Launching an Affiliate Marketing Program for Travel in a Time of Crisis

When a crisis strikes, the first thing many companies do is cut down on the marketing budget and active campaigns. But what if we told you that this is the perfect moment to invest in an affiliate marketing program?

Today, we are going to share key points from the Tapfiliate discussion with Peter Panayotov, an affiliate marketer from Ferryscanner where Peter talks about their experience with affiliate programs during COVID as a service heavily dependent on the health of the tourism industry.

How COVID Transformed Ferryscanner’s Affiliate Marketing Program

Ferryscanner started working on their affiliate marketing strategy in 2021 which was right in the middle of the pandemic. At the time, barely anyone was traveling, and those who did had a valid reason to do so.

Being a ferry tickets and services aggregator, Ferryscanner was put in a tough position in terms of revenue generation and growth. At the time, the company did not have its own affiliate platform and relied on third-party services to provide affiliate partners to promote its services.

There was little control and transparency in the process. The company couldn’t oversee who were the publishers promoting their platform, and it was virtually impossible to forecast affiliate sales or work with partners to develop relationships or improve their performance.

During COVID it became clear that in order to make the most of this promotion channel, the company needs to have more control over the affiliate network, and the Ferryscanner’s affiliate marketing strategy was changed.

Now, instead of getting sales from different partners and paying them affiliate commissions without any control over the channel, the company took the matter into its own hands.

Why Affiliate Marketing is Important for Travel in Times of Crisis and Market Volatility

The logical question you might have reading the previous paragraphs is why work on affiliate marketing campaigns at all when times get tough? Isn’t it better to tighten the budgets and wait while the storm is over?

No, that is a very bad strategy, actually.

McKinsey reported an interesting case with United Airlines that, contrary to many industry peers, doubled-down its marketing budgets and launched its biggest campaign over the past years. As a result, the airline saw a substantial growth in number of total passengers and the number of miles they’ve flown.

And this is true in most cases. Whenever you’re cutting down marketing budgets, you get a bouquet of negative consequences:

• Brand visibility goes down as customers see you less often as they browse.
• Customers trust you less as your inconsistent presence makes them less confident in your product or service.
• Competitors eat away at your market share and profits.
• Customer acquisition costs jump up as you need to make up for the lost visibility.

It’s true that many customers stop spending like they used to when the economy is down. PWC reports that as many as 60% of consumers hold back on non-essential spending in response to the cost of living crisis. However, everything ends eventually, and this holiday season customer spending in the US reached its highest peak since before the pandemic.

And in Ferryscanners’ experience, past-pandemic ferry travel has become more expensive, competitors started investing more in promotion, so keywords and and advertising, subsequently, became more expensive as well. Now imagine if the company stopped promoting itself for the two years of pandemic? Catching up with everyone would have been prohibitively expensive.

Investment, not an expense

Reducing your investment in promotion and brand development can seriously backfire. According to Harvard Business Review, companies that increased their advertising efforts by 25% while the competition was doing the opposite secured a 14% profit increase. And the competition? They had to face a 10% decline in profits for the same period.

Gaining the same profitability growth in normal circumstances would have cost them much more than a 25% increase in ad spending.

As you see, continuing to run ads and other promotional campaigns during recession is a necessity, and it should be treated as an investment, rather than an expense.

Performance-based nature of affiliate marketing

With countless marketing channels and options, why focus on affiliate programs and not something else?

Unlike paid advertisements, celebrity endorsements, email marketing, and other tools, affiliate campaigns are result-oriented. No matter how many eyeballs read the blog post or watched the video with your product mentioned, you only pay the affiliates for those users who clicked the affiliate link and converted.

So not only do you pay strictly per conversion, but you also get:

• High-quality content about your physical or digital products.
• Brand exposure to potential customers.

This makes affiliate marketing a unique instrument with unprecedentedly high ROI. Your key spending is associated with developing a partner program, purchasing an affiliate marketing management solution, and maintaining partner engagement.

Travel is not a luxury but a necessity

One observation that Peter’s team at Ferryscanner gathered during the pandemic and immediately after, was that travel is not perceived as a luxury by the majority of clients.

Although travel is usually among the top things that people cut down on during tough times, it causes them substantial distress. During COVID, when the choice to travel was taken away, people all over the world talked about being travel-sick and having their quality of life go down.

