Best Practices for World-Class Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing can be daunting for education marketers. There are various levels of strategy across career college marketing. World-class education marketers have robust affiliate marketing programs that guarantee lead quality, accountability and integration with affiliate partners. They qualify leads, vet duplications and set priorities based on conversion forecasting models.

World-class education marketers typically engage in:

• Evaluation of affiliate leads based on demand as well as enrollment objectives
  
  • It is beneficial for marketers to not just ask for leads but to look for programs that they may want to highlight, and then guide affiliates to generate leads for these programs.
  • Focus your budget appropriately to give a “lift” to lower performing programs.
• Expansion of lead sources by identifying new, qualified affiliates partners
  
  • Don’t put your eggs in one basket. Constantly evaluate your relationships and adjust accordingly.
  • Every affiliate partner has its own specialty. Don’t assume a high performing partner will be effective across all programs.
• Integration of affiliate lead data into a single reporting structure
  
  • You should have the ability look at the campaign data holistically, as well as on a granular level.  World-class affiliate marketers have the ability to aggregate and disaggregate data, giving different insights into campaign performance.
    
• Being able to extend your marketing reach
  
  • Affiliate programs help your brand get into the “cracks” of the digital world to reach potential students you might not otherwise have communication with.
    

Here are some questions you should be thinking about for your affiliate program:

• Are you scrubbing and de-duplicating leads?
• Do you measure performance of individual affiliates based on their cost-per-enrollment results?
• Have you implemented a real-time scoring system for all leads from affiliates?
• Do you provide full disclosure of your lead scoring system to your affiliates?
  

- John Perkins is Manager of Media Partnerships for GearyPMG