Ambassador’s Communication Co-Pilot is here—and it’s changing the way brands connect with customers. Now, you can build customized emails directly inside the Ambassador platform—empowering your team to launch smarter, faster, and more personalized communications without outside tools, delays, or dependencies. Whether you’re a small team, a mid-sized organization, or an enterprise brand, Communication Co-Pilot gives you everything you need to move faster, engage smarter, and grow stronger.

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Why We Built It

Today’s customer engagement teams are under more pressure than ever:

• Deliver more personalized messages.
• Launch more campaigns.
• Do it faster—with fewer resources.

Traditional email platforms weren’t built for this new world. So we built a better way. Communication Co-Pilot brings email engagement into the same ecosystem where you already manage referral, loyalty, incentives, and customer advocacy—allowing you to trigger communications based on real customer behaviors, all without leaving Ambassador. The result? Less friction, faster launches, and better engagement across the entire customer journey.

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“Communication Co-Pilot removes the usual roadblocks we see with traditional email tools. Now, our clients can build and launch emails that are deeply connected to real customer actions—without having to slow down or switch systems. It’s about giving teams the power to move faster, stay closer to their customers, and create impact immediately.” — Crystal McHenry, Client Enablement Product Manager, Ambassador

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How It Helps Teams of Every Size

🚀 Small Teams: Speed Without the Sprawl

For lean teams, moving quickly is survival. Communication Co-Pilot helps you:

• Create branded, personalized emails without needing outside design or dev resources.
• Trigger communications based on customer actions, milestones, or lifecycle stages.
• Launch engagement flows in minutes, not days.

Result: You keep momentum high—and your customers engaged—without overextending your team.

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🔄 Mid-Sized Teams: Control Without Complexity

As your customer base grows, so does the need for better coordination and segmentation. Communication Co-Pilot gives you:

• A centralized place to manage customer communications alongside referral and loyalty triggers.
• Personalization powered by your existing Ambassador data—no extra integrations needed.
• The ability to test, optimize, and scale without heavy IT or platform switching.

Result: You scale smarter, not harder.

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🏢 Enterprise Teams: Alignment at Scale

Enterprise organizations need more than just speed—they need cross-team alignment. Communication Co-Pilot provides:

• A unified platform where Marketing, CX, Product, and Success teams can collaborate.
• Consistent messaging across your referral, loyalty, and customer engagement strategies.
• Built-in reporting, A/B testing, and audience segmentation for faster optimization.

Result: You reduce friction between teams—and deliver a better, more cohesive customer experience at scale.

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Why It’s a Game Changer

With Communication Co-Pilot, you’re not just sending emails—you’re orchestrating smarter engagement across your entire customer journey.

• Move faster: No more waiting for outside tools, IT tickets, or ESP dependencies.
• Engage smarter: Personalize every message based on real customer data.
• Grow stronger: Align marketing, customer experience, and product engagement under one platform.

The companies that win the next era of customer loyalty won’t be the ones who move the slowest. They’ll be the ones who can listen, act, and engage—all from a single, agile platform. With Communication Co-Pilot, that future is now.

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Learn more about Communication Co-Pilot and how Ambassador is helping brands drive engagement at every stage of the customer journey. 👉 Visit our Communication Co-Pilot page to see it in action.    

The post Introducing Communication Co-Pilot: Email Engagements, Reimagined Inside Ambassador appeared first on Ambassador.

Finally, a Salesforce Managed Package That Works Where Your Teams Actually Do

At Ambassador, we understand that customer-led growth doesn’t start in your marketing department — it starts at the front lines of service and sales.

That’s why we’re proud to offer one of the only Salesforce Managed Packages built directly into Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, not just Marketing Cloud. Most of our competitors stop at campaigns and workflows. We go further — embedding advocacy, referrals, and retention mechanics where your revenue is actually created: with the teams who talk to customers every day.

👉 See the Ambassador Managed Package on AppExchange
👉 Learn more on our official Salesforce Managed Package page

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Why It Matters: Marketing Cloud ≠ Customer Connection

Most Salesforce-integrated referral and loyalty tools are built for marketers. But at companies where growth is driven by the quality of service, the power of your sales team, or the loyalty of your existing customers, Marketing Cloud alone doesn’t cut it.

