Are You Making the Most of Your Affiliate Marketing Data?
The digital marketplace, and marketing in general, has become extremely data-driven. Data enhances your capacity to make accurate decisions and efficient investments. However, possessing large amounts of data is of little to no value if it is not used effectively. For affiliate marketers, successful data usage is vital to competitive success.
The following is an in-depth exploration of marketing data to assist affiliate marketers in getting the most value from the data they collect.
Cross-Device Tracking
The traditional affiliate model rewards publishers or affiliates based solely on the click that led to a customer conversion. This model was fine in the past, but in the era of cross-device shopping, it doesn’t properly incentivize affiliates to spread your message.
Top affiliate networks and programs now allow for more sophisticated methods of tracking buyer paths leading up to a conversion. This approach is more important than ever as consumers often research on one device and convert on another. Leveraging data, marketers can better reward brand influencers, bloggers and others to promote their goods and services before the final purchase. Doing so motivates more people to sign up to their affiliate programs.
Micro-Level Trend Reporting and Decision-Making
Another important trend in leveraging data is more micro-level assessment of products sales and marketing successes. With a personalized approach, affiliate marketers can better assess which affiliates are contributing to particular business and marketing objectives.
If a company is focused on reaching a particular demographic or geographic audience, for instance, it can leverage individual reporting data to determine which affiliates are driving growth. With data in hand, marketers can reward particular affiliates with personalized commission rates or access to trending product promotions to better increase market share within desired segments.
Focus on Lifetime Customer Value
Lifetime customer value is an important business metric in the data-driven era. It tells you how much profit a given customer is likely to provide over the course of a long-term relationship with your business. However, it isn’t something that a lot of affiliate programs currently focus on. Affiliate marketers generally emphasize tracking of traffic sources and transactional data when structuring referral payouts. This approach doesn’t give credence to the long-term implications of attracting high-value customers.
To effectively track LCV, affiliate marketers need to know the cost-of-acquisition for customers, along with the ongoing revenue generated by customer types or segments. As you learn which affiliates and promotional strategies attract high-value customers, you can better structure payout systems to reward top-performing affiliates. You might find, for instance, that certain affiliates connect with customer segments that consistently drive profitable, sustained customers to your business. It makes sense to amplify rewards in these cases.
Conclusion
These are some of the most effective contemporary methods for affiliate marketers to leverage critical data for optimized decision-making. Utilize the data that is available to make sound business decisions and to structure affiliate payout systems that better reward affiliates that help you optimize results.