that you can rely on Affise Reach’s detailed multichannel analytics to make accurate decisions and identify when to set up lower commissions for selected partners or campaigns.
Brands of any size can achieve revenue growth through partner marketing and start campaigns with more flexibility, less cost, and better results. Creating a partner program on Affise Reach is easy, as you can smoothly discover and direct contact using a unique “Partner Discovery” feature. Moreover, brands can go beyond and start building long-term relationships and partnerships without a third party.
Undoubtedly, any partnership program relies on trustworthy and committed partners. Therefore, a complete platform also provides features for partners and makes them feel comfortable using it. In Reach, brands can offer well-designed onboarding, while partners can access a dashboard and track their performance and follow the status of their payments.
Pricing: Sign up for the Starter Plan of Affise Reach for $500. If you want to scale your business, consider the Growth Plan for $800. The custom version costs $1500. Talk with an expert to know how to start now.
Is Affise Reach an Affiliate Network?
Learn now →Impact Partnership Cloud is cloud software for managing the lifecycle of any partnership, be it with affiliates, ambassadors, and others. The tool has features for discovering, onboarding, optimizing, and protecting your partnerships. One of the examples of the software features is the “Enhanced Discovery,” which allows brands to browse and examine critical elements like channel, geography, and audience demographics.
Another feature available on the tool that enables partner discovery is the “Curated lists,” which suggest partner categories, like “Our Favorite Fitness Influencers.” Brands can also search by enhanced data points like Engagement Rate. However, it doesn’t specify if brands or marketers can directly contact partners by messaging them.
The tool has advanced reporting to drive business decisions. It includes accurately tracking partners across web and app properties and attribute performance. The platform is based on the cloud, like SaaS or web, and integrated with various third-party applications. Additionally, it allows brands to pay their partners at any point of the campaign step, and one of its principal strengths is to automate partnerships.
Pricing: you can start to use the platform with a free trial version. Plans are customized, and you need to contact the sales team platform for more details.
PartnerStack is designed for partner marketing and scaling. Perhaps, the thing that makes PartnerStack stand out among the other biggest players in the industry is a focus on the partners. The primary platform features are based on that. PartnerStack has resources such as the “Learning Management System” where brands and marketers can provide training content to their partners to help them drive revenue growth.
Through the “Partner Portal Revamp” available in the tool, each partner can access their dashboard, see their performance, access resources as training material, get payments, and discover new partner programs or offers made by brands. However, notification settings are limited. Also, the platform has another feature called “Co-Marketing Suite,” where brands can automate the creation of co-marketing materials and help their partners to sell better.
The tool has attribution for links, leads, deals, and in-depth content, business owners or digital marketing can track any opportunities being sent by partners in three different modules:
On PartnerStack, partners will discover and decide which brands they want to promote. Still, brands can use the tool to onboard, manage, train, enable, support, and pay their partners.
Pricing: not available as a trial. PartnerStack pricing starts at $500 per month for businesses. The following plans are customizable; you’ll need to contact the sales representative to find the value.
Everflow enables businesses or digital marketers to manage different types of partnerships, such as with influencers, and make media buys. Using this software, brands can have an entire view of their partners smoothly by tracking their channels accurately.
The platform tracks direct links, QR codes, coupon codes, and more. Every time a partner accomplishes the desired action, the brand can easily determine where this action came from. Everflow integrates with major eCommerce platforms such as Shopify, BigCommerce, Salesforce, and HubSpot. However, this platform’s other features, such as user interface or discovering and searching for new partners, are not as advanced as their tracking system.
Pricing: The trial version is available. Everflow’s prices start at $750 for the Starter plan and can go up to $1,995 for the Plus plan.
Originally, TUNE was a software solution for measuring mobile app campaign performance. The company expanded over time and now focuses on marketing partnerships, with native post-back capabilities and automated partner marketing software tools that help businesses to streamline campaigns.
One of the platform’s strengths is handling and supporting all kinds of partnerships: content publishers, influencers, loyalty and coupon sites, media buyers, performance display and cart abandonment partners, mobile apps, and others. Brands can search or browse through their curated, vetted collection of quality affiliates, publishers, and networks available on the platform and connect with these partners.
Among their integrations named “Technology Partners”, TUNE has one that is called “Publisher Discovery”, where marketers and business owners can get an analysis of five brands’ competitors’ affiliate programs, a global view of their market vertical, a Chrome extension to find affiliates in Google search, and finally, affiliates to recruit partners globally. “Publisher Discovery ” is a resource available for TUNE Scaler or superior.
The platform can be used on desktops, mobile devices, and apps. It has automated performance tools such as server postback tracking without cookies. However, TUNE users often point out a problem: marketers and businesses have to pay for clicks, once the limit is set by each plan, while most competitors don’t charge for them. Another issue is that it is not an intuitive and self-guided tool, which means that there can be a long learning curve for beginners.
Pricing: It is possible to request a free trial period. The first plan option, Bootstrap, costs $599. However, it doesn’t have all the features included. Scale plans cost approximately $1.500, and you can ask for a custom plan.
A user-friendly and intuitive interface makes you feel comfortable managing your campaigns. It would be best if you had a dashboard that offers all the relevant information and the general data of your campaign. All the platforms mentioned above have an exemplary user interface; however, depending on your needs, some can be easier to customize than others.
The software should be able to offer integration with eCommerce platforms and other solutions. So, before choosing a platform, you should check if there is a way to configure the applications you already use or if it is possible to customize the integration.
All of the alternatives above offer integrations, but it’s crucial to check each platform’s website to see if the tool you use in your eCommerce is compatible. In this case, an open API and a supportive customer success team are essential to making an integration smooth.
Either platform you choose needs to be able to track clicks and conversions in real-time, capturing every touchpoint of the customer journey and providing insights for data-driven decisions. This allows you to understand how your campaigns are performing and which ones need improvement.
Platforms that offer reports are also very helpful, as an overview helps to plan better. Another important point is the possibility of tracking your partners’ performance to know which of them are exceeding expectations.
Whether you’re a beginner or an expert in the field, doubts or questions can likely arise. Ideally, the best partner marketing platform should offer support at any time. Evenflow, TUNE, and Affise Reach are the options that provide 24/7 chat. Besides, Reach offers multilingual customer support, included in the Scale plan.
The costs to manage your partner program should be taken into consideration. However, you need to think about pricing strategically and take into account each platform’s overall offering. Before choosing, understand whether the platform will meet your needs in the long run:
Note that most platforms offer customized plans, and to get the most out of them, you need to know in-depth about the features you need.
| Interface | Integrations | Reporting | Customer Support | Competitive Price | |
| Affise Rech | ✔ | ✔* | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Impact | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ||
| PartnerStack | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ||
| Everflow | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | |
| TUNE | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
* Integrations will be added to Affise Reach soon.
The platforms presented above aim to make partner marketing more accessible and easier for the parties involved – brands, publishers, and partners. However, the ideal platform for each company depends on the needs of each brand.
Generally, all the platforms have integration, tracking, reporting, fraud protection, and commission payments, among other features, as the core. So, the question is how good or advanced their features are and whether they suit your business model. With the right platform, a brand of any size can take advantage of partner marketing and grow more efficiently in its niche with the help of partners worldwide.
Allowing businesses and marketers to build relationships with their most engaged partners is one way to drive revenue growth significantly, and Reach enables brands to do so. This end-to-end solution helps brands looking to boost their business through partner marketing and has the right features to discover, contact, and keep in touch with their partners.
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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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