From shoes to stereos to sweet travel deals, you can promote anything using affiliate publishers. And if you do use affiliates, you’re in good company. More than four in five brands use affiliate marketing, and affiliates drive 16% of all online orders.
By leveraging affiliate channels, marketers can share personalized offers with numerous consumer communities, such as students, teachers, or the military. In return, the affiliate publishers earn a commission.
Brands use verification to preserve the integrity of these offers. Affiliate-based verification gives your brand access to a portion of your target audience, but it actually restricts your ability to fully leverage all the affiliate publishers and communities that cater to your target audience. This limits revenue potential.
You can best maximize your personalized offers by digitally verifying shoppers with an identity marketing platform. Then you can promote your offer through all the relevant affiliate communities and sites. Personalized offers can see 3x more traffic if they are promoted by multiple affiliate publishers instead of just one.
Follow the Money: Why You Need Digital Verification
Digital verification is vendor agnostic. Using it increases your channel marketing options because multiple publishers will help you reach your audience in exchange for commission on purchases.
Many affiliate-based verification providers, on the other hand, are set up to receive last-touch attribution. Because of this, most affiliate publishers won’t promote your targeted offers, and who can blame them? They would forfeit their commission.
Most affiliate communities and marketplaces are also reluctant to send consumers to these verification providers because they don’t want to help them grow their membership base. The providers are the competition.
Not only does affiliate-based verification cost more in the long run, it also delivers a poor customer experience and has a number of other risks and limitations. The comparison table below highlights the difference between the two methods.
7 Steps to Maximizing Your Affiliate Program
Here’s how to amplify your affiliate program with digital verification:
01 Pick the Community That Fits Your Brand
Determine the attributes of your target market, such as age, gender, income level, how they spend their time, and any known preferences. Most brands already do this when they develop their target personas. Then you map your personas to a consumer community you can reach through an identity marketing program.
02 Create an Attractive Offer
Consumer communities respond well to brands that honor their identity with personalized offers. Sixty-four percent of teachers say that getting a teacher-specific discount makes them feel valued. And 65% of the military say receiving a personalized offer makes them feel supported.
03 Digitally Verify Customers with an Identity Marketing Platform
With digital verification, customers are instantly verified using only the data they are most willing to provide, a frictionless experience they appreciate. The identity marketing platform uses 200,000 authoritative data sources to ensure the security and integrity of your offer, reducing fraud—especially among students with .edu email addresses.
04 Promote Your Offer through All Your Channels
Digital verification through an identity marketing platform is white-label, so you can share your offer broadly on your other existing channels—website, email, social media, paid and organic search, referrals, and content marketing.
05 Promote the Offer through Any and All Affiliates
Identity marketing is compatible with all affiliate programs, so all affiliate publishers will promote your offer—instead of just one. For example, if you offer a military discount, MilitaryTimes.com and ArmyWife101.com will publish it. Brands using this strategy typically see triple the traffic.
06 Nurture Ongoing Engagement with the Customer Data You Collect
Your affiliate marketing program is great for customer acquisition. However, the real power of that first sale is the opportunity for future sales that grow your customer lifetime value (CLTV). Digital verification provides you with zero-party data to drive nurture programs and create lifelong customers. Brands using digital verification can see ROAS as high as 25:1.
07 Track and Optimize Your Program
As with any marketing effort, be sure to examine how well the campaign is performing. Use the platform’s dashboard to measure the revenue generated and fraud prevented, and to review verification analytics and conversion metrics. Look at which programs drive the most traffic, which segments drive demand, and how many of your customers are instantly verified, and then optimize accordingly.
Make the Most of Your Affiliate Marketing Program
Affiliate marketing is a powerful channel for delivering personalized marketing to consumer communities. And using digital verification to secure those offers costs less, provides a better customer experience, and delivers greater returns for your brand.
Read our e-book: The Definitive Guide to Identity Marketing
