Affiliate Marketing Automation: 6 Ways to Get Started

One of the upcoming trends brands need to look out for is the use of automation tools and how such tools can help make marketing processes, including affiliate marketing, more effective. But why are businesses and marketers so keen on implementing marketing automation?

For 35% of marketers, marketing automation enables them to streamline their marketing and sales efforts. Meanwhile, for 34%, it allows them to enhance customer engagement and improve customer experiences. Lastly, according to 30% of marketers, automation enables them to minimise manual tasks.

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When applied to affiliate marketing, automation allows you to handle repetitive tasks more quickly using technology. This allows you to focus on scaling and making your affiliate program more effective instead. Automated affiliate marketing enables more streamlined processes, saves you time, and allows affiliates to implement more efficient campaigns.

Why Automate? 5 Key Reasons Why Affiliate Marketing Automation Benefits Brands

Why should you consider affiliate marketing automation?

• More Effective Affiliate Marketing Program Management: Affiliate marketing automation software lets you automate affiliate payments and affiliate link management, giving you better control over your affiliate program.
• Saves You Time: Affiliate marketing automation minimises or eliminates repetitive and time-consuming processes to help you save time and resources.
• Be Better Equipped to Make Informed Decisions: With the best affiliate network software, you can automate tasks like tracking sales, managing payouts, and monitoring performance, freeing up your schedule for more strategic activities.
• Enhances Scalability: You can use affiliate automation to set up campaign parameters, facilitate personalised communications with affiliates, and optimise your commission management. This, in turn, helps equip you for rapid growth.
• Strengthens Fraud Prevention: A good affiliate marketing automation software enables you to automate affiliate monitoring, including fraud detection and compliance, and set up anti-fraud rules.

Getting Started with Affiliate Marketing Automation

Affiliate marketing automation may seem like a daunting task, but these actionable tips can help you get started right away.

1.    Develop a System

To streamline your operations through automated affiliate marketing, you must create a system and determine which processes you need to automate. A system also allows you to scale your affiliate automation efforts more effectively. That’s because it helps you identify and eliminate bottlenecks, resulting in a more streamlined program. To take things a step further, you can document your system to help you optimise your automation efforts.

2.    Use Affiliate Marketing Software

A reliable affiliate marketing automation software like trackdesk offers several automation capabilities, including allowing you to automate affiliate payments.

Trackdesk also lets you automate affiliate tiers, which helps affiliates stay motivated to drive conversions and leads for your brand. The great thing about this feature is that it’s super easy to set up.

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Additionally, trackdesk lets you create webhooks. This allows you to process newly created affiliates to other systems, such as when you’re adding contacts to your HubSpot account. Aside from HubSpot, you can also use trackdesk alongside other popular email marketing service providers, such as:

• Mailchimp
• Salesforce
• Klaviyo
• Marketo
• ActiveCampaign
• Shopify
• Braze
• CampaignMonitor
• Omnisend

You can also create webhooks that automatically sync when affiliate statuses change. Other trackdesk automation capabilities include:

• Automation that lets you create affiliates from your platform via API and include affiliate information, such as their billing details and preferred payment methods
• Automate sending information to affiliates when conversions occur
• Automate the creation of conversions, as well as refunds of these conversions
• Create webhooks for creating conversions and clicks

Aside from trackdesk, some of the affiliate marketing automation software worth looking into include:

• Outreach automation tools: Respona and Icereach. The former is a link-building outreach platform, while the latter is a LinkedIn automation tool that lets you quickly find new leads on the platform and personalise your outreach efforts.
• Contacts research tools: Respona, SEMrush, Ahrefs, and virtual assistant software like ClickUp or Hootsuite, which are tools you can use to automate repetitive tasks. The first three are tools that can help automate contacts research, while virtual assistants can help you automate certain aspects of your affiliate marketing program, such as affiliate management (communications, payouts, and onboarding).
• Chatbot: Landbot. This AI chatbot generator automates your conversations, helping you generate more leads, book more appointments, and provide more robust support to customers and affiliates.

3.    Implement Chatbots

Chatbots like Landbot can handle simple inquiries, such as FAQs, resolve complaints, provide quick answers, collect customer feedback, onboard new customers, and more. The data collected by the chatbot can be used to influence the customer health score, providing insights into the satisfaction and engagement levels of your user base. In the context of affiliate marketing automation, you can use chatbots for customer service, such as for answering basic questions from both customers and affiliates, which helps both parties have a better experience while using your website. For example, with a chatbot, you can quickly reply to queries and provide round-the-clock support to affiliates and customers, even if it’s long past your business hours.

4.    Consider Using an Affiliate Network

This is geared toward affiliate partners. Affiliate networks typically take care of processes like managing affiliate payouts, monitoring their performance, and finding brand offers. If you’re an affiliate partner, working with an affiliate network can help you save time. Trackdesk’s Partnership Managers Marketplace connects you with world-class partnership managers who can help you build a proprietary affiliate pool. With a private affiliate network, you’ll have access to high-quality affiliates, gain better control over your affiliate program, and offer personalised deals to affiliates.

5.    Use Scheduling Tools

Scheduling tools help you save time and boost affiliate engagement. They can collect key insights and data, such as when audiences are most likely to be engaged. With this information, you can schedule your social media posts at optimal times so they’re more visible and can gain more traction. On the other hand, using an employee scheduling app as well can ensure your team is aligned and available to respond to engagement, enhancing overall productivity and responsiveness.

6.    Automate Your Email Marketing Program

Email automation solutions allow you to automate processes, such as sending emails and email sequences. These tools also let you automate email campaigns and engagement emails, such as promotion emails and program updates. For example, you can use tools like Respona, Mailchimp, and Drip. These allow you to do the following to automate your email marketing program:

• Multichannel automation with segmentation, which allows you to reach a wider audience
• Build customer journeys to automate email campaigns
• Optimise your campaigns through multiple testing methods like split testing and multivariate testing

Final Thoughts

Affiliate marketing automation enables brands to optimise their affiliate program. By minimising or eliminating repetitive tasks, you can create streamlined processes, have access to more accurate data, provide prompt and correct affiliate payouts, and be better equipped to focus on scaling your program.

Trackdesk's automation features also help you achieve the following:

• Automate affiliate payouts via Tipalti - The Tipalti integration lets you process payments directly from Trackdesk. Note that this feature is only available for Business and higher-tier plans.
• streamline affiliate growth with automated MLM tiers
• Affiliate communications

Discover how you can use trackdesk’s automation capabilities to jumpstart your automation journey.