With Ambassador’s Salesforce Managed Package, you can:

• Trigger referrals automatically based on Service Cloud interactions
• Embed reward and advocacy workflows into Sales Cloud pipelines
• Create loyalty logic from actual customer milestones, not just campaign opens
• Enable reps and support agents to enroll customers in programs without leaving Salesforce

This means faster program adoption, more authentic engagement, and growth that starts from real relationships — not banner ads or batch emails.

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🚀 What Makes Our Integration Unique

Most Salesforce integrations in this space stop at syncing contact lists or tracking marketing attribution. Ambassador goes further:

• Two-Way Sync – Automatically write referral, incentive, and loyalty data back into Salesforce objects for unified reporting across teams.
• Programmatic Triggers – Use Salesforce logic and events (like Case Closed, Opportunity Won, or CSAT Score) to trigger referral or reward flows.
• Custom Object Compatibility – Easily map Ambassador to your custom Salesforce objects, whether you’re tracking subscriptions, deployments, or NPS touchpoints.

This flexibility means your CRM structure doesn’t need to change to use Ambassador — Ambassador flexes to fit how you work.

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🧩 Use Cases We Power Best

• Service Cloud: Trigger referral or loyalty incentives after support tickets are resolved or milestones are hit.
• Sales Cloud: Let AEs, CSMs, or Partner Managers enroll contacts in referral or incentive programs directly from the Opportunity or Account page.
• Multi-cloud: Combine marketing triggers with real-time sales and support activity to orchestrate the perfect moment to ask for advocacy.

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📊 Prove It With Performance

Companies using Ambassador’s Salesforce Managed Package have seen:

• 2x increase in referral-driven pipeline from Sales Cloud integrations
• 30% higher reward redemption rates with Service Cloud triggers
• 90% decrease in program admin time due to automation and native setup

If you’re tired of disconnected tools and static campaigns, we’re here to help.

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Let’s Get You Started

If you’re ready to activate customer-led growth from inside your CRM, learn more here or visit us on AppExchange to install the Ambassador Managed Package.

We’re ready to help you move beyond static campaigns — and into real-time engagement with real results.

 

The post Ambassador’s SalesForce Managed Package (Detail) appeared first on Ambassador.

We believe there are three primary use cases for referral marketing software. However, there are a number of ways that you can use referral software to track, incentivize conversions, and increase referrals and revenue.

User-Based Referral Marketing Programs

The most typical use case for referral marketing software is the user-based referral program. The best examples can be seen from social commerce sites like fab.com, software companies like Dropbox, or innovative companies like Uber.

Here, every user is given a unique URL to share with their friends. When the referred user converts as determined by the organization — the referring party will receive a reward.

With Ambassador, the company may define their own reward structure; options include cash, gift cards, points, vouchers, a discount, or even swag like a t-shirt.

The reward structure can be a single or dual incentive. A single incentive commission strategy is structured so that only the ambassador receives a reward. With a dual incentive commission, both the ambassador and the referred user will receive a benefit for their participation in the referral marketing program.

The major benefit of a dual incentive reward structure is that it creates a win-win scenario, which makes people more likely to promote with their network.

Resellers and Product Integration

Sometimes the best use for a referral marketing program is a way to reward the other members in your business ecosystem. Being able to quantify how much revenue different channels generate will enable you to better scale as your company grows.

You can create a referral program to be used solely by resellers, or you can create multiple campaigns and have a specific campaign dedicated to your various resellers and partners. Some may require a more aggressive revenue share structure depending on your business strategy.

One of the common misconceptions we frequently encounter when talking with potential customers is the idea that you need a large number of brand ambassadors in order to run a successful referral marketing program. This simply isn’t true. You can run a very successful referral marketing program by recognizing other businesses in your space, that benefit from your success, and inviting them to participate in your referral campaigns.

Another great way to leverage your referral program is internally. Who is a better business partner than your employees? This works especially well for our enterprise customers, who have thousands of employees. You can adjust the reward structure for your employees to create a meaningful reward for their referrals too.

Traditional Affiliate Model

A simple way to differentiate a referral strategy from an affiliate strategy is by considering the brand ambassador’s motive. A referral marketing strategy is when the brand ambassador is sharing links with people that they know.

The reward structure might encourage them to share the product, but they are not wholly driven by the reward. If there is a chance the user would share the product even if the reward structure didn’t exist, it is probably a referral.

An affiliate marketing strategy is different because the brand ambassadors are typically motivated purely by the reward structure. This is perfectly acceptable, and most referral marketing software can handle this nuance.

