Seven Steps to Affinity Marketing Success
Banks and insurance firms have long seen the power of marketing through affinity partners, but new entrants to this marketing world include smaller financial brands, major hotel and car rental chains, and even consumer services. Airlines are also getting into the act, and so are several consumer security and identity fraud protection providers.
It takes a bit of fearlessness to jump into this world of managing dozens, or hundreds of partners, but the boost in marketing results has been proven time and again.
Credit: amokssolutions.com
Having worked with a number of clients that market through affinity partners, SIGMA has a blueprint of marketing best practices that can dramatically improve affinity marketing results. Some of these are just practical, tried and true direct marketing techniques, but often the complex world of partner marketing makes executing on the basics difficult:
1. Target the Right Affinity Partners. The potential revenue possible from an affinity partner can vary greatly from group to group. Therefore, marketers should manage pursuit efforts based on the estimated potential sale an individual affinity might provide through its market base. By using profiling information about your current customers and looking for partners whose members match your target profile, your efforts should create more productive partnerships.
2. Establish Segments of Potential Partners and Create Segment Benchmarks. By segmenting your partners into major categories such as large corporations, regional associations, clubs, credit unions, colleges and university associations, and national organizations, and evaluating your results by segment, you will usually find significant differences that should drive your strategy. We have found the following data attributes to be useful in segmenting the groups: the relationship strength or influence the affinity has with its members, the size of the organizations membership, and how well member profiles match to the marketers ideal customers. You can create scores for each attribute to help prioritize partnerships.
3. Optimize Affinity Member Targeting. Not all affinity members have the same value; in fact, groups often only deliver a small number of high-tier prospects. In most cases, your objective should be to avoid marketing to members who are low-tier prospects, those members are clearly unlikely to respond and to whom your communication may be seen as junk. Begin by developing a profile to identify who looks most like your best customer. Then stick to your guns and focus on those affinity members who match your target profile. Don’t market to those who don’t. We often develop an analysis of current customers in order to develop a targeting model. The scoring model may be a robust predictive model or a simple points model based on varying attributes. By scoring all members and marketing to the top tier of model scores, you will optimize your marketing spend and return.
4. Integrate Multichannel Personalized Communications. Creating the right messages that support the interests and needs of both yourself and your affinity partners need not be complicated or costly. Use your email engine and/or digital print providers to automatically construct personalized communications that speak to each affinity member uniquely, in an informative and cost-effective manner. The key to success is to establish a simple measurement framework that allows you to learn from each campaign interaction. Develop a test-and-learn approach to understand the optimum combination of email and mail to maximize results and minimize costs. There are a number of messaging tools that allow you to deploy across multiple channels seamlessly.
5. Work More Smoothly with Your Partners Using a Collaboration Portal. For high-functioning affinity partnerships, we create partner collaboration portals. This portal typically supports creative reviews and approvals, repository of key files, and the latest and greatest approved creative assets. One of its principal values is the sharing of consistent and timely information across the partner ecosystem. The Partner Portal informs the affinity partner on campaign timelines, approvals, future campaign plans and additional services that the company provides to the affinity partner.
6. Campaign and Offer Optimization. Fine-tuning your communications is critical to the long-term success of the affinity program. Each campaign deployment is a chance to learn how to improve response and ROI. Subtle, seemingly inconsequential changes can achieve substantial improvement. Establishing a test-and-learn approach should be a central part of your affinity program. SIGMA suggests a test matrix be established for each campaign; the test matrix clearly identifies each element being tested and is linked to the campaign and touch database. As responses and results are collected, performance can be assessed for each test cell. Meaningful results are habitually reviewed and learnings are applied to the next campaign.
7. Business Intelligence and Insights Portal. Your email tool will give you basic email metrics, but you need to bring email and direct mail response and sales reporting together rather than keeping them in reporting silos. The insights portal should provide the basic campaign performance tracking information as well as results by key marketing segments and for all marketing touches. Ideally, the insights portal will automatically assess campaign performance by key benchmarks that are appropriate for both your company and the affinity partners. Once you have an organizations member data, you can append household third-party data to the member record to examine campaign performance by key demographic characteristics and share insights easily with your partners.
Pursuing these strategies across multiple affinity partners will take planning and careful project management, but will surely boost your results over time.
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