On February 19th, several of my team members and I flew down to Las Vegas to take part in Avant Link’s Future of Affiliate networking event. I was honored to be included on the panel of speakers with Scott Kalbach, CEO of Avant Link, and Minh-Khue Bui, head of Partnership Development for ShopStyle. I thoroughly enjoyed meeting both of my fellow panelists. Super smart, super engaged and now amongst my favorite people in the industry!
The topic of the event and panel was the Future of Affiliate Marketing. Over the course of the evening we discussed many aspect of the affiliate channel and where we thought the industry was headed. The first question we were asked was “What does the affiliate channel look like in 2015?”. Here is a synopsis of my thoughts.
Simply put – profitable. Not just from a “rah rah” standpoint, but from a structural one. Affiliate programs in the past have been deemed profitable if their sales were greater than their costs, which usually they are. It’s a simple formula that worked for a number of years and works for relatively simple business models.
But how many in the audience use that simple of a formula for determining the success of a channel. And affiliate channels are being evaluated, managed and and optimize for more sophisticated goals such as new customer acquisition and incremental sales. A sale is no longer a great sale just by it’s nature of selling something. Would that sale have happened without the affiliate channel? Was that sale more profitable through this channel vs other channels? Is the quality of the sale good enough – meaning that there are many ways of measuring quality of the sale. Are the margins right?
The affiliate channel is going to continue to mature in 2015 and will the analysis and defense of the channel needs to not only follow along, but start to lead. I believe with a lot of the tools networks are providing and the detailed analysis that agencies like JEBCommerce are providing, this will definitely happen.
I firmly believe this. There are more sophisticated ways to measure the affiliate channel against other channels and also within the greater ecosystem of all the channels. We are providing this level of analysis for our programs today, and I expect to see more channel managers follow along as well.
We answered a lot of questions during this event and I’ll be sharing my answers more this week!
