How To Build An Automated Affiliate Program
Affiliate Programs can take months or even years to see a return, especially when you're looking to scale and invest heavily into the marketing stream.
Unfortunately, there aren't many Automated Affiliate Programs out there, simply due to the way the affiliate industry has been built on person-to-person communication and building relationships.
However, there are ways to almost entirely automate your affiliate program, and Avelon is en-route to make this a reality. Currently, Avelon automates offers brand the ability to automate every single process of affiliate marketing, and we're building even more features to make it even easier.
In this article, we'll cover:
- What is automation in Affiliate Marketing?
- What takes the most time when running an Affiliate Program?
- Can you automate your Affiliate Program?
- What isn't automated on Affiliate Platforms?
- Can payments to affiliates be automated on Affiliate Platforms?
What is Automation in Affiliate Marketing?
Automated Affiliate Programs take the hard-work out of running an Affiliate Program, and Avelon has built a reliable, tech-driven platform to make it even easier.
Automation in Affiliate Marketing means you'll need to relinquish some of the control you'd have over manually running your affiliate marketing program, but putting your program into auto pilot and checking it once every so often can make a huge difference.
There are certain aspects of Affiliate Marketing that take the most time. In the below section, we'll cover what other programs simply don't automate and how Avelon deals with everything for you.
What takes the most time when running an Affiliate Program?
Affiliate Marketing can be 99% automated. Heck, it can be 100% automated if you only want to provide links to affiliates, as Avelon auto-creates and sends them direct to the affiliate once they've been accepted.
Before we set up Avelon, we interviewed over 100 Affiliate Marketing Managers to see what their pain points were when setting up and running an affiliate marketing program. These are the top bottle necks, placed in a percentage total (average) and based on working 20 hours per week on an affiliate program:
| Description of Event | Percentage of Time |
|---|---|
| Searching for new affiliates | 12% |
| Inviting affiliates to their program | 20% |
| Generating tracking links | 10% |
| Generating discount codes | 9% |
| Correspondence with affiliates | 4% |
| Payouts through accounting department | 45% |
As we can see from the above table, the biggest bottleneck of affiliate programs is actually paying out affiliates. So, guess what we did? We made that 100% automated. How?
Avelon Automates All Pay Outs To Affiliates
We developed our automated pay out system for affiliates, taking all the stress out of brands needing to pay affiliates on time. We're even ranked Number One for affiliate payout times across the entire Affiliate Industry, and pay out every 4-weeks and have never missed a payment to an affiliate.
How does it work?
It's actually pretty simple. Avelon invoices the brand on the first day of every month for the previous months commissions. The brand has 14-days to make payment, and as soon as the payment is made, Avelon transfers the funds to the affiliate.
What Else Can Avelon Do?
Avelon runs separately from sub-networks and other major affiliate marketing platforms due to its unique pricing structure and internal network of deeplinks, meaning we can provide:
- Advanced Reporting Structures
- Advanced Link Blocking & Reporting
- Reverse Link Source Tracking
- Exclusive Affiliate Programs
- SKU-level commissions
- Category level commissions
- Affiliate level commissions
- Automated link creation
- Automated affiliate inviations
If you'd like to learn more about Avelon, drop us an email to hello@avelonetwork.com and we'd be happy to help.