As an affiliate marketer, you’re incredibly familiar with the importance of customer acquisition, and how effective affiliate programs can be to get new customers in the door. In fact, a study from the National Retail Federation found that 38% of marketers call affiliate marketing one of the top customer acquisition methods.
However, equally important to the overall growth of your business is also the other side of that coin: customer retention and conversion. While AM Navigator reported that in most affiliate programs, less than 10% of affiliates drive 90% of traffic and conversions, many affiliate marketers may find that generating loyalty through affiliate programs can be a major challenge. Since acquiring customers is done solely through your publisher, you can’t connect and personalize those customer’s experience, right? Wrong.
Affiliate programs have a unique opportunity that’s often overlooked by the people who run them: The ability to increase customer loyalty, personalization, and conversions through exclusive offers for specific customer segments like students, teachers, and the military. And with simple yet secure verification solutions, like SheerID’s, you can get even more out of these offers than you thought possible.
Here’s just a few ways exclusive offers backed by verification can benefit your affiliate program:
- Gated offers give you the power to bring instant relevancy to your messaging. Since personalization is absolutely necessary in today’s retail climate – Marketo found that 63% of shoppers are highly annoyed when brands continue to rely on generic ad messages that aren’t personalized – being able to tailor messaging to specific customers gives you a major advantage, especially when working in an affiliate setting. Additionally, creating relevant messaging around certain times of year, like military offers over Memorial Day, or student and educator offers during back-to-school, can instantly differentiate you from the competition.
- Exclusive offers allow you to test different offers on a small group of people where the publisher already understands their demographics. If you’re hesitant about creating a discount, or offering a discount to a certain demographic, one of the great things about an exclusive offer through your affiliate program is the ability to test different offers on an already interested audience. And when working with a publisher who targets and knows the wants and needs of the demographic, you’re in a great position to win repeat business and gain those customer’s loyalty long-term. Whether it’s a short-term offer for a specific holiday, like a military promotion over Veteran’s Day, or an evergreen offer to students, you can see what works best for your business while also generating conversions from your target consumers.
- An exclusive offer that includes verification allows you to gather actionable information about customers who verify and purchase. While exclusive offers are an effective tool to reach specific customers, its effectiveness multiplies when you add in the benefits of verification technology. With verification in place, your customers voluntarily share information about themselves, such as their location or affiliation, that you can then use to create personalized messaging to stay connected to those verified customers. This strategy to re-engage these customers can help you develop a more loyal customer in the long-term.
- Having verification in place makes it possible to increase conversion rates by re-marketing to consumers who don’t convert. Along the same lines as creating personalized messaging to re-engage customers who verify their status and make a purchases, verification also gives you the power to increase conversion rates down the road by re-marketing to those who verify successfully and receive a coupon code, but choose not to redeem it. This re-engagement and follow up you would not have been able to do otherwise, can lead to a purchase as a result. In addition, you can also convert those who did NOT successful verify by creating a secondary offer such as free shipping or a smaller discount. Since you know these customers tried for a discount and are in purchasing mode, another offer may pique their interest enough to buy.
There are many ways exclusive offers can benefit your affiliate program – these are just a few that top the list. Ultimately, the potential for personalized communications and re-engagement as a means to create loyalty and conversions dramatically increases when these offers are available, especially with verification in place. And with 67% of shoppers telling Accenture they would purchase items from different stores or websites to get the lowest price, the more attractive and targeted you can make your offers, the better.
Talk to our team at SheerID today to see learn more about exclusive offers, verification, and how we can help your affiliate program reach its true potential.
