Partnerships, full speed ahead! So your forward-thinking business is ready to dive into the partnership economy and spark growth. Then reality hits: how on earth will you build and manage the network of affiliates, ambassadors and other strategic partners you envision?
Partner marketing automation software saves the day, by automating every part of the process—from finding and recruiting new partners to getting them on board and keeping them at peak performance. But automation in the partnership economy isn’t just about time-saving and streamlining; it offers some additional business benefits that may surprise you.
4 Benefits of Partner Marketing Automation
1. Your teams become one
Having an automation solution that works across all types of partnerships helps create a culture of transparency and unites those lingering silos within your organization. When team members are accountable to one another, they can work together toward executing a unified strategy. Rather than operating as individual components of your sales, marketing, or business development teams, your partnership managers become a unified department in their own right.
2. You see the big picture
With a unified dashboard aggregating all the metrics collected across your partnership network, you can begin to see new patterns and opportunities.
Rather than different groups using different tools and operating with different KPIs, automation software gives you a big-picture view and the ability to set organization-wide goals for things like new partner acquisition or conversion rates of new partners—just as you would with business development or sales.
3. You’ll reduce waste: time, money and resources
Partnership automation allows teams to manage relationships consistently across disciplines, dispensing a single payout per partner and avoiding issues that arise from partner crossover. For example, before automating its partnership management, GlassesUSA was managing five different affiliate networks and was wasting money on duplicated credit, management overhead and abuse of partner terms. Automation enabled them to drastically reduce costs by deduplicating affiliate payouts, streamlining workflows, and using reports and alerts to police compliance.
GlassesUSA isn’t the only one reaping the rewards of waste reduction. Through partnership automation, subscription-based grocery service Shipt was able to lower its cost per acquisition (CPA) by an astounding 70% as compared to other direct response channels.
4. You’ll have more contracting flexibility
Flexible contracts allow you to maintain high performance and prosperous relationships in a changing landscape, and automation makes that much simpler. For example, McAfee’s program managers used automation to identify a group of publishers that were driving a significantly higher share of new customers within existing and new categories. They wanted contract terms that would incentivize growth in new customer acquisition and introduced a tiered payout structure that provided CPA modifiers for sales to new customers. The result was a 9% increase in new customer sales.
Grow automatically with partnerships
Partnerships are the big opportunity on the horizon when it comes to business growth, and partnership automation ensures you get the most from this vital new channel. Learn more about the advantages of partnership automation in our eBook, Partnership Automation Is the Future. (Or if you want to go straight to full automation, contact a growth technologist at sales@impact.com.)
