What Mobile can do for Affiliate Marketing

Dawn Quigg, Affiliate Window & buy.at

Wed, 26-10-2011 03:44

Mobile is starting to play an integral part in the affiliate marketing industry, following in the steps of display, search, email and social. It has taken the eCommerce market by storm and its unparalleled growth looks only set to continue.

More people now access social networking sites via mobile devices than via desktops, providing advertisers and publishers with unique monetisation opportunities. Several top affiliates on our network have already built and launched their affiliate apps into the mobile world – Topcashback, Quidco and Vouchercloud to name but a few.

No sector can afford to ignore the sales opportunities that mobile marketing presents, and the affiliate channel is no exception. Mobile will push affiliate marketing above and beyond its limits by:

1. Encouraging advertisers to become savvier and putting on the pressure to explore a mobile strategy as a brand. They’ll be pushed to create a fully optimised mobile site and application in order to set them aside from other advertisers already active or exploring mobile.

2. Expecting affiliates to follow suit and step up their game. The consumer world is craving ever more unique apps so affiliates need be enabling their own mobile optimised sites. They’ll also need to bring offline online by producing offers via mobile that can be redeemed in-store.

Our strategy team here at Affiliate Window have already conducted some research on how mobile is performing on the network and results to date have been astounding. We’ve seen it grow rapidly – from 1.5% of all sales in November 2010 to over 5% in June this year – a staggering uplift over just a 7 months period. In fact, it’s been predicted that £50million revenue will be generated this year from mobile alone on the network.

We have over 1000 advertisers currently operating without mobile optimised sites, so the potential for revenue once they develop this area is quite frankly unimaginable. Just take a look at some of our advertisers who have already embraced mobile:

1. Kiddicare made £200k in the first 8 weeks of the mobile site launch. They have also reported that between 2% and 5% of daily sales on its e-commerce website are starting to come from mobile devices, and are expecting this figure to increase to 20% within 12 months.

2. Another of our advertisers is House of Fraser, who launched their mobile site back in January 2011 as results had shown mobile sales grow 660%.

It goes without saying that mobile has opened up a world of opportunities for the affiliate industry. Advertiser, publishers, agencies and networks all need to embrace it. As a network we are shaping up to ride with the trend, ensuring we have the right tracking in place and the resource to cope with mobile demands from both our advertisers and publishers.

Dawn Quigg is a Team Leader within the Key Accounts team at Digital Window. She works across both the Affiliate Window and buy.at platforms, managing the 7 brands that sit under the BT account and overseeing a team of 6 account managers and execs who look after some of the network’s top accounts such as Aviva, RAC, B&Q and Premier Inn.