4 Best Practices for Affiliate Marketing Success

As affiliate marketers become more sophisticated in their ability to offer highly targeted traffic sources, brand marketers will respond with more of their advertising dollars. However, as these brands turn time and again to cost-per-action (CPA) affiliate marketing to reach new customers and generate leads, they need to know the best practices in order to achieve real-time results. Here are four best practices brands should employ in their affiliate marketing programs:

1. Demonstrate real value in your campaigns. To gain consumers’ attention, offer an exclusive online deal or a buy one, get one free type of offer. If there's no perceived value in a campaign, even the largest brand can fail in online marketing. Unless a brand’s offer is particularly eye-catching, it may well end up ignored compared to the hundreds of other offers consumers are exposed to on a daily basis.

2. Be timely and current. With CPA campaigns, advertisers can find a hook to tie into nearly every season throughout the year, as well as have the ability to modify their offers to coincide with upcoming events. For example, a florist can offer half-off flowers for Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Easter, or other appropriate holidays. Special occasions, trends, seasons and news stories can serve as triggers to get consumers to respond to a CPA campaign.

3. Build a relationship with a reputable ad network. Your brand reputation is priceless. It's taken time, money and effort to perfect, therefore it's vital to protect it at all times. Advertisers have a competitive advantage when they work closely with ad networks that oversee their publishers’ campaigns and ensure a compliant environment. By partnering with a network that's ready and willing to face greater scrutiny from the Federal Trade Commission in the performance marketing industry, brands can be confident that their offers won't be compromised.

4. Take advantage of high-quality leads and customer loyalty. Consumers are typically driven by their brand loyalty to respond to a CPA ad. Therefore, you're more likely to obtain customers that already have strong empathy and trust for your brand. They have a potentially high lifetime value to your brand, so use this data to enhance consumers’ profiles. Using other modeling techniques and taking into account a consumer’s demographic, brand marketers may even be able to predict what the next purchase will be from each newly acquired customer and therefore can remarket to them in the future.

As brands look to extend the reach and effectiveness of their advertising efforts, CPA affiliate marketing is becoming a go-to tool. With a controlled return on investment, 100 percent accountability and increased compliance efforts, it’s easy to see why brands embrace CPA campaigns. Such campaigns offer advertisers a cost-effective solution to accessing a wealth of new prospects. By exploiting the points above, brand marketers can boost their customer base and bottom line equally.

Greg Bayer is general manager of Adknowledge Affiliate, a provider of performance-based digital advertising solutions. Greg can be reached at affiliates@adknowledge.com.