Starting your own affiliate marketing program is one thing, but maintaining it is something different. The only way to do it without going insane is to automate it as much as possible.
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As your website grows, keeping track of performance, responding to your affiliates’ questions, and maintaining your links becomes more complicated.
Employing an automated approach to affiliate marketing offers a more comfortable, more powerful way of tracking and managing your affiliate program and its’ associated activity. It allows you to monitor results employing real-time insights and leverage better control over your campaigns.
In this post, we’ll discuss 3 ways how you can automate your affiliate marketing program. So, let’s get started with affiliate automation!
The Purpose of Automation in Affiliate Marketing
It’s challenging to concentrate on building and sustaining affiliate relationships, let alone getting new leads – when you’re dragged down by the daunting tasks associated with running your affiliate program.
A lot that fits into effective management:
- Gaining and vetting prospects
- Tracking and managing affiliate activity
- Analyzing and evaluating campaign results
- Providing rewards and incentives
Still, automating these tasks can help you save time and increase your business performance.
In turn, you’ll be ready to direct your attention to other marketing initiatives and engagements.
With affiliate automation tools and software, you can:
- Provide affiliate support, resources, and training.
- Collect data and scale campaign performance with real-time metrics.
- Automate logistics, such as making and controlling payments.
Automation won’t just give you more time and versatility. It may also deliver better insight into your business’ performance. Real-time analytics allow you to make better decisions to improve your affiliate program’s marketing strategy and beyond.
Taking an automated approach will help reduce legwork, guesswork, and manual work from many aspects of your affiliate program.
Why not focus on driving leads, results, and revenue instead of performing tasks that can be outsourced by a computer?
3 Ways You Can Use Automation In Affiliate Marketing Business
If you’d like your affiliate marketing program to succeed, you will need the right tools in place. Let’s have a look at 3 ways you can employ automation to improve your affiliate strategy.
Add Affiliate Marketing Software To Your Business
As obvious as it may sound, one of your affiliate business’s most essential elements is an affiliate marketing software – a platform your business actually runs on.
This is a step that requires your attention because if you choose the wrong platform to run your business on, you will risk your entire business once you will e switching to another software.
If you pick the right affiliate software, you will be able to perform all the tasks that I have already mentioned above (analyze, optimize in real-time, and improve the campaign’s performance).
Having an easy to follow dashboard and putting all the tasks related to affiliate marketing on autopilot will save you time and money and a lot of staff members’ management.
You can use an affiliate marketing software to:
- View the performance of each individual affiliate.
- Send out automatic payouts.
- View each campaign’s performance (and improve it).
- Redirect traffic from dead links.
- Detect fraudulent traffic and prevent click fraud.
If you are looking for an affiliate software to power your business, check out Scaleo’s 14-days free trial. It’s compatible with WooCommerce and Shopify and comes packed with all the features you are looking for in an affiliate software.
Add a Chatbot to Automate Affiliate Inquiries
A chatbot is a pre-programmed instant messaging platform that you add to your website in order to automate communication and improve customer experience.
You probably have seen a chat icon on hundreds of websites that pop up as soon as you land on a page, asking if it can help? It often has an avatar photo of a staff member or just a bot icon.
The text-chat interface basically acts as a support agent to manage basic questions and problems.
Attaching a chatbot to your affiliate website can better automate many aspects of your affiliate program.
For example, you can use a chatbot to:https://www.scaleo.io/blog/conversational-marketing-what-is-it-and-how-to-utilize-it/
- Reply to repeated inquiries from affiliates.
- Obtain leads through collecting their information.
- Render support 24/7, even when you’re not online.
- Respond and fix fundamental issues quickly.
Let’s say a visitor is interested in joining your affiliate program. Through your chatbot messages, you can direct them to a landing page for registration.
Another utilization of a chatbot would be providing answers to FAQ or sending affiliates to commonly demanded resources.
Don’t forget to read our post about chatbots.
Shorten Links To Hide An Affiliate ID
Another tool that most affiliates use is a URL shortener. Since many people don’t want to disclose their affiliation or are afraid that people will not be willing to buy, knowing you recommend a product you get paid for.
Another good reason is social media, where long URLs are discouraged.
Affiliate links are a crucial aspect of your program. The Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) parameters in affiliate links are required for monitoring campaign efficiency. They are inconvenient.
Moreover, you need to continually check what link leads to what campaign. And make sure users do not get confused.
You can add a URL shorter to your affiliate software directly in the form of an add-on or plugin, or you can use third-party software to automatically shorten the URLs affiliates will be generating on their affiliate panel.
This will put the link-sharing on autopilot and prevent affiliates from not copying the entire long affiliate link and sending traffic to a dead end.
Conclusion
To make your affiliate program successful, it’s vital to have the best tools to automate the process.
By leveraging automation, you can increase your business’s efficiency, allowing you to improve your results days after day.
Of course, you may also need dozens of other tools that put the money-making process on auto-pilot, and we will cover them in the upcoming posts.