Think Outside the Box!

These are just three traditional use cases for a referral marketing program, but truthfully, there are plenty of creative ways to grow your company using referral software.

Do you want to learn how to turn more of your customers, partners, affiliates, and fans into revenue generators?Request a custom demo from one of our referral marketing software experts today!

The post REFERRAL MARKETING: The Primary Use Cases appeared first on Ambassador.

Building brand awareness involves… well, you know the drill. Producing quality content, being active and engaging on social media, sending out email newsletters to the masses… lather, rinse, repeat.

What if there were an easier way to spread the word about your business? A way that didn’t involve having to spend hours behind the computer, strategizing, planning and carrying out your marketing activities? What if you could tap into the results of all the work you’ve already done to gain satisfied customers and then use this to reach even more prospects? You can. By recruiting your own army of passionate brand ambassadors.

The fact is, word of mouth marketing remains the most powerful tool for converting new prospects into paying customers. In fact, a recent study revealed that while consumer trust in various types of ads and other marketing tactics ranges between about 50-65%, that number jumps to an incredible 84% when it comes to recommendations from others.

Still not convinced? Here are 3 reasons why this tactic will get you amazing results.

1) Brand ambassadors bridge the gap.

Your marketing team can only do so much. You can only reach so far, spend so much and work so hard before you’ve exhausted your resources. Having brand ambassadors provides a nearly unlimited extension of your internal marketing department, allowing the cycle to run continuously on autopilot.

This is especially helpful if you have a small team and want to establish a presence at various events, but are limited in terms of time, money or other resources. Can’t make it to that big trade show coming up? No problem. Just recruit one of your ambassadors to represent your brand and you’ve suddenly found the way to be in dozens of places at once.

2) Brand ambassadors expand your reach exponentially.

There’s a limit to how many prospects you can reach through a given marketing campaign. Your social media marketing efforts are limited to the connections you have online, and those that will (hopefully) find you through other avenues, such as through organic search, ads, etc.

Now think, for a moment, about how many connections your brand ambassadors have. If each of these people, who are passionate about your product or service and eager to spread the word, are connected to hundreds or maybe even thousands of others, who in turn have their own substantial networks – the sky is the limit. Brand ambassadors can help to expand your reach well beyond what you could ever achieve on your own.

3) Brand ambassadors are the eyes in the back of your head.

It’s hard to really monitor what’s going on around you when you’re neck-deep in work all day, every day. Yet feedback is an essential part of the continued success of your business. By being constantly aware and putting their feelers out on your behalf, brand ambassadors can keep an eye on what’s happening – both with your customers and with your competition. Encourage your ambassadors to come to you with any and all feedback that they feel is relevant – even the negative stuff. This will help you continue to improve on your product or service.

You can also tap into your brand ambassadors for their own feedback on new launches you’re planning. Give them an early sneak peak and ask what their thoughts are so you can make any necessary tweaks before officially rolling out your new offerings to the public.

Marketing your business is hard work. Tireless, even. But if you have the right team – including those that are outside your company, but are still passionate about your brand – you’ll be well on your way to success.

What are you waiting for? Get started recruiting your own army of brand ambassadors today and see your hard work begin to pay off.

The post 3 Reasons Why Your Enterprise Needs Brand Ambassadors appeared first on Ambassador.

“People shop and learn in a whole new way compared to just a few years ago, so marketers need to adapt or risk extinction”

~ Brian Halligan, CEO of HubSpot

The key to this quote is the fact that marketing is an ever-changing, constantly evolving field. What worked even just a few years ago may be completely irrelevant today. If you’re going to continue to realize success, you must be willing to adapt to change as it occurs.

That said, here are 6 ways to breathe new life into your existing digital marketing strategy.

1. Spread the Wealth

It seems as if a new online platform is being introduced every few months, which means that your audience may not be getting their news and information in the same places they were just a short time ago. Don’t pigeon-hole your marketing efforts into one area. Even if you’ve been successful there previously, if you’re putting all of your eggs into one basket, eventually it’s going to come back to bite you. Research all of your available avenues, experiment with new channels, and then track key performance indicators (KPIs) so you know what’s working.

