Affiliate Marketing – The Power of Payments
May 21, 2024
Stop getting burned by rogue affiliates. Learn the metrics that catch bad actors before they tank your compliance ratios.
Drive Meaningful Revenue with Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is one of the most powerful, and sometimes, most misunderstood marketing strategies. With close to $14-Billion in worldwide spending in 2023 on Affiliate Marketing, and 60% of marketers planning to increase their Affiliate Marketing budget over the next year. Clearly, businesses are seeing the benefits from Affiliate Marketing. But like anything, Merchants should know what they’re implementing.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a flavor of performance marketing, where Merchants partner up with publishers, influencers, call centers, or third parties—also known as affiliates. Every time that an affiliate brings business to the Merchant, they are rewarded with some form of payout. The conversion and commission are usually agreed upon by both the Merchant and affiliate before engaging together.
Common ways that affiliates promote products/services can include:
- Blog posts
- Banner ads
- Social media posts
- Paid search
- Review sites
- Email marketing and subscriber lists
- Mailers
- Call centers
Why Affiliate Marketing Matters?
Merchants are always looking for an edge; something that can help increase both revenue and reach for their business(es). Affiliate marketing is just that—a method of scaling sales, leads, call volume, and website traffic. For Merchants large and small, from Fortune 500 to startup, Affiliate marketing matters because of the following:
- It’s Extremely Cost Effective
Affiliate marketing is a performance-based model, meaning that you only pay for conversions. Merchants can avoid the upfront costs of running ads, sending mailers, or hiring more sales staff. It means that the responsibility of drumming up business is handed off to a third-party partner. - It Extends Reach
More boots on the ground is more opportunity to convert new business. Affiliates provide the unique opportunity to tap into niche communities through influencers, bloggers, call centers, and more. - It Leverages Trust
One of the most powerful reasons that Merchants may choose to leverage affiliates is because of trust. Affiliates can have relationships, partners, and connected networks that would not normally be available. Don’t underestimate the positive power of leveraging someone else’s network. - It Scales Quickly
Sales, marketing, and revenue generating activities are expensive. Leveraging affiliates can help remove the constrains of budgets and workforces. It provides an option to quickly deploy a workforce to promote a product/service. - It Has Precise Attribution
Unlike other forms of marketing, like SEO or content marketing for example, Merchants can tie specific contribution to specific affiliates. This makes it a far easier form of marketing to understand what’s working, what isn’t working, and how to better optimize earnings going forward. Metrics can include: unique affiliate links, cookie tracking, sales attribution, and commission tracking.
How Can I Use Affiliate Marketing to Drive Meaningful Revenue?
Hold your horses before pulling the trigger on an affiliate. There are a couple of key bottlenecks that can hurt the performance of an affiliate marketing strategy. Let’s dig into a couple tips and tricks for massively improving your revenue potential.
First, assume that your affiliates don’t know anything about your product/service. Providing quality marketing material that converts is up to you. That means that you will need to supply good visuals, copy, landing pages, scripts, etc. to perform. A big snag that Merchants may not realize is that if your affiliate can’t make the sale, they will leave and find a new Merchant partner—so make it as easy as possible for them!
Secondly, fraud is the biggest issue when working with affiliates. Just because you’re getting traffic and sales sent your way, it doesn’t mean that all of those payments aren’t from spam traffic, stolen cards, or fraudulent offerings. Fraud can be especially painful for Merchants with a high AOV and/or with a large share of revenue being paid to affiliates. Why? Because processing poor quality payments risks increasing the Merchant’s level of chargebacks and fraud—which for Merchants, can eventually mean falling out of compliance and losing their Processor.
Slyce360 Monitors Affiliate Trends
Many Merchants and sponsoring FIs can’t meld their CRM data with chargeback and fraud data for a complete affiliate risk profile. And even if they can, Merchants have to constantly review reports to find the needle in the haystack. But the minute that they stop reviewing reports – BAM! – that Merchant is exposed to a potential rogue affiliate.
Slyce360 can automate screening and monitoring affiliates.
- Be Alerted when affiliates make their first sale
- Know exactly how much fraud each affiliate is driving
- See the growing fraud trends with each affiliate
- Track ALL of your affiliates, all of the time without constantly monitoring adhoc reports
- Runs 24/7, behind the scenes
Interested in learning more? Contact your Payment Service Provider today and see what Slyce360 can do for your affiliate marketing strategy.
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