Do you want to know what affiliate marketing automation is exactly? And do you want to know how to set up a marketing automation campaign within a few hours? This article explains what affiliate marketing automation is exactly, what the benefits are, and how you can start with affiliate marketing automation yourself.
Do you want to know what affiliate marketing automation is exactly?
And do you want to know how to set up a marketing automation campaign within a few hours? This article explains what affiliate marketing automation is exactly, what the benefits are, and how you can start with affiliate marketing automation yourself.
As an internet agency, we mainly design and build websites. We often help with affiliate marketing automation campaigns because the websites must facilitate registration forms, lead generation, or landing pages.
We know quite well what affiliate marketing automation entails in practice. I noticed that many articles about affiliate marketing automation usually do not convey what it is really about.
Because it is actually straightforward.
What is Affiliate Marketing Automation?
Affiliate marketing automation is the automation of communication between your organization and the target group. This can be as simple as a confirmation e-mail following the use of a contact form to sending an SMS when a product is ready to be delivered.
At first, this does not sound very personal, but it often feels like it for the target group. Therefore, communication is experienced as very pleasant.
Large organizations mainly use affiliate marketing automation. Still, it can also be very interesting for smaller organizations that do not employ a large marketing team.
Advantages of affiliate marketing automation:
- You will considerably spare your customer service, support desk, and telephone service by giving feedback at the right times. You can pass on a confirmation that an application has been received or that you are processing it, and it will take an additional x number of days. Even after delivery, you can provide customers with information and tips that ensure that your customers can get started and use your product or service successfully.
- You remain ‘top of mind.’ When someone has visited your website, fill in the contact form, or sign up for the newsletter, it can sometimes take a while before you are back in the picture with that person. Through affiliate marketing automation, you can continue to provide this person with information so that the feeling that there was during the visit remains on the website and is reinforced.
- It ‘goes without saying,’. Compared to normal marketing, where someone within the organization always has to pick up the phone, and send a newsletter or brochure, this form of marketing is automatic. This also guarantees continuity if there should be more continuity in the growth of orders, customers, and/or members.
An affiliate marketing automation campaign for beginners
How do you set up an affiliate marketing automation campaign without hiring a specialist and without spending days on this?
As a challenge, I set up an affiliate marketing automation campaign for ourselves. We automatically provide people who sign up for our newsletter with more or less personalized newsletters. These are based on their click behavior in the days/weeks after the first registration. I looked at if I could set this up in a day, and it ended up being 3.5 hours.
The supplies:
- A newsletter service such as mailchimp.com or campaignmonitor.com.
- Some interesting content items. This can be in blogs, articles, news, podcasts, videos, or whitepapers.
Don’t have any content at all?
Then I advise you to get started with this first. In addition to setting up an affiliate marketing automation campaign later, Google will also find your website a lot more interesting and send visitors to your website.
The tool we use to send our newsletters is Campaign Monitor. Still, you can set up an affiliate marketing automation campaign with both newsletter services.
Both services are among the most used e-marketing services globally, and when one offers a new function, it often doesn’t take long for the other to offer it. Campaign Monitor is slightly more business-like in terms of interface and, therefore, a bit clearer, but that is largely taste.
The journey
For example, a campaign monitor refers to the affiliate marketing automation campaign you can set up yourself. This ‘journey’ refers to the ‘customer journey.’ A marketing term refers to the journey a customer takes from the moment they receive attention for what is being offered until well after the purchase.
The journey referred to in campaign monitor is much shorter and is usually at the front of the customer journey, still in the proof, consideration portion.
In the journey that I will set up, I want to keep it simple and use the registrations for our newsletter. In this newsletter, we send teasers of three new articles published on our website.
We don’t write that many articles, and so it can sometimes take weeks or even months for someone to send a newsletter. Of course, we don’t really stay ‘top of mind.’
Via affiliate marketing automation, we can still provide subscribers to our newsletter with content designed according to their interests. Personalizing is a lot easier than you might think at first.
The first step after registration is to send a welcome email. In this email, in addition to ‘thank you for registering,’ we also send three teasers of articles that we know are popular, generate many clicks, and represent a larger group of articles on our websites. In other words, if anyone is interested in one of these teasers, we have even more to send.
Measure and expand your affiliate marketing campaign
Of course, I can make the affiliate marketing automation campaign a lot more complex and nuanced. The campaign is now quite passive. For example, I could also send the members of the newsletter information about our services or an example of a project we have done. Maybe I’ll add that after all, but the great thing about a marketing automation journey is that you can always adjust it based on statistics.
For example, you can replace content that performs less well over time. You can test with a different layout or a different form. Maybe a newsletter with only one article (message) can work even better. That is one of the advantages of the internet. Marketing and communication can be set up according to your own insight but can be tested by figures and statistics.
Do you have any questions about affiliate marketing automation in general or your campaign’s design? Then I am happy to read and answer it in the comment section at the bottom of this page.
Last Updated on November 28, 2023
