In 2021, affiliate marketing has made significant progress forward, and affiliate networks have played a key part in the industry’s growth.
In fact, according to recent studies, 82% of advertisers now employ affiliate networks and rely on them to obtain relationships with publishers.
There are several ways they continue to provide value to their partners and increase revenue. Still, one approach in particular that forward-thinking affiliate networks have effectively tapped into is lead collection and management.
Lead management, a natural extension of an existing affiliate marketing program, offers new potential to monetize leads beyond what is achievable with click traffic. Marketers use redirects to send traffic to their advertisers, and then… the visitors just click away, leaving for good.
However, what if I tell you that you can take all this converted traffic and store them as leads?
We’ll go over why affiliate networks should care about lead management, as well as the advantages of combining affiliate marketing and lead management in a single platform – as we do in Scaleo’s affiliate marketing software.
Why is lead management important?
Lead management is a marketing procedure that entails real-time lead capture, validation, and distribution.
Here’s how it works.
Lead generation produces a “lead,” which is a website visitor who has completed a web form by supplying their contact information or made a purchase through an affiliate link, but without completing the payment.
The submission form might be basic, requiring only an email address, or more sophisticated, which means it may have many personal information details, or details of the affiliate purchase.
The primary advantage of lead management for affiliate networks is that it allows them to monetize leads in ways that click traffic can not be monetized, which means over and over again.
The lead management tool also enables affiliate networks to sell targeted leads at the best possible price. Pricing per lead might vary, just like with anything else – better-quality traffic and leads are priced higher.
For example, in the legal vertical, especially in B2B – a well-qualified lead can be sold for a few hundred dollars.
At this point, you may ask – if affiliate networks are making a profit off commissions, why would they want to engage in lead management anyway?
The answer is simple: additional revenue.
But there’s more to it than that.
Here are a few more compelling reasons why affiliate networks should incorporate lead management into their marketing strategy.
Strengthens relationships
As you may know, affiliate networks are already experts at establishing and leveraging associations with their affiliate partners.
Lead management tool allows networks to further cultivate these relationships while providing the most value to everyone – affiliates, advertisers, and lead buyers.
Affiliate networks bring additional value to advertiser-publisher relationships through lead management by playing a larger role in obtaining higher-quality leads.
Affiliates receive access to a larger audience of buyers, whilst lead buyers/advertisers are paired with sellers who offer qualified leads. In both scenarios, all audiences achieve the best results in terms of ROI.
Expanding the field
Today, an increasing number of publishers are taking advantage of these collaboration opportunities.
Given advertisers’ healthy forward-looking predictions for affiliate spending, there is still plenty of room for development.
The growth potential of your affiliate marketing business is doubled by incorporating lead management features. Here are two ways for affiliate networks to increase their relationship with advertisers and affiliates.
- Networks can sell a single lead to a number of advertisers or lead buyers.
- While using existing affiliates and advertisers in currently targeted verticals, networks can generate incremental revenue.
- Furthermore, they can open up new opportunities in other verticals, broadening their base to include partnering with new affiliates and advertisers.
Greater control
Affiliates typically control the content and traffic that advertisers are interested in with affiliate marketing, making their online media platforms important assets for advertisers to utilize.
Advertisers create a win-win situation for both parties by allowing publishers to monetize their traffic.
Affiliate networks benefit from lead management as well. They have the ability to precisely manage the quality of affiliate-driven traffic flowing through their network. Instead of transferring traffic from the publisher/affiliate to the advertiser and hoping for conversion, the lead management addon presents the option to delegate the process of leads management to the hands of affiliate networks.
This gives them control over the data as well as the user experience, content, and conversion points via administering landing pages.
It is critical for affiliate networks to be equipped with the appropriate technologies. One of the most important factors advertisers consider when choosing an affiliate network is the diversity of tools the affiliate network supplies for analytics and publication.
This is true for both affiliate marketing and lead generation.
The value of connecting the management of various programs on a single platform can not be overstated for affiliate networks operating both types of businesses.
Customers vs. Leads
Lead management is frequently cited as a feature when discussing customer relationship management (CRM), making it difficult to distinguish between the two concepts.
Here’s how it works:
- A Prospect: is a person who falls into your target demographic and market.
- A Lead: is a person in your target demographic and market who is interested in learning more about the solutions you provide, but did not yet make a payment.
- A customer: is someone who has completed the purchase.
Although this appears to be obvious, even a simple process can become complicated when your company continues to generate a range of sales opportunities. Lead management increases the effectiveness of your sales force by building a pool of interested consumers and then weeding out unqualified leads.
Remember that it is more efficient for a sales representative to call 10 quality leads, rather than 100 unqualified ones.
Conclusion
Lead management is an opportunity, which, when done effectively, has the potential to be the next great revenue growth driver for all affiliate networks who choose to implement it. Contact our customer support directly if you want to learn more about the lead management addon for Scaleo’s affiliate marketing software.
Last Updated on January 17, 2024
