Affiliate Growth Strategies to Scale Revenue and ROI

Building and scaling successful affiliate programs is an ongoing process and requires expertise, experience, and creativity to continuously monitor, adapt, and refine strategies to ensure long-term profitability and sustainable growth. If you are reading this article, you are probably managing an affiliate program for ecommerce brands, whether in-house, from a specialized agency, are as an independent freelancer. 

There are many questions that you should find answers to today in this article or questions you should ask yourself; 

• Is my affiliate program optimized for profitability, incrementality, and scalability? 
• Do I have access to measure incrementality or new to file rate? 
• How many revenue-active publishers are in my program? Is that enough?
• How often do I offer channel-specific promotions? 
• Do I have a dedicated resource to manage the program? Do I have a data analyst on my team? Are my knowledge and expertise enough to take on more advanced growth strategies for the program? 
• How many different commission levels do I have in the program? 
• Should I increase commissions on first-click attribution? 
• Do I have access to your website analytics, access to ecommerce sales reports? 

Align your Growth Strategies with Your Goals

As the affiliate program manager, assigned to the project, you have probably been given goals to shape solutions and tailored affiliate growth strategies to support: 

• Brand Awareness – Increase the visibility and recognition of the brand within its target audience. Through strategic partnerships with affiliates, a brand aims to reach new customers, generate buzz, and establish trust and authority in its industry.
• ROAS and Cost optimization – advertising programs to maximize ROI by carefully managing affiliate programs, optimizing ad spend, and ensuring that each dollar invested results in profitable returns.
• Revenue & Sales – Boost revenue and sales through affiliate marketing by collaborating with publishers and partners who can drive high-quality traffic, conversions, and higher sales figures.
• Product Margins – Using affiliate marketing partnerships as a strategy to maintain or increase product margins by focusing on promoting bundles and upsells, or decommissioning top category lines, allowing brands to enhance profitability without compromising on quality.
• New Audiences and Market Test – Expanding into new markets or reaching untapped audiences using publishers’ audiences and market expertise as a testing ground. We partner with affiliates who have a strong presence in these markets to gather insights, gauge demand, and test new products or services effectively.
• Affiliate Platform efficiencies – Select the best platform and technologies to build automation, and get access to real-time reporting, streamlined communication, fraud prevention, and robust performance tracking solutions.

For some ecommerce brand owners, all these goals are essential to the business. So, how to start scaling your affiliate program to drive profitable and sustainable growth?

Let’s dive into advanced growth strategies to scale your e-commerce affiliate program and drive profitable growth; There are 7 fundamental axes of growth to consider and prioritize for your program development: 

• Commission Structures
• Publisher and Strategic Partnership
• Data and Technology 
• Brand Content and Messaging 
• Diversification Strategy
• Automation 
• Continued Management Development 

Commission Structure Strategies

To scale your affiliate program and build partnerships that will make an impact at every stage of the customer journey, develop à full-funnel segmentation for your commissions based on the value of these partnerships. Always focusing on growth and incrementality.

Use Segmented Commission Structures

Implement tiered commission structures to reward high-performing affiliates with higher commissions and reward partners with a higher propensity to drive incremental growth. This motivates affiliates to push for more sales. For example:

• Top-funnel – content syndication, influencers, and review partners – 10-25% CPA 
• Mid-funnel -Loyalty partners and sub-affiliate networks – 6-10% CPA
• Lower-funnel – Coupon and Deal Partners: 2-4%CPA

Pay less for existing customers rewarding higher commissions for new customers

To prevent your affiliate partners from being less motivated to engage with existing customers, balance lowering their baseline commission rates by offering higher incentives for driving NTF customers. Striking the right balance between acquiring new customers and maintaining a positive relationship with existing ones is the key.

Performance-Based Bonuses

Introduce performance-based bonuses, such as achieving a certain sales target within a given time frame, to incentivize affiliates to go above and beyond.

Decommission out of the path-to-purchase partners 

• Zero out commissions for partners outside of your commission rule and who have not made a large impact, in introducing, influencing, or closing the purchase. 
• Re-invest the saved budget to fund paid placements that will yield positive results 

Lower your baseline commission rate

Lowering your baseline commission rates allows more flexibility to incentivize and offer higher cashback or CPA boost during key promotional and seasonal periods.

Publisher and Partnership Strategies 

Your affiliate partners help people find inspiration, make smarter purchasing decisions, drive more, sales, and build new connections, leveraging engaged audiences and diverse media formats. 

They are part of the partner portfolio for the brand and are the core components of any successful and high-performing affiliate programs. Your partnership strategy should be centered on exclusivity, quality, diversification, and target audience alignment.