2. Align Strategies

Marketing is not one-size-fits-all. What works for one organization may turn out to be a complete flop for another. The best way to develop and execute a successful marketing plan is to align your marketing strategy with your business strategy. Next, develop strategies for the functional areas within marketing that align with the marketing strategy. Alignment not only gets everyone on the same page and increases efficiency, it also signficantly increases your odds of helping the business to meet or exceed its goals.

3. Analyze the Competition

Most businesses are doing competitive analysis, but this typically doesn’t go much beyond checking out their products and/or services and keeping an eye on what they’re up to from afar. If you really want to get a leg up, you have to delve deeper. Tap into your existing customers and ask them what they perceive to be the real differences between what you and your competitors have to offer. They’ll appreciate your concern and you’ll get real-time feedback on how you can improve on your own marketing efforts.

• Run a competitive link analysis using tools like Open Site Explorer
• Put competitor URLs into Adwords keyword tool for content ideas.
• Monitor your customer’s brand terms. Take advantage of their stumbles.
• Monitor your customer’s referral links on Twitter.
• Pick a fight. Rivalry games are always sell outs.
• Secret shop your competitors offerings.

4. Provide Value

A recent study conducted by Verint revealed that just 24% of consumers believe that companies take notice of their opinions, and only 29% feel that they are valued as customers. These stats speak volumes to the low opinion many consumers have about brands. By focusing on providing value to your audience – through content, offers, and support – you can change this view and gain a significant competitive differentiator. As a bonus, the more valued your customers feel, the more likely they are to recommend your brand to customers, friends, family, colleagues, and others.

5. Build Relationships

Successful marketing is not only about driving as many new sales as possible, but rather developing and nurturing long-term relationships based on trust that earn you brand preference, repeat business, and brand ambassadors. That’s one of the reasons social media marketing is so powerful. You should strive to make your marketing efforts as personal as possible, and to engage as often, and as quickly, as your customers want and deserve. Show customers and potential customers that you truly care, and your marketing will be exponentially more successful.

Read next: Building a World-Class Referral Program – The Definitive Guide

6. Include Clear Calls to Action

Everything you touch should include a clear call to action – or next step – for your audience. Whatever it is you want people to do – whether it’s signing up for your newsletter, connecting with you on social media, downloading your eBook or making a purchase – don’t just sit back and hope they’ll follow through. Compel them to! Even if you’re happy with the results your calls to action are delivering, you can always do better. Therefore, test, test, test. Whether it’s simply A/B testing, or more advanced multi-variate testing, always be testing and finding new ways to improve your marketing efforts. (Take a lesson from HubSpot, who saw an incredible 1300% increase in CTR just by tweaking their call to action buttons).

Whether you employ some or all of these tips, the important thing to remember is that marketing is a fluid field, where being agile is critical. If you’re going to be even more successful and profitable than you are today, you absolutely must be willing to evolve to meet the changing wants, needs, and problems of your audience.

The post 6 Ways to Improve Your Marketing Strategy appeared first on Ambassador.

Now this is probably why affiliate marketing has a special meaning in my heart. This is also why it really irks me when marketers tell me affiliate marketing won’t work for their business because “it’s outdated.”

That couldn’t be further from the truth.

In fact, Amazon currently has over 900,000 worldwide members in its affiliate programs¹. More so, the Amazon Affiliate Program is used by over 1.2% of all websites on the internet. It’s been proven that affiliate marketing can drive new customer growth for your business and use indirect advocates to make sales.

So what exactly is the hesitation from marketers?

Well, the reality is, affiliate program management is a lot of work. It’s not a strategy you can set and forget. Like any other marketing strategy, it takes time to create and define the specifics which will deliver results for your business. And then it’s continuous management of your program. Some brands with successful affiliate marketing strategies in place have dedicated staff fine tuning their programs on a daily basis.

Now this is not to deter your company from trying affiliate marketing. In fact, if you’re up for the challenge (you’re a marketer, of course you are), this channel is one that will provide remarkable ROI. We’re here to help you get started with 5 best practices to run an effective in-house affiliate marketing program.

STEP 1: Develop a Plan For Success

Know the stakeholders in your company who can help execute on the program. While marketing likely will handle the content & collateral, you’ll want to sync up with your tech team to add tracking codes to your website. Don’t forget to circle up with finance as well, depending on how you plan to pay those commissions (especially if you are running a B2B affiliate marketing program with competitive commission structure). If you’re going to automate the process or scale an existing program, this is also when you want to start vetting technology vendors to find the right fit for you. The more prepared you are, the smoother and more successful your launch will be.