We’ve all seen what happened the first summer when all travel restrictions were lifted. Many called it “revenge travel”, when millions of people took the trips they were deprived of for a few years. All this demand can either go to you or your competitors.

Launching During a Market Slowdown Gives you an Advantage

Something else that many companies don’t realize is if you roll out your affiliate program when the there is a slowdown, you get more room for experiments.

Not as many clients are going to buy your product, and not as many potential affiliates will be signing up. While it may seem like a bad thing, it actually gives you more freedom to do A/B tests, try different commission rates and other formats of rewards, and reach out to different types of content creators.

There is less pressure when fewer people are engaged in the affiliate or referral program so you are more likely to take risks and find the perfect formula for your business. Contrary to popular belief, successful affiliate marketing programs aren’t like that from day one. It takes work and time to bring them to perfection, and it’s better when you can do all that with less pressure.

Then once everything is back to normal and both customers and partners are more active again, you’ll be fully ready with a polished affiliate marketing program.

The Role of Affiliate Marketing Solution in the Program Success

Whether you work with physical products or digital solutions and services, you need software to help you manage it.

Successful affiliate programs rely heavily on technology as it unlocks several key benefits:

1. Automation dramatically cuts down the time it takes to manage and maintain the program. Manual notifications about changes in the program, conversion allocation, commission tracking and calculation, payouts, and fraud monitoring – all those tasks can easily take up an entire working day for your marketing team.

2. Automation also reduces and eliminates many risks associated with manual labor. For example, if you work with large amounts of data and make a mistake with commissions, you can either lose partners who won’t get paid what they deserve and think you’re scamming them or pay extra dollars when partners were eligible for much less.

3. You can scale sustainably without overwhelming your marketing resources. Whether you have 14, 45, or 400 affiliates in the system, you can manage them with the same efficiency when you have a tool that takes care of the majority of the workload. This means nothing will hinder or delay your growth if you choose to expand your partner base with more potential affiliates and develop the affiliate program more aggressively.

How to Maximize Your Affiliate Revenue Even During the Times of Crisis

Launching an affiliate marketing program during a tough time is a good call. You’ll have the space to try different things out, experiment, and work out the best affiliate strategy for your business. However, it’s not enough to announce your program to start receiving new sales and impressive revenue boosts.

If you want affiliate marketing to become a stable and substantial part of your profit, you need to take extra steps to support and encourage your partners.

Provide partners with marketing assets

Marketing or promotional assets will help them with social media posts. Those can be b-rolls for video content, images of your products, cheat sheets with key selling points, additional logo formats, or anything else that your partner network may request.

Think long-term

If you think onboarding affiliates is hard, try activating them. Ideally, the majority of your partners have to generate sales, but many remain idle and never deliver a single conversion.

If you want to combat this issue, focus on long-term planning and develop your strategy accordingly. For example, if you have a short-term vision for the program, you might want to receive maximum profits from every conversion from day one. But if you think of affiliates as your strategic partners for years to come, you might choose to re-think the commission percentage they get for the first few conversions they bring in.

Even if you’re choosing affiliates who match with you in terms of values and positioning, they’re ultimately signing up with you to receive additional passive income. If your commissions and rewards are underwhelming, they will not be too inclined to promote you products.

This is especially true for experienced affiliates, those who know how to sell brands’ solutions and who can do it well. These people are constantly bombarded with offers to join different partner networks, and they’re paying close attention to the percentage of sales you’re planning to allocate to them.

Don’t ignore data

An affiliate manager needs to stay on top of the progress at all times.

How many conversions are you getting this week? Is it more or less than 7 days ago? Are there newly onboarded partners who bring in many new clients? What about your star affiliates, are they doing well? Is everyone selling the same time or product or service? What is the average order size?

All those questions can be answered with data. A modern affiliate marketing management platform will have an affiliate dashboard with a highlight overview of everything that’s going on and an option to dive deep into reports.

Looking at numbers is not the most exciting part of the affiliate marketing business, but it’s necessary if you want to:

• Spot new trends and make the most of them
• Identify risks early on and eliminate them

Diversify partner recruitment

Great affiliate partners can be hiding anywhere.

You don’t have to stick to the familiar routes. Ferryscanner, for example, realized the rising power of social media influencers and the role of Instagram and TikTok in the consumer decision-making process, and they started exploring the route of working with different influencers in addition to traditional bloggers.

