AFFILIATE MARKETING
How Brands Can Use Affiliate Marketing to Increase Their Marketing ROI
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Getting a strong return on a marketing investment: It keeps a lot of people up at night. How will the money spent on that PR firm translate into sales dollars? How will that huge advertising campaign that cost a million dollars impact your brand? For most marketing initiatives, determining ROI is an unpredictable waiting game with no guaranteed outcome.
There’s one marketing model that plays by a different set of rules, however — rules based on paying for performance after results have been driven. Affiliate marketing, once viewed as a shot in the dark, is driven today by sophisticated technology, transparency between partners and compensation tied to specific, measurable results.
Related: How This Affiliate Marketer Learned Enough About His Craft to Strike Out on His Own
That said, a successful affiliate program requires the right experience and partners. Whether you’re looking to start an affiliate program or take an existing program to the next level, you need a strong team behind you. Here are the five players you need to ensure you’re driving the affiliate ROI you want:
1. An Agency
Unless your company has the resources and bandwidth to build a team of several people with extensive affiliate marketing knowledge and experience, hiring an agency is the best option. Agency marketers are experienced at handling the multifaceted complexities that come with building and growing a high-performing program.
Make sure you’re clearly looking at the agency’s setup, ensuring it’s based on performance. I once saw a speech by Robert Glazer, the CEO of Acceleration Partners, a global affiliate marketing company. He wrote a book called “Performance Partnerships,” which focused on aligning any affiliate program with performance. It’s easy to fall for the trap of working with a company that says it will bring you sales, but make sure it puts its money where its mouth is. If it doesn’t deliver in the short term, chances are high it might not be able to meet long-term expectations.
2. A Scalable Network or Platform
Whether it’s an affiliate network or SaaS platform, all affiliate marketing programs need a technology platform to run on. Your platform should be able to support your growth plans and offer you the right features and geographical coverage, particularly if yours is a global brand.
Awin is an example of this type of platform. The firm provides technology that helps address industry challenges, such as third-party tracking, data light tracking, attribution and advanced commissioning. These types of data weren’t available years ago, but with new tech advances, you can identify what works, as well as when and why. It’s not just valuable for the affiliate program, but for also learning what works so you can apply that knowledge to different sales channels.
3. Loyalty Partners
If you want to scale your program quickly, you’ll need to partner with players who are focused on establishing loyal customers. Ebates is one of the bigger players in the loyalty sector operating on a performance basis. The brand is actively expanding its markets and its categories beyond retail to include travel, dining and ride-sharing for cash-back rewards.
It’s important to determine whether these types of partners will truly create loyalty or attract the wrong types of customers. If you pick the right type of loyalty partner, it can result in the strong, loyal customer base that’s key to long-term brand survival.
Related: How Loyalty Programs Are Emerging as Effective Marketing Tools
4. Mobile Partners
Customers are increasingly spending time on mobile devices and apps, so it’s imperative to have partners within your affiliate program who dominate the mobile ecosystem.
Ibotta is an example of one of these apps in the U.S., connecting consumers with grocery, retail and lifestyle brands and rewarding them with cash for buying things they need. I used the app pretty easily when I was standing in line with customer service after a purchase. I simply took a picture of the receipt, and the app applied the cash back to my account. With a lot of mobile user growth, it’s good to look at partners who have developed a mobile user experience that makes things easy and accessible for the customer.
5. Tech-Driven Publishers
The affiliate space has grown well beyond coupon and deal partners. To drive incremental revenue on a performance basis within your program, consider partnering with publishers who are advanced in e-commerce technology, including deep website integration and artificial intelligence.
RevLifter is one example: The company helps brands deliver more conversions, incremental sales and customers by personalizing deals for advertisers across marketing channels. Available worldwide on a pay-per-performance model, it uses AI to understand real-time signals from users’ on-site behavior and deliver the right deal to the right customer at the right time.
Related: Partner Programs Turn Competitors Into Collaborators
Whether you’re new to affiliate marketing or simply needing to step up your game, checking off these boxes will help you develop a strong affiliate marketing program. ROI is hard to manage when you’re running a bevy of marketing programs, but the right team can help you take the reins — and get the outcome you want.
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AFFILIATE MARKETING
Major Deal Alert: Get $50 off a Sam’s Club Plus Membership
Disclosure: Our goal is to feature products and services that we think you’ll find interesting and useful. If you purchase them, Entrepreneur may get a small share of the revenue from the sale from our commerce partners.
Business leaders, listen up! If you’re looking for a smart financial decision that can benefit both your business and household, a Sam’s Club Plus Membership is your new multi-use life hack. For a limited time, you can get a 1-year membership for just $50 (reg. $110), complete with auto-renew, giving you continuous savings without the hassle of re-signing every year.
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With the Sam’s Club Plus Membership, you get more than just access to great products at lower prices. You’ll also earn 2% back on your purchases, which can add up quickly, turning your shopping trips into growth opportunities. Whether it’s office supplies, snacks for the team, or essential products, every dollar spent earns you something back.
Running a business is a full-time job, and finding time to handle everything on your to-do list is often a challenge. That’s why Sam’s Club Plus members enjoy early shopping hours, giving you access to the store before regular business hours. You can get in before the masses, grab what you need, and get back to running your business without waiting for it to open.