STEP 2: Know Your Numbers

Affiliate marketing is about driving positive and efficient ROI for your company. Know your average customer acquisition cost (across other marketing channels) along with the lifetime value of those customers. Armed with this knowledge, you can create an incentive that affiliates will appreciate while leaving a healthy margin for your company.

Figuring out the incentive structure can be tough but start with the basics. Do you want to give a percentage of the total sale (leaving room for someone to purchase multiple products), or do you want to give a specific monetary bonus for a single product or service? Not sure what will work best for you? Check out these case studies to see what worked for other companies.

STEP 3: Inviting Affiliates

The next step in the process is deciding whether you want to launch an internet-wide affiliate program, posting information that’s publicly available on your website, or if you want to keep it more exclusive and reach out to specific influencers or thought leaders.

Our expert take: It’s critical to curate, vet, and establish working relationships with the best and most relevant people to represent your products and/or services. A partnership approach lets your brand directly own the relationship with affiliates, rather than renting from a third-party network. We’ll discuss the partnership approach in more detail later on.

STEP 4: Educate Affiliates & Maintain Relationships

Whether you choose to maintain your affiliate program using spreadsheets and manual processes, or invest in affiliate marketing software to automate the program, the next stage in the process is to continually educate your affiliates about new product launches, updates and offers. Some of our most successful clients choose to do this through monthly webinars or email updates, and others work 1:1 with influential affiliates to go over product details and perks. Your affiliates are almost like an in-house sales team – giving them the opportunity to stay up-to-date on your offerings will increase sales.

STEP 5: Analyze Success

While affiliate marketing software can show you insightful metrics, your data doesn’t do you a lot of good if you don’t interpret it. Every month, set aside time to sit down and analyze which affiliates are bringing the most business, and how they are doing this. Would it make sense to offer affiliate bonuses, or are there similar brands or people that could be beneficial to engage to join your program? By understanding trends and wins, affiliate management can quickly become a growth factor in your overall marketing strategy.

Looking for more ways to optimize your strategy? Check out these 19 affiliate marketing tips every marketer needs to know.

Looking for a real-world example from a company that has freed up 10+ hours per month and increased referral and affiliate sales by more than 300%?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company)#cite_note-110

The post Affiliate Marketing: Getting Started With A Program appeared first on Ambassador.

What exactly does this mean?

Brands are taking affiliate marketing seriously as a means of customer acquisition. They are investing more in this strategy; they are spending more time and resources to understand best practices; and most importantly, they are shifting how they manage their campaigns.

So, whether you’re ready to jump into affiliate marketing or scale your existing strategy to even further expand your reach, the first hurdle is figuring out how to manage your affiliates. Should you give up control and join a large network of affiliates and brands or maintaining your relationships and manage the parts and pieces in-house?

To help answer the loaded question, let’s start with the fundamentals. What exactly is the difference between joining an affiliate network and managing an in-house network?

Well, an affiliate network is a platform that hosts a community of brands presenting revenue-generating offers to affiliates. Affiliates promote one or many companies in exchange for a fee. An in-house network is an internally managed group of ambassadors. Your brand curates, vets and establishes working relationships with the best and most relevant people to represent your products and/or services.

Regardless of the path that you choose for your business, both are wrought with pros and cons.

Affiliate Networks vs. In-house Ambassadors: The Pros and Cons

Affiliate networks help you reach a massive audience, but there are many drawbacks. Unless you have a well-recognized brand, such as Pepsi or Nike, affiliate networks won’t help you cut through the clutter. Your company also has to compete financially with others, which can affect your margins.

One of the biggest downfalls of joining an affiliate network is your brand doesn’t get to vet and curate a group of people who truly understand your brand. They aren’t the best for forging relationships that are meaningful to your company’s goals. Affiliate marketers don’t have to believe in or promote your mission. They are focused on their audience or revenue, not yours.

While managing your own in-house network may take more work upfront, the relationships that are created tend to be stronger, better for your business, and more authentic. Developing relationships yourself helps you find ambassadors, affiliates that are aligned with your business objectives, and can communicate your story in a way that personifies your company’s mission and ideals. These ambassadors work with you to recommend your products/services to your target audience, instead of just shouting your brand name to a general audience as they would in an affiliate network.

Overall, affiliate networks are great for affiliates, but they aren’t ideal for your business.

How Important is Relationship Management?

