What’s ahead for your business in the pandemic? If only we could predict. But sometimes a clue is just a continent away.
With COVID-19 waves and reverb hitting different regions at different times, watching your neighbor’s experiences can sometimes inform how you prepare for what’s to come. For example, partnership leaders from Booktopia, Zalora, Coda Payments and Love, Bonito recently shared how they’ve weathered the storm in Australia and across Southeast Asia.
So regardless of where you do business, be sure to check out a new report from Impact and Affiliate Summit Intelligence: How COVID-19 accelerated e-commerce in Southeast Asia (and what it means for affiliate marketers)
We partnered with the team at Affiliate Summit to get a pulse on the state of ecommerce in Asia and how the market adapted based on the experiences of brands such as Klook, Sephora, Axa, Chow Sang Sang, FarFetch, and Yay Images.
An ecommerce pattern emerges from the pandemic
While every region and industry is different, the Southeast Asia market has witnessed a clear pattern emerging in ecommerce and in the partnership marketing space specifically. As global consumption has shifted online, partnership marketing has become the go-to channel as advertisers attempt to expand their digital reach and communications. It’s a channel that previously had not been as developed in Asia as in other markets, but the pivot to ecommerce has caused it to mature faster.
Retailers in the region report increasing their investments in partnership programs to ensure their online channels salvage any activity that normally would have been carried out through their offline or retail spaces. To recapture that business, they are building new partnerships with publishers, influencers, affiliates, and even other brands.
The Affiliate Summit team spoke to a diverse array of executives in preparing the report, and all agreed that the pandemic has accelerated growth of partnerships. In fact 86% of respondents to the Affiliate Summit Asia survey say affiliate partnerships are now their first or second option for online marketing.
Agents to affiliates
Increased reliance on partnerships means businesses are deepening relationships with publishers and affiliate networks and exploring creative ways to leverage the partnership model. Axa, for example, an international insurance broker, reconfigured its marketing strategy to enable its own agents to act as affiliate partners at a time of high uncertainty. The company’s role was to offer tools and content, empowering agents to acquire customers and transact directly with them.
For more examples and insights, download the free Affiliate Summit report to discover the key trends emerging in ecommerce and the successful strategies Southeast Asian businesses are using to adapt and prepare for the post-lockdown world.
To bolster your partnerships for pandemic resilience right away, reach out to an Impact growth technologist now at grow@impact.com.
