Last month I was happily laying on my sofa watching television when an advert came on the television for an affiliate site. This site was not in the finance sector where some well known super affiliates (or perhaps better known as aggregators) are often seen advertising on television. This was in the very competitive gaming sector where there is huge competition between companies.
It started me thinking again about how affiliate marketing can be integrated more closely with offline and why we have not seen this evolve particularly over the years. We know that Merchants use offline advertising to drive online acquisition all the time and we often see this in peaks of sales when a client has a prime time television ad for example, but traditional affiliates advertising offline is not as widespread as I thought it might have become by now.
Interestingly, when I spoke with the affiliate above they said they had seen a significant increase in sales. Obviously the inherent nature of television advertising meant that they could not allocate this peak specifically to the ad, other factors could be involved, but the increase was significant enough for it to be clear the TV ad had made a positive impact.
We are not obviously only talking about TV when referring to offline advertising as this is only really accessible to those with large marketing budgets. However, it is not unusual to see affiliates advertising offline in some capacity, and offline PR in the media specifically has become a key driver of online traffic for incentive and money saving sites, even traditional leaflet dropping has also been picked up by affiliates and exclusive codes can be requested at point of purchase to successfully track the acquisition online.
So, my question is why do more affiliates not do this? Cost would be the obvious barrier and I would presume then the ability to track accurately back to ROI. To run an offline campaign is always a risk and investment is needed up front to fund it but given that most actions online can now be tracked to some degree (as above even with TV you can estimate a relatively accurate increase in traffic) through unique codes, publisher IDs etc. it could be a feasible channel to generate sales online.
I think that perhaps networks and merchants need to look at this together and see if they can provide collateral and support to decrease some of the cost and initial investment. I know a lot of gaming companies provide their affiliates with flyers with their affiliate ID on which they can use to generate new players through a wide variety of means – from a local pub to magazine drops.Â
Success in this area will most likely depend on sector as well, we have seen it work in the gaming and finance sectors but whether it can be leveraged enough to add value in other sectors such as retail and travel is yet to be seen.
Now, another thought what if we look from the opposite angle, online driving offline sales. What if we turned this concept around and use online to drive offline sales. Why not enable the user to download a voucher online then use this offline in a store for example and track it back to the affiliate. This could drive significant incremental sales for affiliates and merchants alike. This reminds me of an article that I read last year regarding mobile marketing. Yes, I know this has been banded around for ages and two years ago it was meant to be the next big thing but it has not yet really emerged (yet). However, what if you could download a voucher / barcode to your mobile phone which could then be scanned in store? We know the technology is there to do this, many concert tickets are accessed like this already, but if you could do this commercially and then be able to track back to affiliate this could again be another added value channel.
So, what does the future hold? As I see it, in many of the larger sectors of affiliate marketing such as finance, gaming and telecoms the competition for traffic is getting fiercer and new ways of gaining incremental traffic need to be assessed and tried. In the first instances I would see the larger affiliates doing this, like we have seen already, but with merchant and network assistance this could be something that is feasible for all affiliates. Offline advertising is traditionally used to build a brand rather than direct response mainly pertaining to the issues with tracking back to an ROI but as tracking develops I can see offline becoming a viable channel.  I am sure there are a lot more complications in this than I have covered such as avoiding sending the same messages several times and spamming customers but an interesting idea to be explored further perhaps.
If you have any ideas or feedback please feel free to drop me a line Helen.southgate@dgm-uk.com.
