When you successfully partner with influencers to promote your products to their audience, your reach can expand exponentially. In fact, influencers have inspired up to 88% of customers to make a purchase.
However, manual affiliate marketing is a lot of work, which is why big brands like Amazon use automated affiliate marketing processes to scale. Automated affiliate marketing can make finding influencers, getting them the promotional materials they need, tracking their sales, and paying their commissions a walk in the park.
In this article, we’ll look at automated affiliate marketing in detail and the benefits your online business can gain by implementing this marketing strategy.
Table of Contents
What is automated affiliate marketing?
How automated affiliate marketing helps you scale
Top 5 benefits of automated affiliate marketing
Tips for choosing the right automated affiliate marketing software
Conclusion
What is automated affiliate marketing?
Automated affiliate marketing involves setting up software or a system to recruit, sign up, and manage affiliates promoting your products. As an ecommerce business owner, it is the easiest way to scale your marketing efforts without a huge commitment.
How automated affiliate marketing helps you scale
1. Recruit more affiliates automatically
Manually recruiting affiliates is time-consuming and often ineffective. By implementing automated tools, you can better onboard more affiliates in less time.
The programmed system employs artificial intelligence to promote your program on affiliate networks and marketplaces through social media automation. By recruiting more affiliates, a larger number of influencers are able to promote your products more, thus increasing your sales.
2. Provide better affiliate resources
You need to give your affiliates everything they need to be effective promoters. Thanks to automation, this is now relatively easy.
For example, AI tools can generate professional email swipes, social posts, and banner ads. Popular tools like Pretty Links are able to generate affiliate links with minimal manual effort. Your affiliates can use these resources as content for their blog posts or social media platforms.
The easier you make it for them to promote you, the more likely they are to do it, resulting in more traffic and substantial business growth.
3. Track and optimize performance
AI tools are able to monitor and help optimize your affiliate campaign efforts through automated link tracking, attribution models, and real-time reporting provided by the system. In addition, they use natural language processing to assist your ability to track which promotional methods are generating the most affiliate sales for your program. It’s then a case of doubling down on the highest performing affiliates and shifting resources away from those affiliates not producing the results you hope for.
4. Pay affiliates on time
Affiliates expect on-time payments for their sales and traffic. This can be overwhelming if you have to pay commissions to a large number of promoters in your affiliate program.
Luckily, affiliate management software can also manage all the accounting and bookkeeping for you. They can handle commission calculations, approval processes, and payments across all your affiliates so that you can avoid any confusion and complaints.
First and foremost, when you pay your affiliates for their hard work, it keeps them motivated to keep promoting your products and offers.
Top 5 benefits of automated affiliate marketing
1. Increased revenue
By automating your affiliate program, you open it up to more potential partners and greater exposure. This means more traffic to your online store, which translates to increased sales and more money without having to do extra work.
Studies show that automation can drive 5% to 30% of a company’s revenue. Using automation tools to handle nitty-gritty, day-to-day tasks also allows you to focus on more important parts of your business.
2. Reduced workload
Managing an affiliate marketing program manually requires significant time handling communication, reporting, payments, and more.
Automation eliminates administrative hassles so that your team can work on high-impact projects. This frees up time to optimize your website, launch new products, market to new target audiences, and improve your customer experience.
3. Improved organization
Affiliate software stores all your affiliate data, such as profiles, email addresses, performance statistics, and payment reports, in one central place.
In addition, it ensures everything is neatly organized and easily accessible when you need it. This level of organization would be extremely time consuming using a manual program, especially as you begin to scale.
4. Increased flexibility
An automated system gives you more flexibility in how you manage your program. For instance, the system can efficiently create customized commissions, tiered reward structures, bonus incentives, and adjustments.
The platform also handles recalculating earnings and payments automatically based on your settings. With this flexibility, you are able to optimize your program to maximize success while still working on other important tasks.
5. Better partner relationships
Stronger affiliate relationships are crucial to success, and the good news is that automation enables the building of such relationships. Such programs can provide affiliates with automated reporting and on-demand account data, which helps strengthen your relationships with them.
Your partners can also check their performance and earnings at any time and get paid on time, whether weekly, biweekly, or monthly. This transparency and consistency will lead to greater trust and loyalty, which in turn will help attract more people to your business.
Tips for choosing the right automated affiliate marketing software
Choosing the right tool for your affiliate marketing campaign can be complicated. There are many options out there, including highly rated programs like CJ Affiliate, Rakuten Marketing, and Awin. Below we’ll dig into the specific criteria you should follow when making your decision.
1. Affiliate management
As you select an AI affiliate marketing tool, consider one that allows you to add new affiliates and segments and track them both easily. In addition, it should have built-in approval workflows that enable you to review new affiliate applications.
Robust reporting is also vital so that you can analyze which of your affiliates are the top performers, driving the most sales and commissions. Most programs allow you to also send newsletters and communicate with them, helping to keep them engaged.
2. Commission tracking
The ability to track commissions is also crucial when selecting the right tool. You need an affiliate marketing automation solution that can accurately track the sales and commissions generated by your affiliates. In addition, it should be able to handle multiple commission types such as CPA (cost per acquisition), CPC (cost per click), lifetime commissions, and more.
Real-time insights and notifications should also be incorporated, which will let your affiliates know when they have pending commissions. This will help them stay motivated to sell more.
3. Coupon and promo code tracking
If you frequently run promo codes and coupon campaigns, choose software with built-in promo code tracking. It should allow you to set up new promo codes, specify commission rates, and see how much revenue each code generates.
Your affiliate partners will appreciate the ability to efficiently promote the latest offers to their audiences.
4. Automation
You should also consider automation capabilities before subscribing to affiliate marketing services. Look for a tool that encompasses various tools, such as drip email campaigns, which help to reactivate inactive affiliates.
Other useful automation capabilities include fraud detection and automated payouts. Automated payment processing, like PayPal integration, can make it easy to pay your affiliates in a timely manner.
The more you automate, the less time you spend on repetitive tasks. That means more time to optimize your program and drive even better results.
Conclusion
Integrating automated affiliate marketing campaigns into your ecommerce business can help free up time to focus on other, potentially more fun parts of your business.
Used correctly, you can eradicate the need for tedious recruitment and management of affiliates or the poring over of spreadsheets to determine the best commissions and incentives. Automation handles all that for you so that you can build your business and reap its rewards.
