3 Helpful Tips to Build Your Omnichannel Strategy for Affiliate Marketing

The contemporary ecommerce sales cycle can be surprisingly complicated. Leads often interact with brands on several different platforms before making their first purchase, and they expect a unified experience across each channel they use.

As a digital marketer, personalization is the best tool you have when it comes to maintaining strong audience engagement.

In this article, we’ll take a look at how omnichannel marketing works and how its focus on personalization can help take your campaigns to the next level.

What Is Omnichannel Marketing?

The jump from single-channel to multichannel marketing is clear, but marketers aren’t always sure about the differences between multichannel and omnichannel. While both might leverage the same channels, omnichannel marketers approach them in different ways.

In our fast-paced ecommerce environment, customers move seamlessly between social media, their email inbox, and many other channels. Those platforms might appear separate from the perspective of a digital marketer, but the user perceives them as different aspects of the same unified brand.

Omnichannel marketing is all about streamlining the customer experience in order to move leads through your sales funnel more efficiently.

An omnichannel tactic could be as simple as logging past activity and making it available to your team during support interactions. On the other hand, it could also be as complex as developing cross-channel campaigns that respond to a variety of user actions.

It’s easy for marketers to treat each channel separately, but that approach clashes with the way consumers perceive your brand. The key to omnichannel marketing is making sure that your leads don’t experience any friction when engaging with you on different channels.

3 Ways to Build Your Omnichannel Strategy for Affiliate Marketing

Here are a few proven marketing tactics to help strengthen your omnichannel strategy.

1. Create Ads

As an affiliate, the quality of your content will play the most important role in determining your long-term success. You should be prepared to make consistent efforts to develop more effective content by analyzing past results and testing out new ideas.

Keep in mind that your ad results will be limited by the audience you target as well as the content you create. Even if you’re putting together the perfect ads for your unique products or services, it won’t make a difference if you’re sending those ads to the wrong people.

Ad targeting best practices can shift unpredictably in response to emerging technologies, new regulations, and other sudden changes. For example, as major browsers continue to remove support for third-party cookies, marketers are forced to look for new strategies for tracking and attribution.

Omnisend’s Audience Sync tool enables marketers to retarget leads on Facebook and Google using their email addresses (rather than cookies). Once you create a segment in Omnisend, it will automatically be synced to your Facebook Ads account as a custom audience for both Facebook and Instagram targeting.

You’ll also need to leverage A/B testing to make consistent improvements to your affiliate marketing tactics. A/B testing involves creating multiple variants of the same ad and comparing their results with a test audience.

If you’re having trouble deciding between two potential images, give each one a chance to prove itself in an A/B test before using either in a full campaign. Each A/B test you run gives you the chance to improve a specific campaign while also gathering valuable information about the preferences and tendencies of your target audience.

2. Set Up More Audience Engagement Opportunities

Generating revenue through affiliate marketing depends on a strong performance at each point of the sales funnel. Improving your lead generation and lead capture practices will help you increase the size of your audience, giving you more opportunities to make sales with each new campaign.

The key to a strong sales funnel is to move the highest possible percentage of leads through each stage of the progression. If someone clicks on one of your social posts, for example, you want to capitalize on that interaction by turning them into a follower. Similarly, you should be trying to engage with your existing social media followers on additional channels.

While basic landing pages and signup forms are fundamental to any lead capture workflow, we also recommend looking for easier ways to connect with leads. With Omnisend Text to Join, you can add subscribers to your SMS list simply by having them text “Join”.

Even in 2022, SMS is relatively undeveloped as a marketing channel compared to email and other leading platforms. However, gathering a lead’s phone number is a great way for you to connect with them through their mobile device.

Most users receive far more promotional emails than promotional texts, so SMS campaigns will face much less competition and generally lead to higher engagement rates compared to marketing emails. Furthermore, consumers typically respond to texts more quickly than emails, making SMS perfect for lightning deals and other limited-time promotions.

3. Focus on Building Long-term Relationships

Credibility and image are everything in the world of affiliate marketing. Your followers will only be interested in your content if they feel like you offer a unique, valuable perspective they can easily relate to.

With that in mind, focusing too narrowly on sales and promotions may backfire by hurting the perception audiences have of your brand. Instead, work on building meaningful long-term relationships that lead to natural trust and, eventually, revenue.

You won’t be able to develop that kind of relationship without staying in touch with your core audience. While email is still a critical digital marketing channel in 2022, you should also be looking at other emerging channels, such as push notifications.

In fact, our 2021 Black Friday/Cyber Monday analysis found that push notifications are the least popular of all major marketing channels, yet they lead to the highest conversion rate. Marketers sent 492% more push notifications in 2021 relative to 2020 figures, so it’s clear that they’re catching on to this lucrative trend. If you aren’t already leveraging push notifications, now would be a good time to start.

Once you have a user interested in your content, it’s critical to do everything you can to keep them engaged and maximize their lifetime value. Customer loyalty programs are the best way to get even more value out of your core audience. Loyalty rewards give them a reason to continue coming back and strengthening their relationship with your brand.

Loyal followers are also an incredibly valuable resource when it comes to lead generation. Consumers tend to trust friends, family members, and other customers much more than they trust content that’s explicitly promotional. If you don’t have a referral program set up, you’re missing out on a reliable source of highly engaged leads.

Conclusion

Affiliate marketing is nothing new—in fact, businesses were relying on third-party salespeople to promote their brands long before any of us were buying products online. However, affiliate marketers are constantly using new strategies as they adjust their practices to align with the latest trends.

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9 thoughts on “3 Helpful Tips to Build Your Omnichannel Strategy for Affiliate Marketing

  1. This is the best article for affiliate marketers and Affiliate Marketing is a great way to earn money online but it is also necessary that we choose quality products as affiliate marketing.

  2. While looking around the internet I came across your blog & after reading it I felt that I gained enough insights about what I was searching for. Basically, the content is very informative & is catchy enough. Keep writing & bringing up new content. Looking forward.

  3. This article is great. I think it really helped me understand how digital marketing can make my business more successful. My only complaint is that the article needs to be updated with recent changes in digital marketing. For example, you don’t even mention Google Adwords in your Digital Marketing Methods.

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