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Affiliate marketing spend in 2022 is in the ballpark of $8 billion. And we guarantee that companies and brands aren’t spending that type of money on something that doesn’t get a return on investment. If you have one, you know firsthand how valuable affiliate marketing programs can be.
But successful affiliate marketing programs are also a heck of a lot of work to manage. When you do it all manually, that is.
It’s infinitely easier when you embrace affiliate marketing automation, which is what we’ll walk you through today.
What is affiliate marketing automation?
Affiliate marketing automation uses tech to reduce the manual legwork involved in running an affiliate marketing program.
No more trying to monitor affiliate activity, answer dozens of incoming questions from current and potential affiliates, and track performance all on your own. There are plenty of solutions out there to make these tasks less of a chore and get you back some of the precious hours in your day.
Why do automated affiliate marketing?
Automation simplifies tedious, repetitive, and/or time-consuming tasks such as:
- Generating new leads (potential affiliates)
- Qualifying potential affiliate partners
- Keeping tabs on affiliate activity (including detecting fraud)
- Evaluating performance metrics to understand the results of your affiliates’ promotional efforts
- Supporting existing affiliates and providing resources that will make them more successful
- Issuing commissions and rewards
We’ll talk a bit about how some of these tasks are automated next. But, in a nutshell, affiliate marketing automation helps you maximize your time and, as a result, make more money from your affiliate program.
How can affiliate marketing be automated?
Here are four automation options worth trying.
1. Chatbots
You can probably think of more than a few common questions about your referral program. So why spend your time answering them over and over again? Set your website chatbot up to provide on-the-spot answers to these FAQs.
It’ll save you time and prevent you from feeling like you have to be available 24/7 to answer questions personally. Not to mention that it’ll create a better experience for potential affiliate partners and give them the info they need to feel comfortable joining your program.
2. Social media scheduling
Especially if you have social media posts promoting your program that have done well in the past, reschedule them. Most social media tools have features that allow you to repost:
- Your best content automatically when your queue is empty
- Posts of your choice on a regular cadence such as every month
Having this part of your social media marketing on autopilot will free you up to focus on other things.
3. Email automation
Many email marketing platforms allow you to send automated emails and email sequences based on various triggers. So, for example, say you’ve created a short email series to give your affiliate partners ideas for promoting your products or services. Whenever a new affiliate signs up, you can create a drip sequence that automatically sends those emails out over a period of days or weeks.
Of course, you may want to optimize your emails periodically based on how they’re performing. But for the most part, this is a set-it-and-forget-it way to automate a portion of affiliate program management.
4. Affiliate marketing automation tools
Many affiliate marketing tools—Shopify e-commerce plugins and WordPress plugins included—have automation functionality. Like what?
- Auto-approvals for new affiliates and alerts when someone signs up
- Smartlinks (single links given to affiliates that show the most relevant affiliate offers to people who click the link to increase conversions)
- Affiliate activity and sales summaries sent at scheduled times so that you don’t have to remember to check in
- Fraud detection and prevention (e.g. through anti-fraud rules)
- Automatic invitations (and welcome emails) to your customers encouraging them to join your affiliate program
- Automatic payouts of affiliate commissions on a schedule you set
As you can see, the right affiliate marketing software can streamline many aspects of affiliate management and campaign tracking. But there’s another tool that can help too.
How Jasper can help you automate your affiliate marketing processes
Automation is all about generating the same or better results while reducing the need for manual or human input. And Jasper, our AI writing assistant, is a great tool for doing that. Here’s a quick step-by-step tutorial on just a couple of ways you can use Jasper to make automated affiliate marketing even easier.
Jasper offers more than 50 templates for content and copywriting. So just about any aspect of your marketing efforts that you need content or copy for, he can help with. For example, you could write an email sharing some promotion ideas to help your referral partners with lead generation. The Paragraph Generator template is awesome for that.
Just enter a brief description of what you want to talk about, any keywords you want included, and the tone of voice you're going for. Jasper will take what you’re written and run with it as you can see below.
If you want, you can edit what Jasper’s written manually or use the AI to help you to rephrase things or write more. For example, say you wanted to get more specific about each idea. In a Jasper Document (available on the Boss mode plan), start Jasper off on the next sentence to give him an idea of where you want to go.
In this case, we fed Jasper this partial sentence for idea #1: “When potential leads see that you use the tool and that…” Then, we clicked Compose and Jasper finished the thought. If we wanted him to write even more on this, we could repeat the process.
We did the same with idea #2. We started Jasper off with “Show how to choose the right templates for different design projects…” followed by a comma to let Jasper know we wanted more description.
And you could just as easily create referral program landing page copy using templates and the long-from document editor like we just showed. Or, if you’ve got Boss Mode, you can try a recipe like How to write landing page content.
It’s a series of commands that will instruct Jasper on what to write and give him info to use. Anything in curly brackets is for you to fill in. And commands (preceded by ‘>’) are Jasper’s instructions, which you can execute by pressing CTRL or CMD + Enter. Here’s what Jasper generated once we filled in the landing page topic and commanded him to create subheading ideas.
And here's what we got when we executed the next command to expand each of the subheadings with a paragraph. In under 5 minutes, we drafted copy for a short landing page!
As you know, content creation and copywriting can be time-consuming. But with a bit of guidance from you, Jasper can handle most of the process for you. Along with the other affiliate marketing automation ideas we covered, it’s a surefire way to save yourself a ton of time and, of course, make money.
Want to test Jasper for yourself? Sign up today.