Driving and measuring direct sales

Historically, influencer goals and measurements have focused on awareness and brand-building metrics. But over the past two years, a growing number of brands have tasked influencers with driving direct transactions. Many marketers want to make the sales impact of their influencer programs stronger and more accountable, in addition to driving brand and awareness impacts.  

To help brands drive maximum revenue from their influencer efforts, Sideqik, Partnerize, and PerformanceIN have come together to host 7 Ways to Drive Measurable Revenue with Influencers Today.  This webinar will focus on defining the actionable steps brands can take today to get more profitable sales from their influencer programs.

Expert speakers

We have assembled a team of influencer and performance marketing experts to help define the way forward. Join Nancy Rothman, VP of Marketing at leading influencer marketing platform Sideqik, and Charlie Calabrese, VP of Operations at Partnerize, as they share seven ways to drive measurable growth with influencers. Among the topics discussed will be:

• How to identify and activate the right influencers to drive ROI for your brand
• How to leverage your existing community as influencers
• Which metrics to track with your influencer marketing attribution
• How using a pay-for-performance model for influencer marketing can benefit both parties

Learn about these topics, and much more. 

Register now

This webinar takes place on Wednesday, September 16 at 10am PDT / 1pm EDT / 6pm BST.

Register for this webinar and learn how to get the maximum profitable revenue from your influencer investments.

Space is limited, so register today to secure your spot. 

The post Webinar: 7 Ways to Drive Measurable Revenue with Influencers Today appeared first on PerformanceIN.

To understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with an investment in Partnerize, Forrester interviewed four customers with years of experience using the solution. Customers said they chose Partnerize to accelerate program growth and drive efficiency, gain better visibility into systems and processes, and develop direct relationships with partners to improve performance.

Watch this on-demand webinar, featuring special guest speaker from Forrester’s Veronica Iles and Partnerize CMO Jim Nichols to hear more about the study’s findings, based on the experience of enterprises who work with Partnerize.

Learn how Partnerize delivers:

• Payback in <3 months
• $5.9 million in incremental affiliate program growth
• Reduction in excess commissions expense of 18% to 22%
• More content partners, direct partner relationships, and transparent data and insights

Webinar Speakers:

Veronica Iles, Total Economic Impact Consultant at Forrester / Jim Nichols, CMO at Partnerize.

Rewatch the on-demand version of the webinar now and learn more about the Partnerize platform, Forrester study and the power of Partnership.

The post Rewatch: How Switching To Partnerize Drives 330% ROI appeared first on PerformanceIN.

Here are some thoughts on what’s coming, and how we can get our brands growing faster through partnerships.

A better normal

Many solutions providers including Partnerize reported strong retail sales via partnership throughout the COVID era. E-commerce is poised to continue setting records in the next months as shoppers routinise transacting online in more categories and occasions. 

More recently,  there are also upticks in activity for travel, July data from Deloitte shows that the number of people actively searching for travel deals is going up around the world. For travel brands, partnership represents a great place to invest because of its pay-for-performance characteristics. 

We will also see more strategic partnerships across categories and brands, as marketers explore new ways to extend the pay-for-performance partnerships model to influence new habits and buying patterns. There will be more creativity among marketers looking to leverage new acquisition strategies through brand-to-brand alliances. 

E-commerce acceleration into the holidays

Total global retail sales for 2020 are expected to be down just under 6% from 2019, and nearly 12% below pre-pandemic estimates. But e-commerce has significantly accelerated. Worldwide, e-commerce was up 16.5% in May, with the largest increases seen in Central and Eastern Europe (21.5%). 

With the holidays fast approaching, the performance marketing industry can bring needed value and targeted understanding to consumers and brands. Further, because partnerships operate as pay-for-performance, brands will likely increase investment in the sector at the expense of  pay-for-access channels. 

Brands should take the time to develop a creative commissioning scheme to reward partners for desired actions. For example, brands focused on new customer acquisition can reward partners more for new to file customers versus repeat buyers. 

Another trend we expect to see in the industry-leading brands pursuing more diversity across the partner mix. Recent times have brought higher consumption rates of social and high-quality digital content. Purchases made on social media rose 84.7% year over year driven by a record usage of social networks during the early months of the pandemic. Leveraging influencer and content partnerships will become an important part of raising brand awareness, driving purchase decisions, and increasing revenue. Remember also that many shoppers will be looking for tangible savings on purchases, so working with traditional affiliates like coupon and cashback will continue to be wise.

Closer partner collaborations

Some of the best things to come out of the COVID era are renewed efforts from brands and partners to develop closer ties and communicate more frequently. Partnership is fundamentally about mutual benefit, of course, and there is no better way to get it than to work smarter together.  

