Affiliate marketing is an excellent way for brands to drive sales, increase brand awareness, and drive customer engagement. Besides being an excellent customer acquisition channel, it’s an essential channel for brands looking to be successful in 2024. Affiliate marketing spend is expected to reach $8.2 billion in the U.S. alone. As such, long gone are the days of affiliate marketing being a lucrative revenue stream reserved for only a select few brands.
Today, more than 81% of brands run an affiliate marketing program of their own, and 84% of publishers resort to affiliate marketing. Moreover, 40% of brands cite affiliate marketing as their most successful customer acquisition channel, and 54% of brands rank it in their top three channels.
The internet has forever changed how we interact with the world around us, and ecommerce has changed how we interact with the brands around us. Currently, around 60% of consumers first search online for the products they’re interested in before buying in-store or online to make sure they’re making the best purchase choice. Additionally, omnichannel marketing strategies drive 80% more store visits for brands and businesses that implement them.
In 2024, the world, society, and economy around us are more interconnected than ever. Therefore, for brands to be prosperous with their affiliate marketing program in today’s highly connected world, they have to be easily found online and make sure that their brand’s affiliate program promotion is done through as many channels as possible.
Affiliate marketing is an excellent marketing tool for brands as it facilitates a solid online presence and is the best way to reach consumers through multiple channels. Moreover, its performance-based model ensures that brands have complete control over their spending and only pay when sales are made.
So, what does it take for brands to run successful affiliate marketing programs in 2024? This article will dive into the top tips brands can implement to get ahead of the competition with their affiliate programs in 2024.
1. Keep Your Affiliates Close and Your Competition Closer
As the above statistics show, the affiliate marketing space is highly saturated and competitive. Brands are competing with 81% of their competition to partner with the same 84% of the publishers (affiliates). Therefore, to stay competitive in 2024, brands need to analyze the affiliate programs of their competitors to make sure their affiliate programs are not missing out on any crucial elements. By doing so, brands can get inspiration on how to best present their affiliate program and develop a unique and attractive offer that will attract affiliates to join their program over their competitors.
Brands can keep tabs on the affiliate programs of their competitors in a variety of ways. For example, they can create an affiliate account on the affiliate network of their competitors and join the affiliate program of their competitors. In doing so, they will gain access to the fine details of their competitors’ affiliate programs, their statistics, and deals, and even receive the affiliate newsletters that allow them to see their competitors’ affiliate programs through the eyes of their affiliates. Data that brands should monitor and analyze once they gain access to their competitors’ affiliate programs are data such as the average commission percentages they pay out to their affiliates, their commission structure, average order values, and conversion rates.
Brands can also follow their competitors on social media to gain insight as to how their competitors promote their brand and affiliate programs and what strategies they use to grow them. In addition, by signing up for their RSS feeds and company newsletters, brands can gain insight and inspiration to implement in their own marketing strategies and affiliate programs.
Suppose brands don’t wish to manually spy on their competitors by signing up to their affiliate programs or observing their activity on social media. In that case, they can even take a more automated approach to keep tabs on their competitors. For example, brands can utilize automatic monitoring tools such as Google Alerts and SEMRush to receive a variety of automated reports from what their competitors are publishing to the keywords or backlinks they’re using to promote their affiliate programs.
2. Diversify and Personalize Affiliate Recruitment
In order to manage a successful affiliate marketing program and maintain its success for the long term, brands need to partner with as many of the top-performing affiliates as possible. Unfortunately, the top affiliates are bombarded with endless affiliate offers via email and social media every day, and the good ones are always super busy and difficult to reach. As such, long gone are the days that brands can send out an affiliate program offer and expect an immediate response from eager affiliates anxiously waiting to get started.
Therefore, in order to maintain a successful affiliate program, brands need to diversify and scale up their affiliate recruitment efforts. But, simply blasting out as many generic affiliate recruitment emails out to as many affiliates as possible won’t lead to more affiliates joining a brand’s affiliate program.
To attract the top affiliates who will promote your brand into 2024 and beyond, brands need to show potential affiliates that they’ve done their homework by personalizing their outreach recruitment emails and messages. In addition, brands should cite specific posts, or other forms of content, from potential affiliates and use them to show them why they make a perfect fit for the brand’s affiliate program.
Aside from scaling their personalized outreach offers to potential affiliates, brands should diversify their recruitment efforts and target multiple affiliate types through multiple “trendy” channels, such as TikTok, Twitch, etc.
3. Partner with the Best Affiliate Platforms and Build Strong Affiliate Relationships
Getting the top affiliates to join your affiliate program is crucial. However, once they’ve joined, the best affiliates are worthless if they don’t have the right affiliate platform to work with that provides everything they need to promote a brand and its products to its fullest potential. Robust affiliate marketing platforms like Refersion provide affiliates with all the right tools, resources, and data needed to become active and successful affiliates that drive sales. Additionally, the best affiliate platforms provide the platform brands need to incentivize affiliates and build strong relationships with their affiliates. The two work hand-in-hand; without the right affiliate platform, brands don’t have the resources necessary to foster positive and productive communication, incentivize affiliates and offer them enticing commission structures and easy and consistent payouts. Refersion specializes in streamlining affiliate commissions and payouts with Unified Payments.
The Bottom Line
Managing a successful affiliate marketing program in 2024 requires brands to do their due diligence to stay ahead of the competition and the latest trends. By analyzing the affiliate programs of their competitors, they can take critical aspects of what’s successful and what isn’t and apply them to their program.
Additionally, brands need to attract the top affiliates and strive to attract more of the top affiliates from diversified affiliate type categories. Finally, it’s crucial for brands to partner with the right affiliate platform that facilitates an environment for brands and affiliates to collaborate productively. Refersion provides the marketplace and platform for brands and affiliates to scale a successful affiliate program in 2024 and beyond.
