How You Optimize Your Customer Journey with Partner Marketing

1. What is partner marketing?
2. How to use partner marketing
3. These affiliate platforms are suitable for your partner marketing
4. Conclusion: Vitamin B is and remains the most valuable asset

According to the Hightech Association BITKOM, German companies are now earning every sixth Euro online. You see, e-commerce is booming! That's why multichannel - the interaction and selling through various channels - is on everyone's lips. Many companies benefit from budget-friendly affiliate and partner marketing models, by collaborating with partners such as in the technology sector on a performance basis.

Partner marketing can support you in your entire customer journey: from the pre-purchase, through the purchase to the post-purchase phase. The biggest challenges for online shops and online marketers arise from the constant change in the industries: speed and agility are a must to keep up or even be at the very front. Shortage of skilled workers, delivery bottlenecks and rising inflation with falling consumer confidence unfortunately belong to the daily work routine in many companies. The conclusion is often a reduction of the marketing budget.

We show using the so-called clock model, how partner marketing can be the key in budget-poor times.

What is partner marketing?

Partner marketing is an umbrella term and encompasses four important marketing segments: affiliate marketing, technology partners, brand partnership and influencer marketing.

1. Affiliate Marketing

The gigantic world of affiliate marketing is shown by Mhojhos Research: the worldwide market amounts to over 17 billion US dollars. Affiliate Marketing belongs to performance marketing. Sellers - so-called publishers - run their own website, in which they tailor and integrate advertising to their target audience. They receive aremuneration for mediated sales (profit shares) from dealers - so-called merchants. The job of the publisher is, among other things, to increase traffic on the advertiser's website. In return, he or she receives a commission like e.g. CPA.

2. Technology partners

Through collaboration with technology partners in partner marketing valuable website tools for optimizing the customer journey can be connected simply and uncomplicatedly via the commission model and, for example, shopping carts and conversion rates can be increased. The great advantage here: you don't have to provide any resources internally yourself, so your teams can continue to focus on core business.

3. Brand Partnerships

Brand Partnerships refers to the cooperation between (at least) two brands. As part of partner marketing, cooperation also usually takes place here on a commission basis. Brand partnerships make sense especially when you work with brands that offer products or services that match your own. Both sides benefit from reaching new and especially relevant target groups. Here, a strong network is needed to identify optimal brand partners and start cooperation.

4. Influencer Marketing

Also Influencer Marketing belongs to partner marketing. According to a study, 88% of consumers - 83% of men and 89% of women - were once inspired by influencers in their buying decision. Influencers are people with a large reach and/or a big influence on your target audience. The focus is mainly on improving one's own image, but also on boosting sales.

How to use partner marketing

As already mentioned, partner marketing can help you in all phases of the customer journey. How, is best shown by the clock model of marketing professor (New York University) and Pivot podcast co-host Scott Galloway. He uses the clock model to illustrate the use of touchpoints.
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⁠Partner marketing is not only interesting for the pre-purchase phase. It runs through your entire customer journey. The biggest challenges for online shops and online marketers arise from the constant change in the industries: Speed and agility are a must to keep up or even be at the very front. Shortage of skilled workers, delivery bottlenecks and rising inflation with falling consumer confidence unfortunately belong to the daily work routine in many companies. The conclusion is often a reduction of the marketing budget.

We show by means of the so-called Clock Model how partner marketing can also be the key in budget-poor times. The model is based on the understanding of the marketing professor (New York University) and Pivot podcast co-host Scott Galloway. He uses the clock model to illustrate the use of touchpoints.

After purchase is before purchase

The classical use of affiliates to improve the initial phase - i.e., boost website traffic and generate more leads. Galloway advises e-commerce companies to concentrate not only on the first phase. Affiliate marketing networks offer a wide selection of influencers, brand partners, technology partners and classic affiliates like cashback sites or mass media, so companies with a diverse partner portfolio and modern marketing technologies can support all three phases according to the clock model and thus optimize the user experience.

