Affiliate marketing
Noun
[ah-fill-ee-it mar-ket-ing]
Affiliate marketing is an advertising model in which a brand pays third-party content creators to generate traffic and leads for the brand's products or services. Content creators often run a blog or produce video content. They promote the company in their content and are given a unique link to drive their audience to. Then, they are paid a commission for the value of the traffic driven to that link or sales made through it.
Affiliate marketing is a useful tool for businesses who want to reach a wider, established audience through a creator the audience is already familiar with. Affiliate marketing is a billion-dollar industry, and it operates in both B2C and B2B spaces. Return on investment for affiliate marketing can be very high since the company essentially outsources marketing and selling to the affiliate.
Example: Gretchen posted links to a specific software in her blog. For every click that link got, the software company paid her a commission. Gretchen was taking part in affiliate marketing.
The Anatomy of a High-Performing Referral Program
Noun
[ack-ti-vay-shun ray-t]
An activation rate is a metric used by companies to determine when their users are achieving value. Your partner program’s activation rate is the percentage of partners that sign up for your program that gain or add value in the program. What is defined as activation can differ between programs, but it's often a first sale, first referral, or revenue achieved over a set number of months — something that indicates the partner is likely to stay profitable or engaged.
To determine your activation rate, you can take the number of partners who successfully met your activation metric, divide it by the total number of partners who joined your program, and multiply that result by 100.
Also see: Activation
Example: Soltech measured their activation rate to be 30%, which was lower than their target of 60%. They decided to revamp their partner onboarding process to better prepare their partners to sell.
Noun
[ah-fill-ee-it part-nur]
Affiliate partners are partnerships that drive traffic to your properties through tracked links and earn a cut when that traffic converts. Affiliate partners are a subset of marketing partners.
An affiliate partner can be a business, an individual, or another affiliate program. Affiliate partnerships can expand your company's reach and increase revenue through increased exposure and marketing reach.
Also see: Marketing partner, affiliate link
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