Tip: Choose influencers wisely. Peter shared that they pay close attention to the relevancy of the influencer for their business model and target audience. Someone based in Dubai, for example, may not be as efficient in generating conversions for Greek destinations as local influencers, even if the person in Dubai has a bigger following and impressive engagement.

Also, don’t disregard current customers who can become your partners too. At Tapfiliate, for example, there is a feature that automatically invites a new customer to join the partner program and generates a referral link for them to reduce the friction and the barrier to entry. Customers who’ve already invested their money in your business can be some of the best affiliates as they know your product inside out and use it on a regular basis.

Also, try different places where to advertise your partner program and mix and match them for the best results:

• Your website. Add a landing page dedicated to your partner program and use search engine optimization to help potential partners find you on Google.
• Your social media accounts. Those are dedicated to your company, so why not put some information about an affiliate program there? Your followers are already familiar with you and curious enough to click “Follow”, it’s probably going to be easier to recruit them than anyone else.
• Direct ads on search engines. This is a more expensive route for sure, but it can work well for some businesses. If you have spare budget, allocate some of it to trying this out.
• Thank You page after the customer purchased something.

Choose your partners wisely: more is not better

You don’t really need thousands of affiliate partners, you need a few but high-quality ones. People who have genuine interest in your product and the skill to promote it the way that works with their target audiences.

Paul Drecksler, the creator of Shopifreaks, has shared an interesting case about an oral healthcare company that found an affiliate they really matched with. The affiliate, who is a mommy blogger, ended up generating 90% of their affiliate revenue over the years.

So you see, it’s not so much about the number of recruitments you complete but rather how many relationships you foster.

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How to Choose Affiliate Management Software and Not Regret It

If you’re a business owner or an affiliate marketer looking to maximize their affiliate marketing efforts, you inevitably start looking at affiliate software.

Choosing among many options on the market is not easy, so we’ve prepared a list of factors to consider in your decision-making process.

Your goals

Before you do any research or testing, make sure to identify clear, measurable goals and objectives that you want to achieve with the help of affiliate tracking software.

Those goals should be tied in with your overall business goals.

For example, if your travel company wants to see a 15% growth in revenue next year, you can set a goal to have a 100 active affiliates each generating X amount of sales monthly to contribute to the revenue targets.

This goal, in turn, will dictate what your focus with affiliate software is going to be, for example, automated recruitment to speed up the process and have more time allocated to activation, or an in-platform messenger for faster and more efficient update sharing and chatting with partners.

Features

Once the goals are all set up, move on to the product’s functionality.

There are a number of features that every travel business going into affiliate marketing needs to have:

• Tracking. Your affiliate team needs detailed tracking of everything that’s going on in your partner program so they can ensure correct attribution, analyze past sales, and forecast future revenue, and tackle fraud.
• Flexible commissions. Some companies have a single commission type across all their affiliate partners and campaigns, but it’s not always working to their advantage. Flexible commissions mean you can cater to different needs and situations and entice partners to promote you more actively through additional bonuses.
• Integrations. Affiliate software doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and it needs to have seamless integration options to align with the rest of the environment and make your workflow as simple as possible.
• Fraud preventative functionality. This can differ depending on your niche and personal requirements, but there must be at least some sort of anti-fraud tool because fraudulent activity is almost inevitable. With Tapfiliate, for example, clients get to approve who can join their program to minimize unwanted partnerships, and the solution can track whether conversions are genuine or not to protect your affiliate income.

Support

Every software, no matter how marvelous it is, requires technical support.

Look for vendors who offer 24/7 coverage and have multiple options, such as contact via email, messenger, or phone, and an option to have a personal account manager.

Also, check out if they have user guides, manuals, a customer portal with how-to materials, and blog with helpful articles.

Price

Pricing is an inevitable factor of any software evaluation, but it shouldn’t be the driver of your decision-making process.

Make sure the license cost is not only affordable but actually includes a generous amount of features and limits, so you can work confidently without having to worry about the constant need to upgrade or pay extra for something.

Company reputation

Last but not least, check out the company itself.

You’re going to make an important business step by signing with them to manage your affiliate relationships, and the company needs to be reliable.

See what type of clients they worked with before by Googling them and looking for case studies at their website. See what people share on review websites as well.

Also, check the website itself. Does it look up to date? Can you see the contact information? Are the links working, images loading and everything else looks presentable? It may seem insignificant but will tell you a lot about the business.

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