Affiliate marketing is a great way for complementing businesses to reap mutual rewards. Maybe you’re a marketer running campaigns through affiliates or perhaps you’re looking on how to promote affiliate links for revenue. Whichever way you’re looking, push notifications are one of the top ways to supercharge engagement for affiliate campaigns.
If you’re new to affiliate marketing, an affiliate is a company or individual hosting a promotional campaign on behalf of a separate business. The affiliate is rewarded for driving traffic towards the business’s products or promotions.
In the past, this would normally be in the form of simple linked text or banners. Now, however, push notifications have taken over the game as one of the most effective tools for affiliate marketing.
What Exactly Are Push Notifications?
Even if you don’t know the term, you’ve probably seen push notifications before. You know those notifications from WhatsApp or Facebook that come up on your phone even when you’re not using the app? Those are push notifications.
If you use a web browser regularly, you’ve probably noticed more and more sites asking if you’d like to receive notifications on your desktop. This is a newer form of push notification. You may have seen them used for informational purposes and they can also be a powerful way to market to a relevant audience.
How Do They Help With Ads?
Push notifications have proven to be highly engaging. They boast click-through rates (CTRs) of up to 8%. While this might not sound so exciting, compare that to the 2% CTR of your average email campaign. That’s four times higher engagement.
Add to that the fact that potential customers need to opt-in to receive push notifications. This means more effective ad targeting. This affiliate lead generation will help gather higher quality traffic, with more real users and less customer churn once they’ve reached the desired landing page.
You can see why push notification ads are so attractive to marketers. They make an effective part of any customer engagement strategy, as well as encouraging a more engaged audience. They are perceived as less intrusive than other forms of advertising thanks to their opt-in nature.
How Can I Use Them to Boost Affiliate Marketing?
The benefits of push notifications should be clear by now, but how can you implement them? Let’s get into the specifics of how to get the most out of using them in your affiliate marketing campaign. Whether you’re utilizing them to push daily deals or one-off sales, it all starts with content.
Create Clear, Concise, and Engaging Copy
The standard format for push notifications is a thumbnail image, headline copy, and a short description. You might also include a website URL and a larger call to action button. A generic discount offer would look something like this:
You can see that there’s not a lot of room to work with. It’s important that headlines and descriptions are short and punchy. The image needs to be engaging but simple enough to be effective as a small thumbnail. You also need a strong CTA. Using eye-catching words like “discount” or “sale” will help draw attention to your notification.
You can capitalize on the nature of push notifications here. They reach the customer directly, staying on screen until they are clicked on or dismissed. So, the more enticing your headline, image, or call to action, the more chance your user will click through.
Improve Direct Ad Targeting
Market segmentation is crucial for push notification campaigns. You can use your existing customer data as a starting point to match the right ads to the right customers.
The short and simple format of notification ads means it’s relatively easy to create alternatives with varied wording and images. As you develop and launch your campaigns, you can use these alternatives to run simple A/B tests. This will help further narrow down your market segments, helping direct targeting in future campaigns.
If you’re a business running campaigns through a large number of affiliates, you should consider using affiliate tracking software. This helps you monitor which ads perform best with which affiliates and will enable you to target the best ads for the ideal online meeting platformplat.
Get Personal
Advertising content works best when customers feel like it’s been tailored to their personal needs. It may sound simplistic but there’s really no easier way to sell than offering someone a product they already want.
With push notifications, this means two things.
First, you need to know your customers. As well as using your existing customer data, use an ad tracker to collect customer data as you go. This will help you know your audience’s preferences regarding content, platforms, and more.
Second, you need to tailor your language to speak to the customer directly. Research has shown that personalized language and tailored content are much more attractive to customers. Phrases like “your discount” or “just for you” will be more effective than generic alternatives.
Centralize Data Collection and Software
Growing your average affiliate commission with marketing campaigns and their ROI will require different kinds of software working together. Embrace solutions such as cloud integration to ensure that your ad trackers, affiliate trackers, and other work from home software can interact and be accessed from a central hub.
The data you collect will be a powerful tool to keep your future campaigns successful. So make sure you can access your customer data easily. Avoid isolated data in data silos by centralizing the data within your business. Consider using cloud migration and give your marketers the information they need, right at their fingertips.
Use Effective Traffic Sources
You can run push notifications from a single source like your website or chose to target affiliate partners individually. To reach the largest audience, though, you’ll need to use one or more traffic sources.
A traffic source targets multiple platforms where users have accepted push notifications and runs your campaign through all appropriate channels. This can massively increase the volume of traffic that clicks through your notification. This is especially true if you use a platform with a global reach.
If you’ve run affiliate campaigns before, you may be familiar with popular traffic sources like PropellerAds or ZeroPark. If not, there are a lot of choices for traffic sources. Here are a few things you should look for when choosing your traffic source.
Pricing Model
Traffic sources generally use a cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-month (CPM) model. The most cost-effective model for you may vary as your traffic volume increases. New or small-scale users will be best starting out with CPC pricing, as you only pay for actual clicks. Once you’ve passed a certain volume threshold, it can be more cost-effective to pay a monthly fee.
You should also look at a traffic source’s minimum deposit amount as this can vary between providers. If you’re just starting out, look for an established platform with a low deposit (around $100 is a common price).
Platform Reach
If you’re just starting out in affiliate marketing then you may not know your exact target market. A platform with a global reach will direct the highest volume of traffic towards your ad. The quality of this traffic will be lower than from a directly targeted ad, though.
If you are an established marketer it may be better to target a more specialized platform. New competitors in the field, such as Megapu.sh, specialize in push ads, while other providers will allow you to target specific market segments with more traditional marketing communication methods.
Features
Getting all the features you need out of one platform is important. If you’re new to the field, you’ll want to choose a provider with a user-friendly UI. You may also want to choose a platform with integrated tools for traffic monitoring like ZeroPark.
Established marketers will need to consider the ad formats on offer. Some providers will let you run a variety of affiliate campaigns in one place. If you want to run multiple campaigns at once with more than just push-ads, this will let you easily compare the success of each campaign.
Push to Win
Push notifications certainly aren’t new technology but they’re still a growing market. New options are emerging all the time and it’s worth keeping up with the changes to keep your ad strategy relevant.
Newly updated versions of Chrome and Safari will monitor user preferences for push ads and automatically disable them if users opt-out regularly. In response, a new form of in-page push ad has been developed. It looks like a push ad but works like on-site advertising to bypass browser restrictions.
Keeping up with these kinds of new developments can give your digital marketing a competitive edge.
Push notifications are still a hot topic in digital advertising. Don’t hesitate to capitalize on this trend while it’s at its peak.
With the relatively low cost and high return on investment, it should be easy to convince your colleagues that this needs to be a part of your ad strategy. So even if you’re not in the office right now, get on that teleconference phone and let them know.
