Don’t go at it alone. Get support with an affiliate lead generation strategy.

Businesses are consistently turning to affiliate marketing to generate leads. Affiliate networks make it easier to manage campaigns and optimize results. While it’s possible to work with affiliates directly, the process is a huge undertaking for most businesses.

Eighty-three percent of advertisers use affiliate networks to manage affiliate programs and generate leads. Discover eleven reasons you need an affiliate lead generation strategy.

1. Affiliate Marketing Technology

Working with affiliates has many benefits, but it requires some complex tools. To build an affiliate lead generation strategy, you need to be able to track affiliate results in real-time, monitor conversions and payout on real results. Working with an affiliate network gives you access to all the affiliate marketing tools you need to maintain a successful, profitable campaign.

Affiliate networks provide campaign management, end-to-end tracking, reporting and payment options in one easy-to-use dashboard. This makes it easier for advertisers to track and optimize affiliate campaigns.

Affiliate networks also manage commission payments to your affiliates. ArrowShade pays affiliates on time every time, to keep our affiliates happy and attract top marketers to our program.

Affiliate marketing technology can be expensive on its own, costing hundreds to thousands of dollars each month. Paying for affiliate marketing tracking technology directly will eat away at your profits and reduce your return on investment.

2. Affiliate Managers

Another important benefit of working with affiliate networks is affiliate management services. Affiliates can be difficult to manage, because they don’t work for you directly. You won’t be able to monitor their activities or ensure they’re running the campaigns the way you envisioned.

ArrowShade affiliate managers work with affiliates to maximize their earnings and optimize their lead generation methods. This helps secure the success of both the affiliate and the advertiser. They monitor campaigns and provide optimization recommendations to affiliates.

Affiliate managers can also work as the middleman between you and the affiliate, ensuring that both parties are happy in the relationship.

3. Fraud Prevention

Fraud has plagued the affiliate marketing industry at times. Working with new affiliates directly can be a gamble, and you may wind up paying for fraudulent or false leads.

ArrowShade affiliates are pre-screened to determine their eligibility for the network. We work with experienced lead sellers, and screen applicants to do our best to avoid issues with lead quality.

Account managers will work with you to detect, identify and prevent fraudulent leads. When you work with affiliates directly, it can be difficult to identify fraudulent leads until it’s too late, and you have already paid for bad leads.

4. CPCs are Higher Than Ever

With competition on top ad networks growing, CPCs have never been higher. It can be incredibly difficult to run a profitable pay per click or search marketing campaign when the cost per click is in the double digits.

With affiliate marketing for lead generation, advertisers only pay for leads instead of for clicks or impressions. While affiliate networks will charge a fee, advertisers often see much higher ROI when they pay for leads versus clicks.

Your affiliate network may charge you a set fee per lead or charge you based on the ping tree model. You can set lead bids, and leads will be delivered to you when your bid is competitive enough. You can also establish things like:

• Lead maximums
• Lead minimums
• Multiple bid prices
• Lead filters

Talk to your affiliate network about what your lead buying options are, then choose the one that meets your ROI goals.

5. Compliance

Do you have certain advertising rules? Do you need to provide disclaimers to users? Are you only interested in buying leads generated from certain types of marketing campaigns? Regardless of your compliance rules, your affiliate network can work with you to ensure compliance.

Tracking compliance can be time consuming, so having your affiliate network do the work for you is more efficient. You set the rules, and the affiliate network ensures lead sellers follow them.

Let your affiliate network know about any campaign rules you want followed. It’s very important you establish traffic types you will accept. For example, if you do not want to buy incentivized leads, you should establish this with your network. Some affiliate networks work with affiliates who offer incentives to those who complete forms.

ArrowShade does not accept incentivized leads, but many networks do, so it’s important to check with your network.

6. Leverage Influencers

Some affiliate marketers are industry influencers. They generate leads by providing quality content on their site or by producing quality videos. Either way, affiliate marketing is a great way to leverage influencer traffic.

Working with an influencer directly can be confusing, since many don’t have established pricing. You may pay a set fee up front for a post or video without knowing exactly what you might get in return.

By working with an affiliate network, you can leverage the audience of an influencer with established pricing and set expectations.

7. ROI in Real-Time

While other campaigns can take several weeks to months to become optimized and ROI positive, an affiliate lead generation strategy can return a profit much quicker. The upfront investment is very minimal if there is one at all, and advertisers can leverage experienced experts.

With an affiliate network, you can leverage:

• Experienced marketers
• Optimized offers
• Knowledgeable account representatives
• Real-time reporting

These elements make running a campaign easier and cut back on the upfront costs testing new marketing campaigns.

8. Less Bandwidth

With affiliates running your campaign, you don’t need as many marketing heads cutting back on your overhead. An affiliate network can take over recruiting, reporting, campaign management, affiliate management and optimization. This helps cut back on the bandwidth required of your current marketing team, freeing them to work on other campaigns and company goals.

9. Increased Reach

Every advertiser’s goal is to get in front of their target audience. There are only so many ways to reach your target marketing. Only certain networks provide the types of targeting you might need to reach the people you need to convert.

Affiliate marketing allows you to reach people you may have never reached. Whether it’s through a blog, email marketing campaign or social channel – affiliates have dedicated audiences that are already interested in your products or services.

10. Easy Reporting

Reporting is essential to securing budget for your programs and demonstrating the success of your efforts. Affiliate networks make it easy to show executives that what you’ve been doing is working. You can easily export reporting from ArrowShade and showcase results from clicks to leads and ROI.

11. It’s Proven to Work

Affiliate networks are proven to generate leads. There’s no doubt that affiliate networks like ArrowShade connect advertisers with approved lead sellers willing to promote their products. More than eighty percent of brands have adopted affiliate marketing, and sixteen percent of e-commerce sales come from affiliates.

The affiliate marketing industry has over twenty years of data to back up it’s claims of success. Let us help with your affiliate lead generation strategy. If you’re ready to start buying leads and increasing ROI, contact ArrowShade today for your lead generation needs.