Affiliate marketing is a lot of things. It’s a proven way to increase sales, gather first-party customer data and improve your SEO.
But there’s one thing that affiliate marketing definitely isn’t: easy. I mean if it was, there’d be no reason for our agency to exist and I’d probably be writing product descriptions for a Lands’ End catalog instead of this amazing blog.
It can be a grind to connect with affiliates, negotiate a commission structure and then track and monitor performances, and all of that is even more challenging if you’re just starting to build out your first campaign.
Purply, our award-winning marketing technology, provides you with all of the data and tools you need to successfully launch and run your own affiliate marketing program but it can still be a challenge to master everything it has to offer. That’s why we’re always looking for ways to improve the user experience and provide more support for our clients.
“A lot of users of Purply are smaller businesses that are just getting into affiliate marketing for the first time,” says Ad Purp product manager Sean L.. “We want to make sure that we’re there to support them and make sure that once they’re on the platform they don’t feel alone or overwhelmed by all of Purply’s functionality.”
That’s why we’ve decided to add a new and exciting feature to Purply that we’re calling Milestones.
The purpose of Milestones is to help you do more with Purply and to provide real rewards for mastering its different capabilities. Milestones creates an incentive structure to help our clients learn all of the different functions and abilities that Purply provides them.
“Milestones effectively creates a series of guided tutorials that provide you with a series of challenges to complete and then rewards you as you complete each one.”
Rewards definitely sound cool, but what does that really mean? Are we going to give you a gold star and virtual trophy every time you pick up a new skill?
Not exactly.
Sean adds “The awards in Milestone are pretty high value. So each time you complete a challenge, you’ll receive an account upgrade, such as you’ll get to see more affiliates per month or you can get custom affiliate lists created by our team or get a free training session. All of the rewards we’re offering have an actual monetary value.”
Purply isn’t an ATM machine. You don’t just push a button and wait for the money to pop out. The tools it offers are powerful but they take time to master. We want to make sure that everyone who signs up is able to use it to create real value for their brand.
“A key part of making Purply work is to help people in that initial 30 days when they’re at the beginning of their learning curve. By adding in Milestones, that’s a way for us to say ‘hey, here are some challenges for you to think about as you get started with growing your affiliate business.’”
Users are able to earn perks by completing tasks such as recruiting your first affiliate or successfully onboarding your first five affiliates, which means that Milestone’s value is twofold. One, it gives you real, tangible rewards for what you accomplish, but two, the goals you complete will help you build your affiliate campaign.
“It can take up to 90 days for an affiliate program to really start generating the kind of returns that companies are looking for and sometimes clients can get frustrated when they’re trying to master a new program and not immediately seeing any benefit coming back to them. This creates some immediate wins that can really benefit them and provide them with an incentive to fully use the program.”
The most rewarding thing we get to experience at Purply is to watch a new brand come on board and build a profitable affiliate campaign for themselves and the greatest frustration is watching someone give up just as they were on the cusp of success.
With Milestones, we believe that we’ll be able to help guide more users to build the kind of winning affiliate campaign that will push their brand (and profits) to the next level.