Grow your portfolio of affiliates, balancing diversification with performance contribution

Your portfolio should include top partners building value at different levels:  

• “Brand and conversion path introducers” – essential to your affiliate program and campaigns’ sales targets
• “High AOV potential” partners – invaluable in meeting your revenue and sales targets.
• “High-revenue potential” partners – essential to activate and engage with during new product launches for example as they will accelerate discovery and product adoption and increase sales and revenue of your program.
•  “Partners from similar audience interests” – essential in increasing your program reach with audience and indirect markets complementary to your brands.  For example; recruit and grow partnerships with travel sites if your brand sells luggage or camping gear, and launch outreach plans with nutrition and supplement-focused partners to offer to promote your fitness apparel brand as audiences overlap, interests and affinities are really high in these two markets.

Exclusive Partnerships

Forge exclusive partnerships with top-performing affiliates. Offer them unique deals, early access to products, or higher commissions in exchange for their loyalty.

Multi-Channel Approach

Encourage affiliates to promote your products through various channels, including social media, email marketing, and content creation, to reach a wider audience. 

Unlock performance-based relationships with influencers and brand advocates

Many advertisers have a strong interest in working with influencers in the affiliate channel and the demand is only increasing. Affiliate allows for influencers to be paid on a CPA basis and streamlines the tracking and payout process. In addition to working with influencers on a one-off basis, affiliate allows brands to partner with sub-affiliate or content monetization platforms. This gives brands the ability to reach a large range of influencers usually syndicated in sub-networks. The Affiliate and Influencer marketing teams can work together by reviewing relevant influencers for a brand, sharing influencer insights, and identifying KPIs and campaign ROAS goals.

Cross-Promotions

Collaborate with other e-commerce brands in complementary niches for cross-promotions. This can expand your reach and bring in new customers.

Quality Over Quantity

Focus on attracting and retaining high-quality affiliates who align with your brand values and target audience. A smaller group of dedicated partners can often yield better results than a large but less engaged network.

Sunset non-productive partners

By sunsetting these partnerships, you allow allocating more time to focus on high-performing partners. By keeping non-productive affiliates in the mix, your EPC will decline over time and so, your organic ability to attract new partners into the program.

Note about EPC: While EPC may seem to be a tempting start to trust from an affiliate perspective, it does not always reflect the true power of a merchant’s affiliate program performance and attractiveness. Experienced partners and affiliates can easily pinpoint what makes up a good advertiser program and avoid being blinded by results sometimes far off the reality. Factors skewing results: 

• If you work with a large number of low-quality partners (which we’d not recommend), your EPC may go high due to the volume and number of partners in the program.
• If you work with Paid Search partners, trademark bidders, or adware, your EPC can go up.
• Partners using aggressive newsletter campaigns to drive volume and clicks will lower your EPC.

Gain a greater share of voice on SERPs while boosting your New-to-File (NTF) customer rates

By testing Paid Search partners you trust. Vice-versa, Affiliates violating these terms by bidding on trademark plus terms can raise the CPCs of the branded campaigns and- in some instances – deteriorate the brand image. Therefore, double down your efforts to monitor bidding compliance and protect cost and reputation.

Data and Technology Strategies 

Harnessing the power of data analytics and cutting-edge technology is imperative for optimizing performance and driving growth. Through sophisticated tracking systems, affiliate program managers can gain invaluable insights into affiliate behavior, customer journeys, and conversion patterns.

Data-Driven Optimization

Advanced affiliate strategies are grounded in thorough research and analysis, It is essential to get access to and utilize analytics tools to track affiliate performance and customer behaviors. Optimize your program based on data insights, focusing on what works best. 

Get one analytics tool you trust for analyzing website and ecommerce site behaviors such as Google or Adobe Analytics 

Focus on incremental results

Determine what affiliate sales are incremental and what it means for your business. What affiliate sales could have happened without the investment in the channel? This is what incrementality is. Just because a sale is attributed to a channel does not mean that we should incur that cost going forward to ensure we acquire that customer or sale.

• How to bring new incremental orders and customers?
• What would be the loss of sales of customers without affiliate marketing efforts?
• Improve your ability to track incrementality to be more efficient.

Look at data, technology, and benchmarking

Benchmark and competitive intelligence

While setting your own program benchmark to measure performance and trends over time, not keeping tabs on the competitor’s strategies and industry benchmarks is leaving money off the table. Spend time studying the competition, and performing gap analyses to make more informed decisions on revised commission structures, content, and promotional calendar to keep and gain new market shares.

Businesses have high growth goals and fewer resources right now; As ad prices rise and effectiveness declines, affiliate marketing has been on the rise. Partnerships can drive the most efficient revenue growth for any business, but you need the right technology to manage it all. You should partner with the best technologies that can automate the entire partnership lifecycle, to maximize the efficacy and scale your affiliate program efficiently.

