Written by Eric Laughlin, Strategic Partnerships Manager at Awin. Awin is one of the founding members of The APMA and a global, award-winning affiliate marketing platform.
The growth of technology partners
Technology partners in the affiliate channel have achieved strong growth in performance and popularity amongst brands and agencies over the past few years. Since 2022, Awin has seen a 20% increase in active technology partners across its platform, and in 2023 revenue driven by technology partners grew by 9%.
The increasing number of partnerships year-over-year between technology providers and merchants stems from a combination of factors, from easier integrations and flexible partnerships, to an ever-expanding list of unique solutions available within the affiliate channel.
For technology partners, the attraction of establishing partnerships with enterprise level brands, fast growing SMEs and everything in between, has led to the affiliate channel becoming an integral part of their strategy. For advertisers, they’ve gained the ability to source, launch, and test various solutions with limited technical or financial risk.
A technology partner for every stage of the funnel
Building out a strong upper-funnel to generate increased traffic and visits to a brand’s webpage is at the top of every marketers mind. How do I increase user visits to my website? Often thought of as offering conversion-only tools, technology partners can enable other high-performing solutions to drive more traffic to merchants’ websites. Influencer and social media technology partners can increase reach with a brand’s target audiences. Connected TV (CTV) campaigns in the US can help them reach new customers in a historically CPM-orientated and expensive channel. Comparison Shopping Services (CSS), launched as a result of Google’s breach of the EU’s antitrust laws, give brands in Europe more exposure on Google Shopping. The last two solutions are also great examples of region-specific solutions that are based on market variances and subsequent monetisation opportunities.
Technology partners that offer campaigns aimed at improving discoverability, personalisation and conversion are extensive in number as are the KPIs they can optimise. Brands with low average baskets or attach rates can work with product bundling or product recommendation partners, while those looking to reduce bounce rates and improve conversions may consider a bounce recovery partner or an exit intent strategy. The goal of technology partners operating lower in the funnel is to address the merchant’s challenges and concerns around optimising user navigation or improving conversion rates. Improving specific metrics while driving incremental revenue at an efficient ROAS is a core function of technology partners.
Lastly, the post-purchase phase of the user journey is just as important as pre and purchase phases, if not more, and there are technology partners that can help here as well. Engaging with users who have already made a purchase helps brands improve their loyalty, retention rates and customer lifetime value. Solutions that improve the customer experience and offer the user additional benefits or personalisation are incredibly powerful at enhancing those metrics. Email re-marketing solutions are an amazing tool to re-engage with customers and reduce internal resource allocation for the campaign. Referral marketing solutions turn your users into a source of new customers by offering rewards linked to new purchasers they refer. Finally, a brand-to-brand technology provider can enable a net-new revenue stream for brands interested in promoting other brands products on their website.
It’s clear that technology partners have established themselves as unique and integral partners within the affiliate channel. At every stage of the user journey, technology partners offer efficient, reliable and goal-oriented solutions based on the needs and challenges of the brands.
No technical deployment needed
These partnerships can be easily enabled through their existing relationships with affiliate platforms. On Awin, these solutions are integrated into the Advertiser MasterTag meaning deployment won’t require involvement from a merchant’s technical team. Some technology partners can be activated with a single click using Awin’s one-click activation. From there, the rest is taken care of; tracking, reporting and invoicing are managed through the affiliate channel, products feeds can be accessed from the platform and custom implementations like data parameters or link structure set-ups are established on activation.
Some additional benefits include:
- Strong ROAS with flexible commercial structures (CPA, Monthly licence fee, hybrid payments)
- Metric-centric solutions aimed at solving brand’s challenges; AOV, CR, Customer LV, Bounce Rates, Traffic, Margin Efficiency, etc.
- Seamless deployment into existing channel rules, guidelines and processes through the affiliate channel
Advanced reporting; Product level tracking, multi-touch attribution, device and transaction level details
The marketing solution you need is just a partnership away
The affiliate channel offers great opportunity for brands to take advantage of technology partners without long development queues or high upfront spend.
Their influence across the entirety of the user journey also gives brands exceptional flexibility to establish meaningful partnerships aimed at achieving metric-driven results. As the suite of technology partners continues to expand, new and exciting technologies will become available. The best thing about technology partners in affiliates is that there is always an innovative partner or solution available at your fingertips. If there is a challenge faced by a brand, there is a technology partner that can help solve it; it’s just a partnership away.
About the Author:
Eric Laughlin is an affiliate marketing expert who specialises in helping brands activate value-driven strategic partnerships. His background in account management, knowledge of the technology partner landscape and understanding of common e-commerce challenges makes finding the right partnership effortless.
Are you interested in working with one of Awin’s technology partners? Submit your enquiry here.
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