The Direct to Consumer (DTC) market continues to grow rapidly – 40% of US internet users expect DTC brands to account for at least 40% of their purchases within the next five years. 

These “disruptor” brands know it’s all about creating connections and providing powerful consumer experiences to acquire long-term, loyal customers. Eliminating the “middle man” between the brand and the customers, DTC brands can efficiently build a loyal customer base to further spread the word about the products. 

Leaning into performance marketing channels to reach and engage with this audience has helped DTC brands acquire customers at scale efficiently, and you can leverage your affiliate partnerships similarly to foster growth. With rising ad costs, particularly on Google and Facebook, it’s the right time to invest in your affiliate partnerships to help with customer acquisition and long-term customer retention.

The customer experience is top of mind for DTC brands. This means you can’t ignore the customer experience at any touchpoint; whether the customer reaches you through laptop or mobile, through paid search or display, via your social channels, or your affiliate partner sites. This means you must work closely with your affiliate partners to communicate your brand guidelines and expectations. This way, your customer experience is consistent no matter the entry-point. While your affiliates know their audience, it is your job to make sure that they can be a strong champion of your brand and promote to their readers with your brand voice in mind.  

Many DTC brands are mission-driven – this aligns with current consumer trends around healthy and virtuous living. (CJU19: The Consumer Megatrends Shaping Holiday Shopping 2019) Remind your affiliates what your mission is, and partner with affiliates who give their audiences an opportunity to give back. Affiliates like iGive and Goodshop/Goodsearch allow consumers to make giving back easy as they shop online.

Customisation is key for today’s consumers. Successful DTC brands know that their customers want to personalise their experiences on and offline. They build choices for the customer, so they can interact with the brand from discovery to engagement through the transaction and beyond in the way they most prefer. 

Working with a diverse group of affiliate partners ensures that your audience can find you and experience your brand through a variety of channels and touchpoints.

Your customers are interacting with retailers and brands in so many ways. With the right affiliate partnerships, you can reach them via Facebook, Instagram and other social platforms, on cashback or points sites who consistently engage with their extremely loyal audiences, email marketing affiliates, review sites, gift guides, the list goes on! These partners all help reach your customers where they are browsing, having conversations with friends, learning about trends, and searching for bargains. 

Browser extensions like Honey and Wikibuy, who have received mixed appreciation from brands in the past, are offering more customisation and more personalised experience for their audience. Consumers report that the way these partners streamline choices is a helpful tool for them as they shop online. (CJU19: The Consumer Megatrends Shaping Holiday Shopping 2019) 

Authentic storytelling is a hallmark of DTC brands. Partnering with social influencers and other content partners can extend your reach with authentic storytelling across niche audiences. 

Recruit content creators whose voice and values align with your own, and who will help amplify your message as a brand ambassador. Make sure these partners have what they need to engage their own loyal audiences, from custom offers and creatives to tips on what to feature. Give them the freedom to reach their audience in their own voice, but make sure they understand your brand guidelines so they can also increase yours. These partnerships are a resource investment, in both money and time, but they can help build your brand in a truly authentic way that engages customers and creates a loyal customer base.

Partnering with larger media sites whose content is trusted and viewed as “authentic” by consumers can help you build your own brand reputation and acquire new customers. Consumers trust the recommendations from their favourite media sites like Buzzfeed, Business Insider, or Wired. These large media partners can offer you exposure to a vast consumer audience and it’s worth the investment to engage with these consumers.

DTC brands know that a seamless, integrated experience is paramount to their customers’ experiences online, and they invest in innovations and improvements that will continually ensure they are delivering this experience. You can do the same for consumers and affiliates by ensuring you are ITP 2.0 compliant, and that you are tracking across all devices and channels appropriately. Investing in smart attribution and consistent, reliable tracking not only helps your affiliates trust you and invest in your relationship further, but it also provides you with robust data across all your customer interactions, so that you can make informed decisions about your program.

Because they own all their customer data, without anyone in the middle of their brand and their customers, DTC brands can use this data in a continuous feedback loop of customer experience innovation. You can do the same, by listening to the feedback from your affiliate partners and helping your affiliate program evolve to meet the needs of the consumers who find you through these partner sites. Your partnership should truly go both ways.

