Affiliate marketing is one of the most effective and probably the oldest marketing channel on the internet. Due to its impact on sales, affiliate marketing is still much popular. But there's no denying the fact that affiliate marketing is evolving into partner marketing and this is a good thing for marketers and business proprietors.
As the professional relationship between an affiliate and the brand is entirely based on the well-established performance-based model, their business objectives are usually well aligned and allow for scale.
Original affiliate marketing
Around the late 1990s & early 2000s, the affiliate marketers were busy driving web traffic and increasing sales for brands. These usually included publishers like loyalty sites, content, cashback, coupons etc.
Measuring the marketing performance then was fairly decent, with the brands and companies tracking the affiliate-driven conversion and pay out commission for the online purchases and sales that are driven by each of the individual affiliates.
This type of relationship between affiliates and marketers were managed by an affiliate network that used to specialize in finding affiliates, tracking conversions and processing commissions.
Marketing technology
Over the last decade, the marketing function that has been revolutionized throughout the wide technological deployment, the automated function of marketing, collected information about consumer journeys across every marketing touch points, and increased highly customized advertising as well as media buying.
While the advancements in technology have been staggering, the improvements in usability added to the ability to integrate the marketing processes and data flow across all the marketing functions, CRM records, channels etc. allows the leading marketers to use marketing technology for their own group, reducing the need for relying on a 3d party intermediation.
Expansion of the partner categories & channels
In last few years, the leading marketers have extended their performance-based measurements and commission system, and also its ability for scaling beyond the conventional affiliates, to include the meta search engines, mobile apps, aggregators etc. Especially, in last years, mobile apps development and their usage have increased exponentially.
This type of partners and the expansion on various channels indeed call for the expanded category name and partner marketing seems to be more fitting.
Data at scale
Rapid expansion of sophisticated, new channels and partners demanded an equally yet balanced amount of sophisticated insights, analytics, and reward infrastructures. To address these demands, an excessive amount of granular conversion data is required.
Today, the brands and companies want to achieve highly granular conversion, meaningful data, including the product category, SKU, new returning consumers, location, time, channel, LTV, device, online, offline etc.
Companies use this data to evaluate and understand the conversion costs, partner and channel category performance & efficiency, profitability across products, promotions etc.
These detailed analytical data and the actionable insights give the opportunity to advertisers for managing key partners, partner & product categories, channels, promotions, etc. more efficiently. This will drive higher revenues from more profitable products and at the same time, increasing the operational efficiencies.
The advertisers also use their performance data to evaluate potential profitable tiered reward system, mostly based on metrics like total conversions, consumed or booked conversion, premium conversions, etc.
Advertiser & marketing partner alignment
The tiered reward system aligned the advertisers’ and the partners’ objectives with higher rewards for a more profitable conversion or sale.
Optimizing and dividing campaigns and promotions performance looking forwards requires that the brands and the advertisers share same collected, anonymous data with their own marketing partners. The shared data allows the marketing partners to transparently identify how they could optimize their own contents and the audience targeting segmentation efforts for driving more profitable conversions to the advertisers for generating higher commission. This created true alignment between the advertisers and their partners in marketing.
And that is how the affiliate marketing evolved into today’s partner marketing.
