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Want to acquire more customers? Affiliate marketing is a top tactic for customer acquisition, according to one survey of brand marketers. But to make the most of this strategy, you need to leverage all the tech available to you, namely:

• Affiliate software
• Affiliate networks

As a top affiliate software for e-commerce and SaaS brands, Tapfiliate has tons of experience developing and improving our software to meet diverse brand needs.

Keep reading as we walk through the different types of affiliate platforms available to you and what to look for in an ideal solution.

What is an Affiliate Marketing Platform?

An affiliate marketing platform is a solution that helps you grow or improve your affiliate program. Consider what your affiliate program needs to operate and scale.

You might want access to more potential affiliates to promote your program, reporting methods to assess and improve your strategy, or workflows to make your day-to-day tasks more productive.

The good news? You can achieve all that and more with the right platform or multiple platforms.

Types of Affiliate Marketing Platforms

Not all affiliate platforms function the same way. Here are some differentiators and features of the most popular types of affiliate platforms:

Affiliate Software

Affiliate software (an affiliate management tool) helps you launch, manage, and grow your affiliate program with various features. Many affiliate software tools specialize in specific industries or business types.

For example, Tapfiliate has ample experience supporting affiliate programs from brands in these industries:

• SaaS
• Subscriptions
• Dropshipping
• E-commerce

So, what can you do with affiliate software? Here are some top features:

• Conversion tracking: How can you tell which affiliate brings you which sale? Conversion tracking via cookies, affiliate links, or coupon codes lets you see what’s selling and who’s promoting those sales. Affiliate software offers diverse tracking methods and reporting to help you visualize results.
• Affiliate commissions: Affiliate software helps you customize commission types and amounts for your affiliates. You might choose from flat-fee or percentage-based commissions or toggle automatic increases based on performance. The best affiliate software includes commission structures specific to certain industries, like recurring commissions for SaaS brands or product-specific commissions for e-commerce businesses.
• Integrations: Think of integrations as connections between multiple pieces of software. Here’s the thing: affiliate marketing isn’t just about typical tracking and commissions (though those are significant parts). Many brands also pair affiliate marketing with other initiatives, like email marketing, customer research, or budget management. If you use additional software to handle those tasks, you’ll need a convenient way to link the software together within your workflow. For example, you might value integrations to email marketing platforms like Mailchimp or accounting software like Quickbooks if you use either of them.
• Affiliate communication and sharing: Need to share a product update with your affiliates? Or maybe you just want to check in and see how they’re doing? You can communicate with affiliates through affiliate software via in-platform messaging, automated notifications, email updates, asset sharing, and more.

Affiliate Network

An affiliate network is more of a marketplace that serves both affiliates and brands in finding each other. They usually have an online dashboard of sorts where each party can search for the other based on criteria like:

• Industry
• Social media followers
• Specific platforms
• Experience or education
• News prominence
• References

Think of affiliate networks as an intermediary that connects brands to affiliates.

Say you’re a finance SaaS brand that wants to expand your marketing reach to more B2B businesses in your industry. You’d need affiliates with demonstrated experience and followings in your niche, right? An affiliate network can help you find those specific affiliates with filters on their marketplace.

Here are some more features of an affiliate network:

• Diverse affiliate types: A network offers a wide range of affiliates in both industry and type. For example, you might have a more easily marketed product on an influencer platform. Or, you could note more success on coupon websites. Affiliate networks help you filter through premium publishers, influencers, content publishers, cashback services, mobile publishers, and more.
• Streamlined approval process: You’re scrolling through social media and finding the perfect content creator to promote your brand. But to recruit them, you’ll need to send a message, negotiate a commission, and spend time emailing back and forth before you set up a meeting or partnership. Networks eliminate that time by establishing clear criteria, commission specs, and other requirements to get affiliates and brands on the same page.
• Program support: Most affiliate networks offer some level of customer service to assist brands in navigating the platform. For example, Admitad’s personal touch via customer support was paramount in Acer’s campaign success over time with affiliates they found via Admitad. You’ll also find additional published resources on an affiliate network’s website, like helpful articles, case studies, feature tutorials, and more.
• Fraud prevention and security features: Affiliate fraud is real, and so is all the money brands are at risk of losing if they fall victim to it. Affiliate networks usually offer some level of security feature to protect brands from fraud.  For example, Impact recently released a media property verification feature to verify publisher social media accounts.
• Conversion tracking and reporting: Once you recruit publishers on an affiliate network, how can you tell if they’re actually contributing to your affiliate program’s success? Most networks offer some level of tracking and reporting to help you attribute conversions and sales to each affiliate. More robust networks will also offer comparison reports to help you assess your performance within your industry.

3 Examples of Affiliate Marketing Software

Need an extra boost in your affiliate program? You can improve your program with insights from a performance report or engage affiliates with more flexible commissions and automated workflows. All of these are accessible to you with the right affiliate software.

Here are our top picks of software on the market:

1. Tapfiliate

Tapfiliate is an affordable and scalable affiliate marketing software that specializes in affiliate program management for SaaS, e-commerce, dropshipping, and subscription businesses. It has real-time conversion tracking across different methods, like clicks, affiliate links, coupon codes, and cookies. On top of that, brands can engage affiliates with flexible commission structures, automated increases and announcements, customizable reports, branded assets, and in-platform messenger communication.

Pricing plans start at an affordable $89 per month, which includes unlimited affiliates and affiliate programs, as well as up to 10,000 tracked clicks and 2,000 tracked conversions. Our Pro plan offers product-specific commissions and up to 10,000 tracked conversions, while enterprise clients can enjoy white-labeled pages and advanced MLM sales goals.

