As affiliate marketing develops, so does the technology it relies on, and we’re seeing constant improvements to the software and tools that help to automate and improve processes, offering greater reach, more targeted ads and more refined analytics.
How is technology changing affiliate marketing, and why is it so important to successful lead generation? Ultimately, when handling data, the more human touches, the greater room for error. Technology helps to vastly reduce time spent on manual efforts and the potential for human error, whilst increasing security and helping optimise marketing and sales activities. Read on for examples of how technology is currently enhancing affiliate marketing.
Lead management platforms
Lead management platforms provide data analysis and integration capabilities that can help improve the customer journey. They reduce the need for handling, identifying and qualifying data and help provide analytics gained from user engagement, tracking website and email engagement in order to develop new prospects. These platforms can help to more precisely target customers with your services, as they can more accurately focus on their specific needs and help identify which parts of your business visitors are directly engaging with.
Using these analytics can help to tailor marketing efforts and strategies to better help your customers. These platforms provide impactful information and data insights in real-time, strengthening the lead generation process and allowing you to focus on generating sales rather than losing time spent on research.
Affiliate tracking software
Affiliate marketing platforms should give you the tools you need to launch, promote and manage affiliate programmes. Affiliates can use this software to track the performance of affiliate sales, leads, impressions and clicks recorded. Tracking affiliate activity accurately can really help finetune and boost marketing performance and help you to scale your affiliate campaigns. Marketing software platforms offer tracking and real time reporting capabilities, so that you can access affiliate sales and data in real-time and measure the ROI of your affiliate campaigns. Most affiliate marketing software provides features including affiliate onboarding, tracking and reporting, collaboration with partners, third-party SaaS integrations and quality fraud detection and security features.
APIs
APIs have become a crucial tool for affiliate marketing; they allow data transfer between two applications, enabling them to talk to each other. This can help you to send data from an in-house software programme to the cloud and take the information from the cloud into an in-house system. Every industry has its own unique technical requirements, but APIs can adapt to each system and deliver the data in a way that any interface can utilise. As affiliate marketing has evolved, using APIs has helped to automate many processes in order to deliver accurate data in real time, ensuring a greater level of compliance, as well as greater metrics on performance.
Using APIs both allows direct work with advertisers and reduces the amount of manual work required. Affiliates also get quick access to analytics, and the APIs provide transparency and security between networks, affiliates and advertisers regarding their data. APIs provide accurate data flows that can help identify the buying interests of website visitors, in order to display specified ads to the targeted audience. What’s more, data only needs to be updated manually once to be updated automatically across the whole ad network.