The short answer: Very important.

So if you have to go the affiliate network route, how do you manage those relationships?

Well, you don’t. It’s challenging to keep control of relationships with affiliates because you haven’t vetted them and you don’t know them well. The lack of familiarity with your affiliates makes it difficult to manage them effectively. In addition to this, the nature of affiliate networks anonymizes affiliates, making it a hurdle to establish relationships with them after the fact. Lastly, but most importantly, most affiliates are choosing to join programs with the best revenue opportunities, so your goals are hardly aligned with your army of affiliates. The highest paying brand almost always has the largest affiliate community on most networks.

When you manage your own in-house network, relationships are prioritized over commission fees. Your ambassadors are on the same page regarding your brand and company’s goals. Caring about your business always means having the right people onboard. Managing your in-house network is your best bet for transparency, authenticity, and effectiveness. A great example of taking a relationship approach to affiliate marketing are our friends over at RealtyShares. 

Here are some simple tips to help you get started on the right path towards a more relational approach to affiliate marketing:

– Keep open, honest lines of communication with customers.

– Invite feedback.

– Interact and engage with customers and prospects via social channels.

– Monitor what’s being said about your brand online and respond accordingly.

– Go out of your way to show your ambassadors that you value them.

By making the shift from traditional affiliate marketing to relationship marketing, you’ll be well on your way to attracting and retaining customers that don’t just like your brand, but love it.

The post Affiliate Program Management: Join a Network or Manage In-House? appeared first on Ambassador.

The Affiliate Marketing Landscape in 2020

The data doesn’t lie: And what the numbers tell us is that affiliate marketing is poised for enormous growth. In fact, total affiliate marketing spend in the U.S. is predicted to grow 10.1% each year, which means, spend may rise to $6.8B this year.

According to Google Trends, search interest in the term “affiliate marketing” has become almost twice as popular as it was five years ago. With an increasing amount of consumers turning to online shopping, affiliate marketing is quickly becoming more useful than ever.

And affiliate marketing is not just a U.S. trend. In fact, it’s a global industry worth well over $12 billion dollars. From software to fashion, marketers are noticing the interest in online purchasing from their customer base. So it’s no surprise that more than a third of marketers stated affiliate marketing as one of their top customer acquisition methods.

But affiliate marketing isn’t just useful in attracting new prospects. In fact, the majority of marketers are using affiliate programs throughout their sales and marketing process.

Here’s the breakdown of how successful marketers today are using affiliate marketing at every stage of the buyer journey:

– 83% in the discovery and awareness phase
– 79% during conversion or purchase
– 79% for ongoing customer engagement

What does all this mean?

The data proves it is increasingly important for marketers to know how to make best use of affiliate marketing spend.

19 Affiliate Marketing Tips Proven to Work

Whether your company is looking to get started with affiliate programs or revamping an existing strategy, here are 19 affiliate marketing tips for marketers that want to be successful:

1. Create an affiliate marketing strategy and include key players across the organization. This ensures the channel is effective and leverages strengths from different departments.
2. Display a link to join your affiliate program prominently on your site’s homepage.
3. Dedicate a landing page that explains how your affiliate program works.
4. Make the landing page to join your program easy to understand, yet cohesive with your brand website.
5. Optimize your affiliate program landing page (don’t be scared to run A/B tests for conversions.)
6. Actively recruit and manually vet affiliates that enroll/submit to join your program. Ensure their online presence is aligned with your brand. (For more on this, check out our blog post on affiliate program management)
7. Have a plan in place to grow the number of affiliates in your program. Customers are an overlooked segment, are you engaging with this segment when recruiting affiliates?
8. Use catchy email subject lines to recruit new affiliates to join your program.
9. Share a “welcome kit” with new affiliates containing educational materials on your product/services, unique share links, marketing assets, resources on how to drive traffic, examples and best practices, and of course, the incentive structure.
10. Segment your affiliates to run targeted campaigns with varying commissions.
11. Provide affiliates with a portal that houses the assets, insights, and reporting they need to optimize engagement.
12. Share your most engaging pieces of content with your affiliates to encourage prospects navigating through your buying cycle.
13. Leverage social media, video content, and email marketing to attract new affiliates to join your program.
14. Update display banners, share links, and assets to match every new sale and promotion being displayed on your website.
15. Educate your affiliates on who your ideal customer is. By sharing information about your target demographic, affiliates are better armed to seek out customers on your behalf.
16. Proactively reach out to your affiliates with potential content or topic ideas. For example, leverage holidays and seasonal events to create fresh, relevant content.
17. Keep an eye on analytics and always be optimizing your program.
18. Structure different payout models based on affiliate type, sales generated, or special promotions.
19. Whether it is real-time or scheduled, automated cash payouts to your affiliates is one of the best ways to keep your program members happy and sharing.

