Launching and growing a new affiliate program can be a daunting task for affiliate managers in the iGaming industry.
With stiff competition in pricing, limited budgets and thousands of brands to contend with the task of finding and recruiting new partners and referral traffic can almost seem quite daunting.
In this article we are going to share a few points of how you can freely utilize industry tools to leverage partner discovery , recruitment and onboarding alongside Cellxpert’s next generation of tracking technology to streamline your program launch, help segment your partners and improve reporting, and optimize your affiliate program results for maximum performance.
- Automating Affiliate & Publisher Discovery
One of the first steps in building a successful affiliate program is identifying potential partners who align with your brand and target audience. There are many available tools you can use to benchmark your program and partner performance from leaderboard data and interviews with publishers found on the IGB Affiliate website and more traditional SEO tools such as Majestic and SEMRush that can provide automated search and competitive intelligence results based on data that you insert into the search function to help you get started.
One of the simplest ways to find new affiliate partners is to create a targeted customer search term / phrase list and then insert these keywords and phrases into both search engines and social media platforms to see the sites and directories that appear in the results. If you have more sophisticated resources you can use publisher discovery or scraping tools to find sources that might match your target customer.
In addition to this many programs often use the publisher networks already established on affiliate network partners to help find new niche audiences that will convert to their brand offering. Having a solid automation feature to help you at the start will increase efficiencies and help save you time to get outreach automated and incoming affiliate applications to your program flowing faster.
Brand teams can then also join industry groups, follow forums and attend virtual and in person events to establish new affiliate partnerships and lead generation sources for their iGaming brands
- Streamlining Affiliate Recruitment with Automated Outreach Emails
Once you have identified potential partners, the next step is to reach out to them and invite them to join your affiliate program. Crafting the perfect outreach email can be daunting. Understanding the fundamentals of what your partners need to read and understand about your program prior to joining is a balancing act.
You’ll want to provide enough information that they understand your program brand, position and promotion incentive but also avoid cold call templated emails. Remember partners are receiving many solicited emails in a day so how should you automate your outreach campaign and communication funnel?
Automating the affiliate discovery phase and outreach process can save you time and ensure consistent communication with potential partners. You’ll need to use some email hunting tools such as LinkedIN, Hunter.io and there are many others that can help you find public information of affiliate partners that you’ve selected to recruit.
Getting your outreach emails to be personal enough to engage and not alienate a potential partner by making them feel like they’re on a templated list – can perhaps be a challenge. There are many resources available online to help you craft the perfect outreach email and this short video from Affiverse’s drive time series can help you get started crafting one that is fit for purpose for your brand. It encourages affiliate managers to draft short, sales copy that covers a 3 tier approach to answering just three questions: Why You, Why Them and Why now. You can watch this short video tutorial here.
Once your sales or recruitment copy is fine tuned, you can get ready to upload the contacts into a CRM tool like, Respona, Mailchimp, or even something more sophisticated such as HubSpot which can help you create automated email campaigns for partner recruitment drives allowing you to segment your content and make it more personalized to the partners you want to recruit.
- Once onboarded, you’ll need to segment and manage these partners effectively.
This is really where Cellxpert steps in to assist with providing cutting-edge affiliate tracking and next generation reporting which helps affiliate managers simplify and manage hundreds of publishers within one simple analytics and tracking dashboard.
With detailed and granular reporting, you can segment your partners once onboarded and monitor their traffic and performance on a per player basis to keep track of who is sending the right type of customer and monitor their lifetime value, driving better results and revenue growth.
In addition to that the platform helps affiliate managers streamline the onboarding process for new partners being recruited. It provides a user-friendly interface for partners to register, set up secure 2FA access and access promotional materials, to track their performance. By offering a seamless onboarding and secure interface to host their affiliate data and payment information in, Cellxpert helps attract and retain high-quality affiliates to your program as the level of trust is established already at the first point of registration into your program.
Cellxperts huge range of supporting Commercial Models such as cost-per-acquisition (CPA), cost-per-click (CPC), or revenue share based on rules such as geolocation offer immense flexibility to managers when negotiating for traffic with partners who also work with their competitor brands. Having the flexibility to tailor commission structures to align with different partner types and maximize their motivation to promote your products or services at the onset encourages partner relationships to flourish and gives affiliates the opportunity to get creative on monetization strategies using the data to guide these discussions vs. working blind based on market relatable rates.
Accurate Tracking with Postback and Server-to-Server Integration – another feature which Cellxpert offers to clients helps leverage postback and server-to-server tracking, which affiliates prefer due to the improved accuracy and attribution of player conversions and enabling real-time data to reflect in their reports. This level of tracking transparency builds trust and strengthens the partnerships being built between you and your affiliates.
Conclusion:
Automating the affiliate discovery process and partner recruitment is essential for managing a successful and scalable affiliate program. By utilizing tools and resources mentioned above to identify new performing partners, building a recruitment strategy and automation funnel and leveraging Cellxpert’s advanced tracking and management capabilities, you can streamline your program launch, optimize your partner performance, and drive consistent revenue growth for your brand.
Embrace the power of automation and technology to build and manage a thriving affiliate program that boosts your business’s success.
Want to take a closer look at our software and utilize it in your business? Book a Demo With our sales team today!
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