Affiliate marketing's sacred cow

Something that has frustrated me for a while prompted me to scribble a LinkedIn post a couple of weeks back. It provoked a more visceral response than I anticipated and was my most viewed post in a year.

It also had some additional cut through, being mentioned twice last week at Affilifest in Manchester.

Given I was targeting an industry sacred cow it was bound to get a few people’s backs up, but it wound others up in a way that (I think) proved my point.

So I wanted to revisit the topic and expand on some of the points I may have rather clumsily expressed in the original post.

Let me give some background.

I’d been at a previous affiliate conference and someone on a panel threw out one of those lines about how we’re a relationships channel and that’s what makes us special. A pretty innocuous statement, but I think it’s what sits behind its inference that masks a real problem in our industry.

Before I explain why, it’s important to clarify: I’m not having a go at anyone who repeats the line that relationships are critical in the affiliate channel. That should go without saying. None of us exist in a vacuum and it would be a pretty lonely place if we didn’t have our network of contacts to oil the wheels and chat about the latest developments.

My gripe is not about wanting to have a few beers with your industry mates (something I can certainly relate to) or building a new valuable and trusted partnership. It’s more about what a ‘special’ focus on this represents and obscures.

I think it’s a smokescreen, shorthand for how we’re not driving needed efficiencies, instead reliant on manual drudge. I also feel it’s a one-dimensional view of a channel that, because of its myriad connections and daily synapses, necessitates fast-tracked automation if we’re not to see out the rest of our days in the digital slow lane.

So what do I mean when this is applied to the real world?

An example: if you were building networks or affiliate platforms from scratch, and money was no object, would you build them the way they currently are? Perhaps you’ve never given any thought to this and how you would do things differently. But it’s something I’ve been contemplating for a long time now and I definitely wouldn’t.

What would I do differently? I’d take a step back and consider what’s wrong with how the whole affiliate ecosystem works. From launching an affiliate programme to signing up as an affiliate to accessing, processing and acting on data, I’d assess where are the painpoints. The bits we get stuck on. How do we create platforms that are intuitive, self-guided and as automated as possible?

Last year I signed up as affiliate on multiple platforms and the hoops people have to jump through before they’re accepted are considerable. And that’s assuming you have some working affiliate knowledge to navigate the language and phraseology we use. Often there are way too many steps involved. No wonder the dropout rate of affiliates signing up to networks is so high. Business turned away daily. Yes, I get the compliance angle, but in this day and age, tech exists to verify who people and companies are.

Practice what you preach

Let’s take it a step further. Tech partners offering overlays and basket abandonment have been feted by affiliate networks for a few years now. So why don’t we have similar software across affiliate platforms?

Been hovering over various navigation points for a while? Perhaps you’re not clear what a report means or where it is. At this point, an interstitial asking if the user is having issues finding something could be served. Short video explainers could accompany the text because people process information in different ways.

At Affilifest last week a session on data pointed to the disparate nature of statistical sources across our industry from publisher to network to advertiser datasets. But I’d add that datasets within businesses are similarly fragmented. Who can confidently say they match up all their datasets across multiple platforms to create a single customer view?

I noticed that at the Performance Marketing Awards next year, there is a new category of ‘Best use of a Customer Data Platform’ and this intrigued me as I’ve yet to hear any affiliate business talk about how they’ve built a CDP and how that’s stepchanged how they work with customers.

Networks should be collecting numerous qualitative and quantitative datapoints about their customers which enable them to customise the journey or pages they see based on these preferences or choices.

If I have to click through several links to reach a report that their analytics shows I view daily, why not automatically add that report to the homepage, removing the friction. I'm reminded of how challenger banks have taken such a big market share from traditional banks because they're 'unbank-like'. They've made banking easy and something I don't really think about that much (just what I want from my bank). Just because we've always done something it doesn't make it right.

Preference data can also be used to serve up targeted content according to my needs. Serve me new affiliate opportunities on the homepage based on what trends my programme is showing or according to what I’ve asked for.

SMEs

Small businesses are not financially important enough to networks to warrant anything approaching meaningful account management, but that doesn't mean they can't benefit from fantastic customer, more that we have to be creative about how we collect and act on their data and preferences to deliver them targeted and useful opportunities.

Great account managers can deliver great customer support but great customer support doesn't have to be delivered by great account managers. Crack this and thousands more companies can embrace affiliate marketing.

Show me the tech

So how does this relate back to my frustration about our focus on relationships as something special to the affiliate channel?

It’s because so little of the above actually exists, and a whole layer of affiliate management has grown up that is focused on manually performing these tasks.

It’s made us inefficient and has led to painful decisions as brands continue to squeeze margins. Paying for a team carrying out conveyer belt tasks may be useful for brands strapped for resource, but it doesn’t make a network or agency indispensable; it’s just near-shoring tasks that no one wants to do.

Ironically, if we laser-focused on automation, it could mean we’re able to build even stronger relationships as account handlers aren’t bogged down in manual grunt work that saps their enthusiasm for the job. But more than that, it breaks down barriers, making business smoother and more seamless. It should unlock revenue and encourage investment in more innovative models, the very essence of affiliate marketing.

It will also align our channel much more with other digital services that are slicker, algorithmic and sophisticated. A friend referred to our industry as ‘tactile, but in a way that seriously inhibits its growth for potential’.

There are huge opportunities for scale and growth in affiliate but I’m not seeing many examples. Maybe it’s a wilful desire to hold back the tide by those with a vested interest or a lack of vision by those with the resources to bring about change or something else. Either way, I’m sure there are some fantastic tech developments in the pipeline, expedited by AI and machine learning. Without it, we risk valuing a good contacts book more than core competency.