With online channels rapidly growing, it is up to marketers to understand how consumers are seeking out information, filtering out the noise, and digesting content. Affiliate marketing can be a strategic solution for brands looking for a trustworthy introduction to digitally savvy buyers.

How about a real-world example? Let’s take a look at at one of our clients, a subscription-based pet food company.

Affiliate Marketing Success Stories: 81% of New Customers Acquired From This Channel

On the surface, this company in the Home Goods, Services, and Pets industry might look like most other eCommerce brands. This pet food company doesn’t just deliver fresh, healthy food to its pet-loving customers. It also strives to improve the lives of those customers, their pets, and a wide network of other people who support its brand.

And it does that, in large part, through a unique affiliate marketing strategy.

The brand’s biggest sales and marketing assets are its network of charitable organizations — animal rescues, humane societies, and veterinarians. And while the company is thrilled to have these groups advocate on behalf of its brand, they are equally motivated to make sure everyone is rewarded for their efforts. That’s why the brand decided to implement an all-in-one affiliate marketing technology that would more accurately track and compensate both affiliate and customer referrals on one platform.

Because the company’s affiliate and referral programs have both offline and online components, it was important to find a marketing vendor with the flexibility to help manage, track, and optimize every aspect of its multi-program campaigns. By creating multiple campaigns, the company can offer cash to charitable organizations and recurring discounts on subscriptions for customers who refer. Meanwhile, the marketing team can still run offline campaigns and manually manage them via its Ambassador portal.

After two years of leveraging Ambassador, the company has generated 8X more in new revenue than its total investment in the software. Just as important, it’s helped build better customer relationships and positively impacted the brand’s network of ambassadors.

Ready to Use These Tips to Boost Your Affiliate Strategy?

A recent survey revealed that 88% of people say they would like some sort of incentive (money, product or service, loyalty points, early access, swag) for sharing a product via social media or email. Whether you plan to set up a unique reward system or stick to the cash payouts that most affiliates prefer, automated affiliate marketing programs are a strategic way to manage campaigns.

Just like the pet-food brand mentioned above, Ambassador’s affiliate marketing software allows companies of all types to upload customer information and create individual affiliate profiles. Affiliates can track their sharing progress and access company-approved branding material to share throughout their network all from one easy-to-use portal. With images to post on social networks or offers to send in emails, affiliates can share your brand with their networks.

The post 19 Tips to Boost Your Affiliate Strategy appeared first on Ambassador.

Most marketing leaders know that one of their most important responsibilities has little to do with marketing. Instead, a big chunk of their time is spent with procurement — evaluating, buying, and implementing the right marketing technologies and then building strategies around them.

The problem is that choosing the “right” solution is easier said than done. With the evolution of the digital landscape changing and new marketing technologies constantly emerging, it’s important to consider which questions to ask when it comes to affiliate software.

The Affiliate Software Search Worksheet: 20 Questions to Ask During the Vendor Selection Process

We’ve put together a detailed list of key questions to ask during the vetting process because asking the right questions helps you select the best software for your brand’s needs.