Throughout the past several months, brands and partners report even more open lines of communication. More frequent check-ins and communication of promotional changes will continue. Recently we conducted a survey of leading brands and partners worldwide and found that 68% of top brands reported more frequent communications with their top partners since COVID arrived. 75% of brands said they had proactively reached out to brands during the period.

Increased emphasis on automation 

All of us, no matter if we’re a brand, agency, network, or platform, are being asked to do more with less. We need to operate more efficiently, with less budget, and improve performance in measurable ways. 

We need to find ways to reduce manual effort in partnership through automation. It’s clear that brands want to understand ways to use technology and experts to streamline process. With automation, advertisers and publishers will be able to have an easier path to profitable partnerships, both through better recruiting and smoother onboarding. The automation of many manual tasks will also free up resources to drive strategic innovation.

Automation will also play a key role in the quest for improved attribution. With automation, it’s easier to determine the accretive value of partnership programs, no matter what metric is being applied to assess incrementality. Automation enables more powerful analytics as well as the ability to commission more strategically across those KPIs.

Mobile mobile mobile!

One of the fascinating consumer effects of the COVID-19 situation has been a big move toward mobile transactions. Even in markets like the US, which has lagged much of the world in mobile share of total transactions because of a robust PC install base, we’ve seen a  23% year over year increase in purchases made on mobile devices. 

It will be more critical than ever to deliver seamless shopping journeys on mobile sites and apps and a seamless journey across channels in the coming 12 months. For performance marketers, deploying tracking that can capture sales on the PC and mobile web, as well as in-app is going to be key to understanding the value-driven by partners. 

Final thoughts

The first half of 2020 has certainly been a period of rapid change. But change brings with it new opportunities to meet customer needs. Few would deny that e-commerce has played a very valuable role in helping consumers cope with the COVID era, and partnership has been at the centre of that value creation. And through that value, partnership also delivers outstanding growth to brands and partners alike. 

The post What Do the Next 12 Months Look Like for Partnership? appeared first on PerformanceIN.

With this in mind, Partnerize, the leading SaaS provider of partnership management solutions for global brands, is pleased to announce the findings of a new commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting. The study reveals that enterprise brands switching to Partnerize from a legacy affiliate network experience 330% ROI and investment payback in less than three months.

The study, The Total Economic Impact of Partnerize, concluded companies switching to Partnerize capture total benefits of $11.3 million, and net benefits of $8.7 million, including accelerated program growth, greater commissioning efficiency, improved accounting productivity and avoided legacy network fees. To create the study, Forrester conducted in-depth interviews with four Partnerize customers in North America, EMEA, and APAC regions to assess the costs, benefits, risks, and opportunities associated with using the Partnerize platform for partnership management.

The study reported that quantifiable benefits of implementing Partnerize include 10% to 25% annual increases in partner-driven revenue and reduction in commission expense through robust validation and more precise commissioning approaches. The study also found a variety of significant but unquantifiable benefits from switching to Partnerize. Key among them was the opportunity to have direct, collaborative relationships with major partners when using Partnerize. Said one of the interviewed brand leaders:

“The network has a basic understanding of what you do and how you work, but it doesn’t have the same level of detail or the same passion that you have for your business. It makes such a difference having direct relationships with the affiliates.”

As the study also pointed out, Partnerize offers a wide range of partnership types in its ecosystem, including affiliates, influencers, loyalty, referral, brand, and content partners. According to another interviewed Partnerize client,

“The type of partner that we work with has expanded because we’ve got more budget now, and it’s enabled us to open up a whole new world. Partnerize helped in the sense that they have a partnerships manager that has recommended partners that we now work with more closely.”

“At Partnerize, our mission is to transform the value that partnership captures and delivers for brands,” said Jim Nichols, CMO for Partnerize. “As a business model, partnership is scalable, diverse, and pay-for-performance, three characteristics that make it ideal for brands looking to drive more profitable growth in a world of consumer control and increasing media consolidation. This ground-breaking research validates how we empower brands to get maximum benefit from this great channel.”

Additional benefits include transparent data and insights, cost predictability and more stable margins created by the SaaS model, and the Partnerize customer success team serving as a strategic resource and enabler.

Download the complete “The Total Economic Impact of Partnerize” study here.  To learn more about the benefits of the Partnerize platform, schedule a demo today.

The post Total Economic Impact(TM) Study Shows 330% Three-Year ROI for Enterprises Switching to the Partnerize Platform appeared first on PerformanceIN.