Top affiliate platform like Impact Radius, allows affiliate program managers to build, grow, and scale ecommerce performance by offering many features and functionalities:

• Act as a marketplace to connect advertisers to publishers via discovery tools to optimize your inbound recruitment strategies
• Access to a large pool of publishers and emerging partners in many industries and verticals to diversify your program 
• Affiliate payouts, network fees, and contracts are consolidated to facilitate finance management and contract approvals, to save time and streamline the payment process.
• Offers robust tracking and reporting capabilities with a complete view of the brand consumer’s journey from an ad impression through acquisition across all devices and channels. 
• Access to analyze overall partner contribution and optimize costs by preventing overpaying commissions to multiple partners for the same conversion. 
• Identify publishers and campaigns that yield incremental results as we will see in our next point, incrementality is key to any successful affiliate program. 

Content and Messaging Strategies 

Building affiliate program growth strategies that align with your brand’s content and messaging is a powerful way to boost your affiliate marketing efforts. Because your brand’s Unique Value Proposition (UVP)  and messaging are at the center stage of the success of your affiliate program, without unique value differentiators and compelling content and brand storytelling, it is going to be hard to build, maintain, and grow your partnerships with publishers and affiliates. 

While your brand ecommerce performance is the north star for affiliates to decide whether or not to invest time and efforts in promoting your brand, your brand key value differentiators, offers, and creative assets can make a huge difference.

• Syndication: Develop high-quality content that affiliates can easily syndicate on their platforms. This ensures a consistent brand message and increases visibility.
• Education: Regularly provide training materials, access to new product launches and category lines, and all the value and benefits your affiliates and partners will have to promote to their audience.

These synergies will not only drive growth but also enhance your brand’s reputation and customer loyalty.

Diversification Strategies

Loyalty Programs

Create a loyalty program for affiliates, providing long-term incentives such as increased commissions, early product access, or personalized support.

Global Expansion

Expand your affiliate program internationally to tap into new markets and demographics, access a larger customer base, increase brand exposure, and drive more sales, adapting your strategies to local preferences and trends.

Omnichannel Expansion

if the ecommerce brand evolve in an omnichannel environment having DTC retail, and Amazon presence, build bridges across channel to drive affiliate traffic to Amazon and help support better control over cost and profitability of the Amazon storefront channel.

Expanding to affiliate marketing for Amazon sellers will help the ecommerce brand expand non-Amazon traffic reach through the affiliate model and grow its brand recognition, and sales within the brand vertical.

Expanding the affiliate program to Amazon will also help build better ROI on the overall brand advertising spend while getting Amazon brand referral credit for driving traffic to their network. This credit can then be used to fund commissions with partners and support optimized costs.

Automation Strategies

Spend less time reviewing applications and leverage automation to intelligently process applications using customizable rules. Set rules and triggers to assign partner groups and contracts based on their business models and automate recruitment by setting up rules to accept and reject applications.

Continued Professional Development Strategies

While you should invest time and effort in optimization and scaling your affiliate programs, it is essential to ensure your approach and strategies consistently evolve with the needs of your audience, the new market rules, and seasonality. 

In the dynamic landscape of affiliate marketing and digital marketing, the role of affiliate program managers is always evolving. To excel in this field and drive sustainable growth, it is essential to prioritize continuous learning and invest in ongoing professional development. An expert affiliate program manager should always adjust emerging partnership formats, technologies, and trends and understand consumer behavior shifts. 

1. Search engine algorithm changes can negatively impact the rankings and traffic of your top SEO, and editorial content partners and slow down the growth of your affiliate program
2. Compliance and Regulations such as GDPR and FTC guidelines are always changing and publishers, advertisers, and affiliate program managers must stay current with these rules  to prevent any costly legal issues
3. Consumer Behavior shifts and evolves with changing trends and preferences, how they consume media, how they shop online and offline, and how they (re)prioritize their needs, you should carefully watch these changes to adjust and keep up with the demand.
4. Attend affiliate and digital marketing conferences at least once a year to connect with existing and new partners, stay informed, and join panel discussions, workshops, and presentations to gain additional insights and discover new tools.

Building and nurturing connections with affiliates and partners requires a deep understanding of the industry nuances, which can only be achieved through continuous education and experience. In a field where innovation and adaptability are paramount, the commitment to lifelong learning is not just a choice but a strategic imperative for affiliate program managers.

Wrapping-up 

Creating and expanding successful affiliate programs is a continual journey that demands expertise, experience, and creativity. It involves the constant monitoring, adaptation, and refinement of strategies to secure long-term profitability and sustainable growth.

Get started today with your Growth Strategy plan for your affiliate program focusing on your commission structures and partnership diversification efforts. 

Allocate 2-4 hours weekly to measure performance, analyze data, and put together an optimization plan to maintain growth or combat decline.

Your research and decisions should be backed up by the review of the program and competition benchmarks and by the new digital and consumer trends, always evolving. 

Success starts with The Good Strategy!