1. What’s the average ROI achieved using your platform?

2. What’s the level of satisfaction with the support you provide to clients?

3. Do you have an NPS score and/or client reviews you can share?

4. How has the product evolved over time to better meet evolving needs?

5. How responsive is your Support team to questions and troubleshooting issues?

6. How often does your Success team proactively reach out to clients to coach them or offer best practices?

7. What extra work, if any, will be required to get the technology up and running so that it will fit our needs?

8. Does using the technology require any special skill sets (like coding) that we may not already have on our team?

9. Are any third-party integrations required to get all of the functionality we desire?

10. Can the product be easily customized? If so, will that cost extra?

11. How many people on your team are dedicated to continually improving and updating the product?

12. What is your mobile platform like? Is it a truly native mobile SDK?

13. Does your technology support omni-channel campaigns?

14. Does your influencer platform offer global functionality, i.e., multi-language, multi-currency, etc.?

15. What security measures are in place to prevent fraud, flag fake users, and detect risk?

16. What level of customer support do you offer?

17. Do you offer dedicated account managers to help us achieve our objectives?

18. How happy are your employees? Would they recommend your solution?

19. Do you have any Glassdoor or employee reviews you can share?

20. What’s your company culture like? (Is the vendor a culture fit for your team?)

The Right Affiliate Software Can Change Your Customer Acquisition Strategy

Best-in-class affiliate software vendors build their solutions around flexibility, scalability, and extensibility, and their teams are constantly working on new features to make their customers more successful. This allows your business to easily implement new features and functionality on-demand, with relatively little back-end development.

One of the biggest benefits of buying affiliate marketing software from an established vendor is that it virtually future-proofs your program. To learn more on how to scale your affiliate marketing initiatives, check out our definitive guide.

The post Affiliate Software Search: How To Select The Best Vendor appeared first on Ambassador.

The problem with selecting the “perfect” affiliate marketing solution is that it’s easier said than done. With dozens of marketing channels and thousands of technologies to choose from, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to decide where to allocate your time and budget.

We’ve heard from many marketing directors about how much time and resources are wasted evaluating vendors, only to find out that they can’t meet the requirements. Even worse, we’ve had affiliate program managers reach out to us because they are stuck in a contract that is depleting time and energy from the team without adding any business value.

In fact, here’s a real story from an Ambassador client:

Fresh off a negative experience with an affiliate marketing software vendor, this reputable Consumer Home Goods & Services company needed the security of true, end-to-end program support.

More specifically, the company was looking for a trackable way to automate manual processes and scale results from their existing program that was delivering thousands of referrals and directly generating new business.

Initially, the business signed with a lower cost vendor. The team quickly realized they weren’t able to integrate that product with Salesforce and their existing commission structure as easily as they had hoped.

This left them with two options: Keep their process in place and try again with another platform that was a better match – or – piecemeal an approach that could potentially work with this existing vendor.

We’re thankful that the company’s smart marketing team reached out to us to consult on how to best leverage technology to fit their specific needs and we were able to deliver.

Within five days of implementing Ambassador, the company’s program was fully operational and the company had the flexibility it needed to customize it to their unique sales cycle and process.

Affiliate Marketing Software: What to Look for in a Vendor

It’s important to know what to look for when navigating the landscape of marketing software providers. To avoid the pitfalls of getting started with the wrong affiliate marketing software, here are the 6 “must-haves” when it comes to finding the perfect fit for your needs:

1. Custom Registration

The ability to own, brand, and customize the recruitment and registration experience for the affiliates you want and need while keeping true to your brand. Control who receives access, when they do, and to what aspects of your program.

2. Affiliate Portal + Unique Share Links

This feature is extremely important in order to proactively provide your affiliates with the assets, insights, and reporting they need to optimize engagement. This will also eliminate constant requests and streamline processes.

3. Enterprise Security & Fraud Detection

In today’s cyber world, you can never be too precautious. The platform you invest in should be able to provide complete control over terms and conditions while flagging any suspicious activity, and even ban affiliates. Especially for international brands that require GDPR compliance, your provider should be well-versed in rules and regulations.

4. Automated Cash Payouts

The ability to deliver real-time, or scheduled, automated cash payouts to your affiliates is a feature your partners will appreciate – no more manual checks, excel files, or logging into multiple accounts or systems.

5. Tiered Rewards

Want to pay out differently based on number of sales, revenue thresholds, or specific purchases? That shouldn’t be a problem if your affiliate tracking solution can structure different payout models based on affiliate type, sales generated, or special promotions.

6. Multiple Campaigns

In order to scale, you’ll need the ability to tailor specific programs, and commissions, or revenue shares for each affiliate campaign or affiliate segment, while ensuring the lead, sale, and commission are continuing to be tracked.

The brands that understand the importance of leveraging the best affiliate marketing software to automate and scale are the ones that see the best results. Once you establish authentic partnerships with members in your program that are aligned with business goals, you have the ability to grow your business with the right affiliates for your brand.

Learn how to create an affiliate program capable of driving high quantities of qualified leads, new customers, and revenue in our latest eBook, “The Definitive Guide to Affiliate Marketing.“

The post Affiliate Marketing Software: 6 Must-Haves When Choosing A Vendor appeared first on Ambassador.