Building Strong Partnerships

After you deal with all the prior aspects of the affiliate marketing setup (which are rather technical issues of the process), you have to focus on building partnerships with your affiliates (a part with a strong human touch). Basically, this is number one on your practical guide to effective affiliate marketing strategies for online casinos. We mean your program has to be interesting for your partners in terms of the remuneration offer, its tiers, timely payments, and other characteristics.

Within a serious process of affiliate marketing, the first step is setting up a manager on the side of an online casino, which will be responsible for affiliate relations: searching for new ones, contacts & contracts, answering their questions, solving issues, and doing negotiations.

After you will have connected your gambling, reporting, and affiliate software pieces into a working node, maintaining transparency and consistency with your partners is key to having a strong and lasting partnership.

Ideally, you require a lot of affiliates, not closing this door to any individual or company, who’d like to earn a living by bringing you new gamblers. Since your casino may work in different markets & niches and offer a unique set of products, which is more relevant to some audiences than others, you will need the services of many affiliate partners, which specialize in a certain niche, activity, or geo. They may also offer the inflow of new clients to your casino through different channels, such as:

• Email marketing
• Blogging/vlogging
• Influencing
• Thematic websites (particularly, social media websites)
• Streaming (like Twitch) and others.

For instance, affiliate work and geos in sports betting aren’t the same as in pure casino games. So make sure you attract all interested affiliate partners into your network, not denying people without at least first considering them.

Optimizing Affiliate Campaigns

The keystone for effective work of affiliate marketing is tracking and analyzing affiliate performance. An affiliate manager on the side of the casino shall define which of the partners work well under the rules and with what efficacy. He or she shall prevent and cut off fraud, ineffective partners, and those with constant negative carryovers. They also shall work on the improvement of the quality of the leads and be actively involved in identifying top-performing affiliates and campaigns.

One of the best promotional strategies is A/B testing for the optimization of the results of campaigns. A/B tests in each campaign will give valuable insight into what efforts in which channels work the best, what & how can be changed.

The retrieved results of all tests, efficiency estimations, and other daily work of an affiliate manager will contribute to the improvement of the effectiveness of all further campaigns. They also shall change the remuneration levels in the affiliate program over time to better balance the ROI of the entire undertaking.

Implementing Incentives and Rewards

Incentives and rewards are crucial for keeping your affiliates satisfied cooperating with you and preventing them from leaving.

You can — and should — reward your best performers with personal and unique gifts, no matter if they are shaped as money, valuable gifts, corporate parties, presents, expense payments, or something otherwise alluring. As a wise business owner knows for sure, it is always about building personal relations with the most valuable clients and partners that drive success in the long run and contribute to word of mouth. So, if someone steadily brings you an 8-digit profit each year, maybe, you should consider giving them a private jet and compensate for its yearly maintenance cost (to give you an idea — a cheeky and fast Hawker 800XPi for $4.5 million could be a fantastic option). The exact offer to contribute to the strength of your relations is up to you, depending on the income of the partner, your relationship history, and other factors.

Ensuring Transparency and Timely Payments

Nobody wants to be ripped off. So if you promise your affiliate partner certain conditions, make sure they are fair, complete, transparent, and do not contain “small text”, which makes it possible for you to change them as you wish, fooling your partner.

Thus, your program conditions must clearly and unambiguously say:

• For what exactly do you pay, how much, and with what periodicity
• What payment means and what currencies do you support
• What specifically contributes to lowering and increasing the payments
• What are the minimum sums of payment to be withdrawn, etc.?

When your transparency and client support is absolute, the desire of affiliates to join your network and keep up the good work will be high. Remember that, after all, you pay for what companions deliver you: reliable and money-having clients, who want to gamble and spend at your venue.

Tracking and Measuring Success

Last but not least thing of importance is the tracking system, which is a must. As you give each of your partners a unique ID (referral link), you have to track the clients that come to your casino with that ID. Every single unique client, who visits your website from their IP and device (as long as they don’t clear cookies), must from now on be attached to the ID of an affiliate. And as soon as such a person is registered within your casino under the referral link, tracking becomes even simpler (because now, it won’t matter whether they clean cookies or not).

A good tracking system makes it possible for an affiliate partner to monitor how many clients they got attracted, what are these clients’ revenues for them under the existing model of remuneration, and other important stats. Thus, not only do your partners know how they work and what they get in terms of money but also, which channels of client attraction work and to which extent (that is, conversion rate).

On your side — back office — thanks to ID, you will know stats on each affiliate partner, their efficiency, earnings, ROI, diligence, and other things.