How can partner marketing help you?

Working with different affiliate partner types through an affiliate marketing network has many benefits:

• Increase your traffic
• Winning new target groups
• Improving your conversion rate
• Personalizing your website
• Increasing your AVOs (Average Order Value)
• Automating your upselling
• Integration of intelligent discounts

Your company remains agile and continues to pursue its own strategic direction, while achieving its goals with technology partners and other partner types.

The partner marketing success story of Samsung

Samsung used the affiliate network Awin, to quickly find suitable technology partners using the central tracking set-up. The choice fell on UpSelling, an on-site specialist who promptly improved the user experience on their website. Thus, Samsung was able to quickly introduce and test a new solution to see if it worked as well as they imagined, rather than queuing up with their idea in a long internal development queue.

Thanks to the collaboration, the British Samsung website has personalized recommendations based on the shopping cart and alternative product recommendations for out-of-stock goods. This led to huge added value for website users and increases in conversion rate and sales. Samsung then extended the partnership beyond the UK, benefiting even more European markets.

These affiliate platforms are suitable for your partner marketing

There are several great networks for your partner marketing. A global affiliate marketing network we recommend is Awin from our previous example. Whether you want to boost your visibility, win new customers or increase your brand loyalty - it offers innovative technology partners, brand partners, influencers and classic affiliate partners for every phase of your customer journey. Thus you can consider the improvement of your user experience and your marketing actions via a single portal and precisely analyze which part your partners (instead of technology partners) contribute to your company growth.

Three main focuses of Awin are:

• Expansion of online business
• Access to pool with tested affiliate partners with low-risk business models
• Account management with insights including automatic payment processing

How effective word of mouth is, is underlined by a Edelman study: A whopping 77% of consumers make purchase decisions based on reviews. The fact is, who shops on a website that stands out with an excellent user experience, is likely to become a repeat offender, praises providers in conversations with friends and acquaintances. In the best case, happy users leave a positive Google review. Whether in personal conversation or in writing on the net: this kind of recommendation is the most authentic and high-quality advertising.

Popular Awin Technology Partners

Last year alone, Awin advertisers were able to generate revenues of more than 300 million pounds with their technology partners. We introduce you to two popular technology partners.

Technology partner for the pre-purchase phase: Intent.ly

Intent.ly specializes in conversion optimization and offers a wide range of technologies for this purpose. The company provides access to its intelligent on-site overlays. So far, intent.ly has enabled revenues of more than 1.5 million pounds for small businesses.

Technology Partner for the Post-Purchase Phase: Bounce Commerce

Bounce Commerce offers AI-based bounce management, website optimization and customer retention through intelligent purchase incentives, such as product recommendations, which are presented to a user based on their search behavior and product preferences. Studies by Bounce Commerce have shown that up to 30% of users who would leave a shop because they have not found the right product are addressed again through the technology. In some online shops, the share of new customers through the technology of Bounce Commerce even exceeds 50%.

Users call it the "affiliate network par excellence for DACH" and praise it in the OMR Reviews Ratings because of its

• mature technology and its large pool of potential partners,
• uncomplicated and smooth handling,
• short response time.

If you have questions about the network that delivers your technology partnerships of today to achieve your goals of tomorrow, then ask the Awin team personally in our OMR Masterclass.

These 10 Affiliate Networks on OMR Reviews you should check out:

ADCELL

Webgains

100partnerprogramme.de

CJ

lead alliance

Ingenious Technologies

impact.com

Admitad

MyLead

Rakuten Affiliate Network

Conclusion: Vitamin B is and remains the most valuable asset

Who seeks, finds - then as now. Affiliate Marketing networks simplify your search for important partners that you need for quick and sustainable business growth.

There's a good reason why affiliate marketing is experiencing a huge uptrend: It just works and is low-risk, as you only pay for generated transactions and thus actual sales.