Editorial Articles

Peter Rowe, Managing Director at affilinet UK offers his thoughts on how affiliate marketing will fit into the New Year’s marketing mix

As we enter 2011, the affiliate marketing industry has much to be confident about. A number of innovative tactics to generate leads and maximise sales are coming to fruition and are being incorporated into our customer’s campaigns in the run up to the New Year. What’s more, recent research conducted by affilinet showed the value marketers place in affiliate marketing investment, with respondents predicting it to be second only to search at delivering sales online over the next twelve months. Outlined below are some of the latest techniques networks and advertisers are using to maximise return on investment from affiliate marketing campaigns.

Joining online and offline – call tracking
Numerous articles from marketing consultancies in the last few years urged marketers to look closely at how they join up their online and offline marketing campaigns. As we enter the New Year, the importance of maintaining an integrated approach to marketing remains as important as ever. It helps to ensure consistency of branding for all campaigns and maximise return on campaign investment across the marketing mix.

Our research showed that, in reality, less than a quarter (23%) of marketers have completely joined up online and offline campaigns. However, the development of new technologies should help to counter this trend in 2011. For example, the recent launch of our CallTrack solution now means we can expand our work with affiliates beyond traditional online methods enabling them to drive phone calls to brands’ call centres. To do this for our clients, we generate unique phone numbers for individual publishers for use in their online promotional activities and on their websites. All the numbers are trackable, so that there is visibility over which affiliate is responsible for each lead generated to the call centre. The benefit being that it enables brands to record which combination of affiliates are successfully driving online and offline business, while ensuring all affiliates are correctly attributed for sales and leads generated.

Personalised targeting
With consumers becoming increasingly brand promiscuous, ensuring they are presented with the right products and promotions at the right time will remain an important trend for marketers next year. As a result, targeting technologies are increasingly popular, proving a great way to present consumers with promotions on products that they have already shown an interest in online. We have recently started working with a remarketing company that captures the data of consumers who have abandoned shopping transactions. This allows for targeted remarketing in order to recover lost customers and revenue. Data capture is also becoming the core driver of targeting in display advertising campaigns. New technologies are allowing for improved anonymous consumer profiling and many companies are building up an understanding of their consumers and the journey they are taking to purchase. Companies that use this technology in the coming year will be better placed to harvest actionable customer data and market to consumers off the back of it.

Recognising the role of every publisher in the purchasing journey
We’ve recently started to see post impression (PI) models making a comeback on a performance basis. This model is renowned for rewarding high-quality content publishers’ role in the decision making process of consumers viewing adverts on their sites. This means that advertisers are able to purchase ad space that is traditionally sold on a CPM basis at a more measurable CPA rate. Alongside the continued research into multi-attribution, this reflects that brands are becoming increasingly savvy and recognising the need to ensure that they continue to reward affiliates, no matter what their role in the purchasing journey.

Social media and affiliate marketing in 2011
The way brands integrate social media sites into their affiliate marketing campaigns will also continue to evolve in 2011. Most recently, affilinet has been working with a leading automotive brand and social media specialists Rocketer to target consumers on Facebook in order to generate test drive bookings. Success of this campaign has largely been due to targeting relevant user activity such as the Topgear fanpage, the use of thousands of ad variants in the campaign and being able to analyse click to action rates to optimise the activity. While 2010 saw a number of brands testing the water in using social media channels as part of their affiliate marketing campaigns, 2011 should see a number of other clients using this channel to deliver better ROI by targeting consumers according to status updates, groups joined and ‘likes’ and ‘dislikes’.

Access to the right knowledge in 2011
While our research clearly underlined the volume of sales generated by affiliate marketing, it also revealed it to be one of the least understood marketing channels by industry peers, with only 56 per cent of marketing professionals surveyed claiming to fully grasp its intricacies.

Working with networks and media agencies allows brand marketers to better understand how affiliate marketing can be tailored to meet their business objectives, while allowing them to tap into some of the latest innovations that will maximise their return on investment throughout the year.

Peter Rowe
Managing Director, affilinet UK