Boost For Sustainable E-Commerce Growth: 5 Tips For Better Partner Marketing

Partner marketing is becoming increasingly important in online retail. But not all partnerships pursue the same outcome. The result: those who do not have a complete overview of their activities cannot successfully evaluate the campaign successes. 

Targeted Attribution Ensures Success In Online Trading

A lot doesn’t always help a lot. Nevertheless, it is clear that only repeated contact points also lead to marketing success. The secret is to align the attribution to selected high-quality touchpoints that result in a coherent customer journey and fit the product.

Anyone who hears their favourite singer’s new album and is suggested concert tickets on the streaming service is probably immediately interested. If the concert dates are recommended again when users later search for the lyrics because they can’t get them out of their heads all day, the tickets are almost bought.

This free-rider effect increases the success of the marketing measures considerably. Repeated contact points in relevant contexts generate the decisive incremental added value.

Not All Marketing Success Is Measured In Clicks

The goal of e-commerce is to generate purchases. For a long time, pure performance channels were therefore primarily used. Branding and image were the domains of print, television, and out of home and hardly an issue for online trade. But we’re on the internet more than ever.

Fashion inspiration comes from fashion blogs and Instagram rather than fashion magazines. The latest tech trends are making waves on Twitch or YouTube. This changed reality must also be reflected in marketing measures and partnerships. Branding requires other advertising formats. Success is also increasingly measured in qualitative rather than vital quantitative figures. Nevertheless, brand image and the conclusion of purchase are closely linked.

Above all, online shops will be successful in considering and understanding their customer journey across all touchpoints and optimising their campaigns. The affiliate rewards are then measured by their actual influence on the purchase decision and not by where the last contact occurred. The last click is rarely the most valuable.

Affiliate Marketing Offers Far More Than Just Low-Funnel Partnerships With Coupon Publishers

Affiliate marketing is a proven channel when sales and performance are your focus. And contrary to popular belief, not all sales in affiliate marketing are generated from coupon sites. The established affiliate networks are not entirely innocent of this fallacy. To date, they offer advertisers hardly any opportunities to link the commission payment to performance instead of the last click. Vouchers are a great marketing tool, offline and online, as an insert in the package. 

A successful affiliate program consists of partnerships with social media influencers, comparison portals, or companies with complementary products. Content partnerships with blogs and media whose credibility reflects their offer are particularly effective.

Leaderboards are a tried and tested means of doing this. An established food medium looks at ten food processors from the same price category. Short, pointed reviews make it easy for readers to understand whether a product meets their requirements. The affiliate link provided will take you directly to your online shop.

Get Out Of The Silos

Partnerships are an integral part of any performance marketing strategy. However, you can pursue very different goals: brand awareness, the presentation of new products, target group development, or discount campaigns. If all these activities are viewed in isolation in various dashboards, networks, or simply in Excel, a valid measurement of success is almost impossible.

As different as the goals of partnerships can be, they go through the same lifecycle and are mutually dependent. To view the entire customer journey as a process being monetized in concert, we need to break down these silos.

Tracking And Reporting Structures Are Standard

Data-based success measurements are only reliable if all of our data can be compared. Data sets collected at different interfaces should, if possible, monitor parameters and KPIs using the same rules. If the parameters used to measure the success of influencer A and influencer B are not 100 percent congruent, their successes are not optimally comparable. Especially not when there are many data sets and automation comes into play.

The Solution: A single source of truth, as it is called in the software sector, i.e., the central point where data is collected uniformly and can be viewed by everyone. This also pays off when we want to compare influencers and commerce content. Both partner disciplines function according to their success models. Nevertheless, it makes sense for both categories to draw from a standardised KPIs pool and weight them differently.

Also Read: Affiliate Marketing: The Benefits For Your E-Commerce