2. PartnerStack

Partnerstack is an affiliate software specializing in B2B and SaaS affiliate programs. They offer diverse commission types based on cost per lead, sale, and action. Additionally, the software offers reporting features that help brands track different stages of the customer journey.

Pricing information isn’t listed on their website, though reviews note that monthly costs are expensive, reaching thousands of dollars monthly, depending on your business and needs. 

LeadDyno 

LeadDyno is an affiliate software that helps fashion, wellness, and SaaS niche brands grow and manage their affiliate programs. The platform’s “What’s Selling” feature helps e-commerce companies track the best- and worst-selling products within their affiliate programs. They also offer affiliate recruitment features like automated approvals, customer invitation emails, and personalization via logos, colors, and branded assets.

Pricing ranges from $49 to $749 monthly across four different tiers. Each tier caps the permitted number of affiliates, except for the most expensive $749 plan.

3 Examples of Affiliate Networks

Looking to expand your affiliate base? Check out these affiliate networks to access thousands of potential partners for your affiliate program.

1. Admitad

Admitad is an established affiliate network that supports big-name brands like Uber, Samsung, Ali Express, Shein, and Lenovo with their affiliate programs. The network has tons of experience in international and cross-border programs, including for Chinese retailers. So, this is an ideal affiliate network choice if you want to put your brand on an international map.

Additionally, Admitad stands out with its cross-channel tracking and diverse traffic optimization for brands based on its vast network of affiliates on its platform. The network’s reporting features help brands measure their most effective traffic sources and highest-performing affiliates. On top of that, it has a robust security suite to ensure brands aren’t victims of affiliate fraud since it carefully vets affiliates before placing them on its marketplace.

As for results? Take your pick — Admitad’s case studies boast impressive results, like 350,000 monthly app installs or 27,000 new monthly e-commerce orders.

2. Impact

Impact is a well-known affiliate network with three main streams: partnership management, creator, and advocate. The first manages the partnership lifecycle from recruitment and contracts to operations, tracking, and reporting. The network helps you find niche affiliates based on filtration in its marketplace and enables you to customize your contracts to meet your business needs best.

The Creator stream speaks more specifically to influencer marketing and partnerships. Finally, the Advocate stream is a section for customer referrals and recruitment, including referral program creation, incentives, and automated workflows.

3. ShareASale

ShareASale is an affiliate network that services merchants, affiliates, and agencies. It currently has over 30,000 merchants on its platform and over 1 million publishers (affiliates).

The company has tweaked its offerings over the last 20 years with personalized program diagnostics, real-time performance data, and automated recruitment tools where you can send customized invitations to niche affiliates to join your program. Features include a user-friendly dashboard, customizable reporting, custom commissions, advanced tracking, and revenue attribution.

Pricing starts at $35 monthly, along with an initial $625 sign-up fee.

5 Things to Consider When Choosing an Affiliate Marketing Platform

Your marketing budget isn’t endless — that’s why you need to filter out wasted expenses by deciding on the best possible affiliate platform for your business.

The goal is to have an affiliate platform that helps you generate more income with the growth it offers your program.

Here are some things to consider before you invest in an affiliate platform:

1. User-friendliness

Marketing tasks can eat up hours in your schedule. Your affiliate network or software should help you gain back some of those hours with an efficient operation. And step one to being more productive is to have a user-friendly platform. You and your staff should be able to move seamlessly from feature to feature within a network or program and easily access and analyze performance data to improve your strategy.

Pro tip: Always opt to try an affiliate software’s free trial before you invest in a subscription.

2. Customization

No affiliate program is exactly the same. Meaning? You can’t expect a one-size-fits-all software to bring you the same revenue as it might for another kind of business. Here are some green flags for customization in affiliate networks and software:

• Affiliate marketplace: An affiliate network should give you a wide roster of potential affiliates to choose from. But how are they displayed? Is it a neverending sequence of pages? Or can you filter results by niche, following, experience, channel, and other criteria to help you find the best match? Go for affiliate networks that let you customize search results to find the best affiliates for your program.
• Commissions: Look for affiliate software that offers diverse commission options to better engage your affiliates. Performance bonuses and increases are good signs in software, as well as multiple structures like lifetime, recurring, product-specific, flat-fee, and percentage-based commissions.
• Integrations: You should be able to connect your affiliate software and network to other essential tools in your stack. But if they don’t offer a direct integration, look for custom integration options via developer code.

3. Price

Affiliate software and networks often come with wide-ranging price tags because of the vastness of features, tracking needs, and business types.

You might find software with an affordable, first-tier subscription plan — but make sure the features and offerings make sense for your business. If you can’t have unlimited affiliates without paying for an enterprise plan, that’s a red flag.

4. Customer support

Customer support is a vital component of an affiliate network and software. Online platforms can have glitches and high learning curves, and you should feel confident in the platform’s company that their support team can successfully and quickly get you through any snags.

Look for platforms with multiple customer support channels, like live chat, email, social media, and phone support. You can also check review sites like G2 and Capterra to assess a platform’s customer support.

Scalability

Your affiliate program might grow from one affiliate to one thousand with the right strategy. However, your affiliate software should accommodate and propel that scaling through its features. Our advice? Prioritize scale-friendly platforms with perks like unlimited affiliates, high tracking capacity for conversions, white-labeling for brand consistency, and multiple tiers to speak to different stages of your affiliate program.

Boost Your Affiliate Program with Tapfiliate’s Affiliate Software!

Bottom line? There’s no shortage of affiliate tools and platforms to help you see more sales, growth, and revenue from your affiliate program.

Affiliate networks are great resources to help recruit niche-specific, secure affiliates. On the other hand, affiliate software platforms give you more features to manage, improve, and scale your affiliate program with performance insights and better affiliate engagement.

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