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StackSocial prices subject to change.
AFFILIATE MARKETING
Campbell’s Soup Is Trying to Change Its Name. Here’s Why.
The 155-year-old Campbell Soup Company, the first to bring canned soups to the market, wants to drop the “Soup” part of its name and go by just the Campbell’s Company. Shareholders can vote on the suggested name change in November at Campbell’s annual meeting.
The request reflects Campbell’s broader strategy to expand beyond soup and into higher-growth categories, like snacks, which have shown promise. Snack sales grew 13% for the company last year while soups grew 3%. Nearly 48% of Campbell’s net sales came from snacks in fiscal year 2023. Meanwhile, Campbell’s Goldfish brand reached annual net sales of $1 billion in March, a feat only attained by one other product from the company: its iconic red-and-white-labeled soup.
Campbell CEO Mark Clouse said at an investor event on Tuesday that the “subtle-yet-important” name change more accurately reflects “the full breadth of the company’s portfolio.” Earlier this year, Campbell acquired Sovos Brands, the company behind the Rao’s sauces, Noosa’s Yoghurt, and Michael Angelo’s frozen entrees brands, for $2.7 billion.
The company has also made other acquisitions, like a $4.87 billion deal for snack company Snyder’s-Lance in 2017.
Campbell’s Tomato Soup. Photo Credit: Richard Levine/Corbis via Getty Images
Campbell executives said on Tuesday that they see stable sales in soup, 3% to 4% annual growth in snacks, and 1% to 2% in meals and beverages.
Even though the company assumes no annual growth in soup, it continues to innovate and invest in the category. Campbell recently introduced new spicy soup flavors, including the Ghost Pepper Chicken Noodle soup, to appeal to younger shoppers. Older populations usually buy more soup, so sales in that category could rise from groups like older millennials, the company said.
Campbell’s fourth-quarter earnings for the three months ending July 18, 2024, show that total net sales were up from the previous quarter, from $2.068 billion to $2.293 billion.
“For the last five years, we have been on a transformative journey to redefine our company,” Clouse stated.
AFFILIATE MARKETING
Apple Adds AI Writing to iPhone 16 for Texts, Emails
AI can write emails. AI can write songs. AI can suggest writing improvements that go beyond spelling and grammar to word choice.
As big tech companies like Google, Microsoft, and Apple roll out their latest AI features, one use case of AI keeps coming up: AI can write. It’s sometimes so good that job seekers have asked it to write their resumes and cover letters, and new technologies have rolled out to detect AI’s presence.
Related: These 4 Words Make It Obvious You Used AI to Write a Paper, According to New Research
Easier writing is a key selling point of Apple’s AI, Apple Intelligence, featured in the new iPhone 16 released Monday. Apple Intelligence is “built into your iPhone, iPad, and Mac to help you write, express yourself, and get things done effortlessly” according to its product page.
Apple said the AI can help upcoming iPhone 16 users draft emails and texts.
iPhone 16. Credit: Apple
Apple isn’t the first to focus on writing as an AI use case: Google ran an ad at the Olympics last month about how its AI could write a fan letter from a child to her Olympic hero — sparking conversation about what would happen when the Olympian held a stack of fan letters that sounded the same.
“As more and more people rely on AI to generate their content, it is easy to imagine a future where the richness of human language and culture erode,” Shelly Palmer, professor of advanced media in residence at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications wrote in a July 28 blog post.
Though Google ended up pulling the ad after public backlash, the future the ad portrayed — of young people turning to ChatGPT instead of puzzling through how to say something themselves — is fast becoming a reality.
ChatGPT has over 200 million weekly users, over 60% of which are under 34 years old. Nearly one in three users are under 24 years old.
Related: Can ChatGPT Help Start a Business? I Tried the Latest Version, GPT-4o, to Find Out.
Research published earlier this year shows that university students who rely on ChatGPT experience poorer academic performance and memory loss. A separate study found that the top uses of ChatGPT were creating content, responding to emails, writing cover letters and resumes, and coming up with ideas.
AI opponents point out AI’s writing abilities may be based on copyrighted works used by big tech companies without credit or compensation awarded to the people who wrote these works.
“To add insult to injury, the bot is being trained on pirated copies of my books,” author Margaret Atwood wrote in a 2023 article for The Atlantic last year about the issue. “Now, really! How cheap is that? Would it kill these companies to shell out the measly price of 33 books? They intend to make a lot of money off the entities they have reared and fattened on my words, so they could at least buy me a coffee.”
AI supporters say that the anti-AI group is “classist and ableist.” The organization behind National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) defended AI writing last week, for example, by saying that “not all brains have [the] same abilities” and some need “outside help or accommodations” to write. Disabled writers took issue with the remarks, as well as NaNoWriMo sponsors, and the organization has since changed the wording of its stance and apologized.
Related: Klarna CEO Says AI Could Help Reduce Company Headcount By 50%
Then there are more neutral issues with AI, like estimates that AI systems could run out of free training data within the next two years, leaving open the question of what kinds of data to use next.
AI-generated content has steadily risen to the top of Google searches, doubling from about 7% in June 2023 to 14% in June 2024.
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