While you’re communicating with your affiliates about your brand, your products, your new offers and benefits to consumers, your affiliates have amazing insights into their audience demographics, behaviours, interests, and challenges. You should be learning from each other and continually innovating to meet the needs of consumers. When the customer experience is at the forefront, everyone wins.
 

The post Embracing the Direct-to-Consumer Model in the Affiliate Channel appeared first on PerformanceIN.

Year-over-year, companies continue to invest more of their marketing budgets in digital channels. 44% of marketing budgets are currently being allocated to digital channels, and this is expected to increase to 54% over the next five years (August 2018 CMO Survey). With budgets growing across channels like social media, search, email and display, as well as across devices (i.e. desktop, mobile and tablet), a multi-channel approach to attribution can help you understand and optimise the ROI of all your marketing channels and ensure you’re allocating budgets appropriately.

What is multi-channel attribution?

Multi-channel (or omni-channel) attribution is the process of determining which marketing channels and strategies have influenced and ultimately led to a customer action (i.e. a sale or lead) and awarding each channel appropriate credit based on its role in the customer journey. 

Attribution expert, Anthony Clements, defines multi-channel and omni-channel attribution for us; “Multi-channel attribution seeks to measure how effective an individual marketing channel is at driving conversion. Omni-channel attribution seeks to measure how customers engage with a business, including different types of marketing, platforms like desktop or mobile, and will also generally look at offline engagements.”

How do I start looking at multi-channel attribution?

The first step in making multi-channel attribution work is to view all your marketing channel data in one place. By being able to view all your marketing channels holistically, rather than viewing them in separate silos, you can understand how they impact each other and what role they play in your sales cycle. 

This cycle or process is like a funnel and each marketing channel operates within this funnel in various ways – from building brand awareness and bringing prospective customers into the funnel, to help the customer make the final decision to take action. 

With the proper analytics tools in place, you can view each touchpoint in the customer journey, from when they first interacted with your brand all the way to when they hit the “buy” button.

For example, you would be able to see when a customer interacts with your targeted Facebook ads, if they also clicked on paid search ads in Google, interacted with an influencer on Instagram, or searched your brand on their favourite loyalty site to see if they’d get cash back on their purchase before they decided to take the last step.

When you view this multi-channel data in aggregate, patterns start to emerge. You might find that a percentage of your Facebook ad audience also interacts with Instagram influencers, therefore adding value to the transaction. You might learn what percentage of customers interact with coupon or loyalty affiliates at some point in their journey, and where those partnerships fit into the overall click-to-consume path. 

Once you have your marketing channels tagged and tracked, and you’ve collected enough data to give you a strong baseline, you’ll be able to identify some actionable insights.

How can I use attribution in my affiliate marketing strategies?

Like many marketing managers, you might be concerned coupon affiliates are “hijacking” conversions from other channels or from customers who may have come directly to your site. However, in taking a closer look at your attribution data, you may find they add value to different buyer groups.

For example, a recent analysis of a client we work with took a deep dive into their multi-channel attribution and was surprised to find that over half of transactions from coupon affiliates were single-source transactions; meaning that the customer hadn’t interacted with any other channels during their sale-cycle. 

This helped them re-evaluate their strategy in working with coupon affiliates, with an understanding that they were bringing more incremental sales than they had originally assumed. Rather than removing coupon partners from their affiliate program, they continued to work with and optimise these partnerships, and added budget accordingly, thus driving new incremental sales.

Another client we worked with had been very frustrated with the performance of smaller influencers in their program before looking at their overall click-to-consume path. They had worked hard to bring these influencers onboard but had “no results” to show for their efforts. 

In taking a closer look at their multi-channel analytics, we identified that in many cases, these influencers had done just what their name implied: They were, in fact, an influential touchpoint higher up in the buying cycle and were contributing to the sale. Together we developed a strategic attribution plan to incentivise these influencers with a portion of the commission paid on the conversion. This resulted in a more engaged top of funnel partners driving primary audience traffic, thus contributing to sales. 

What should I do next?

Your network partner or affiliate management agency can help set up and automate appropriate attribution models and help incentivise different types of affiliates to drive desired results. 

Check in with your technology partners to see what tools and capabilities you may already have access to help understand your multi-channel marketing activities and insights in a more holistic way. From there, build an attribution model that works best for your business. By looking at all your marketing activities together, you’ll learn how they can complement each other to help achieve your goals.

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