How to Improve Performance Marketing with Affiliate Management Software
Despite operating under the performance marketing umbrella, affiliate marketing is a term used interchangeably with performance marketing.
Affiliate marketing utilizes social media, search engine, email marketing, and other forms of marketing where commission compensation is exchanged for the desired action. As it sounds, performance marketing is driven by executed desired results, such as a lead, sale, download, or booking.
When organizations begin to plateau, performance marketing is often the answer. Given how affiliate marketing is a subset of performance marketing, it’s appropriate how affiliate management software provides the framework for boosting performance.
In this article, we’ll cover:
- How performance marketing and affiliate management are related
- Five ways how affiliate management software improve performance marketing ROI
- Seven powerful performance marketing tips for growth
Performance Marketing and Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is the grandfather of performance marketing.
Similar to other forms of marketing, affiliate marketing has evolved over the years. Nowadays, it encompasses a big picture approach that deviates outside traditional loyalty partnerships and traditional coupons to include:
- Mobile app developers
- Native advertisers
- Social influencers
- Email marketers
- Geo-targeting paid search partners
Where both performance and affiliate marketing intertwine would be how it has gravitated from product and brand marketing into an inventive, performance-based strategy concerned with:
- Increasing sales
- New customer acquisition
- Expanding market saturation
- Customer segmentation targeting
- Maximizing campaign ROI
For example, every day, we see how technology has provided people with opportunities for earning commissions for recommended products, apps, and services.
Influencers with large mailing lists, intuitive web plug-ins, and conversation optimization tools where payouts are rewarded after sales are complete are examples of how performance and affiliate marketing have merged.
5 Ways to Improve Performance Marketing
So much of performance marketing success boils down to the collective features and technological tools in your marketing arsenal. Finding a niche is one thing, but unless you have the means to capitalize on your market with impactful tools, you’ll find reaching your marketing goals to be only a dream.
That’s why having a robust and versatile affiliate management software is vital to performance marketing success.
Here are five ways affiliate management and tracking software can boost your performance marketing to new heights:
Enhanced Traffic Management
A complete affiliate management system will provide streamlined capabilities for optimizing performance marketing campaigns.
To maximize the most out of your campaigns, your affiliate management program should include traffic management features such as:
- Performance reporting hub to analyze network performance, traffic sources and conduct in-house comparison reports
- Parallel tracking links for data-driven analytics and performance monitoring
- Postbacks and pixels for fine-tuning partner-specific groups and custom conditions
- Dynamic split testing for optimizing landing pages and offers
- Virtual balance account systems that help project managers manage affiliate partners, budgets, capping, scheduling, and balances.
An end-to-end affiliate management system should also support custom permission access, capping budgets, and a Smart API system to provide network operators and affiliates comprehensive insights to improve network performance.
Improve Traffic Monetization
Traffic monetization tools and resources are the primary driving forces for improving performance marketing when using affiliate management systems.
For enhanced network performance, your platform should support a flexible, conditional, and customizable commission system, allow for campaign scheduling and targeting, multi-advertiser management, and flexible geo management.
Perhaps the most valuable feature in this department would be having a leads distribution resource to maximize ROI.
Optimize Remarketing Campaigns
Studies show that retargeting outperforms all other ad placement strategies with an efficiency rate of 1,046%. Thereby, having an affiliate management system that supports your remarketing efforts can significantly improve your existing performance marketing ROI.
For instance, at Getlinked.io, we offer a robust Omni-messaging system for creating powerful remarketing campaigns, event-driven and scheduling messaging for structured remarketing collaboration, and third-party integrations such as STP, SMS messages, and autoresponders.
Full-Circle Management
Affiliate management software can combine network, back-office, and financial management into a centralized dashboard for streamlining your organization’s processes.
Leveraging automated processes such as an in-house invoicing system, complete network log, real-time alert system for network activity, and creating compliance and legal pages can save your business time and money while improving network performance.
Robust Security & Infrastructure
If your infrastructure prevents scalability, you are ultimately hindering your performance marketing efforts.
That’s where an affiliate management solution becomes ultra-powerful. You see, most are structured in a scalable environment, allowing businesses to increase market exposure while tapping into new avenues for customer acquisition and affiliate recruitment.
Secured servers, real-time monitoring, disaster recovery, data encryption, and 2FA authentication also provide network operators peace of mind, allowing more time to focus on driving business growth.
Learn more regarding the Importance of Performance Marketing in 2021.
7 Tips for Maximizing Performance Marketing Efforts
Here are seven tips to getting the most of our performance marketing efforts and how affiliate management software can aid the process.
Craft Impactful Landing Pages and Offers
Lousy landing pages can put off visitors and prevent them from revisiting you. With an experienced affiliate management partner, you can improve under-performing landing pages, stay ahead of the curve with the latest content, and gain complete oversight of how visitors act on your site.
Choose Traffic Sources
An organization’s partners speak volumes regarding the type of company you are. Making sure you have reputable partners and trusted traffic is one of the most critical factors of performance marketing. Using an affiliate management solution can provide you with the analytical information needed to identify non-trusted web sources to reduce campaign hindrances.
A/B Testing
Circling back to the benefits of traffic management features with affiliate management programs, conducting split testing provides campaign managers with the best-performing landing pages.
Extensively Track and Monitor
The more information you can gain regarding your marketing efforts, your affiliate’s audience, common pain points, and performance metrics, the better you’ll be able to formulate high-yielding marketing campaigns. Using a multifaceted tracking feature, such as those with affiliate marketing software, are powerful and insightful tools for cultivating growth.
Define Buyer Personas
The better the customer experience you can generate, the more effective your marketing campaigns will be. Creating an irresistible offer or service is the best way to drive performance in our modern era of contextual marketing.
With affiliate management and tracking solutions, you can better understand segment audiences and craft compelling content optimized for sales.
Integrate Costs
Merging your marketing technology with your strategy silos under one roof is a quick and easy way to free up extra capital that can go towards other performance marketing budgets or services.
Balance Builders and Drivers
Builders are marketing campaigns such as blogging and social engagement that are foundational and recurring. Their primary objective is to boost the visitor base, drive in more subscribers, and improve social outreach.
Drivers are short-term campaigns that seek to capitalize on existing assets and generally don’t last for more than 4 to 12 weeks.
How affiliate management software can aid in this process is by providing direct linking for improved SEO, providing valuable remarketing resources for sales blog pages, and analyzing the performance of every marketing campaign to learn what works and doesn’t.
The Bottom Line
Performance and affiliate marketing are cut from the same cloth.
While affiliate marketing existed before performance marketing, technological advancements and applications have integrated both marketing fields into a singular concept.
At Getlinked.io, we understand your audiences, what makes them click, and how to boost performance marketing ROI past industry plateaus. Our performance-powered affiliate management system is robust, data-driven, and fully customizable to provide you with the tools, resources, and technology partners needed to defy industry norms.
Speak with one of our specialists to learn how Getlinked’s affiliate management software can improve your performance marketing efforts.