Lead Generation and Affiliate Marketing

Lead generation is one of the most cost-effective ways to drive sales and build brand awareness – especially for advertisers who may have lost valuable consumer data due to GDPR. Here at Rakuten Marketing, we work closely with lead generation partners who help our clients to fill their sales funnel to initiate sales or capture valuable consumer data for future marketing activity.

In this blog post, we speak to our Network Development Manager, Dhruve Patel, about how our advertisers can use affiliate marketing to drive new customers via our lead generation partners.

What is lead generation?

Lead generation is the process of acquiring a user or customer who has shown an interest in a company’s product or service.  Lead generation allows you to build directly engaged customers, who have gone through the process of performing a tangible action such as signing up to a newsletter or downloading an app for further engagement.

How does it work within the affiliate channel?

As affiliate marketing is a performance-based channel, it provides a great opportunity for advertisers to push their products or brand through a variety of methods. As the affiliate channel evolves, many advertisers have been looking at how they can engage with new customers and build brand awareness. Lead generation encompasses both of these KPIs. The model allows advertisers to gain quality leads through email, mobile, social and display by targeting consumers on both desktop and mobile to acquire new users.

Our lead generation partners will identify the most effective way to target potential customers at scale with precision. This includes targeting based on age, geographical location, interest and many other demographics. In order to do this, there are a variety of payment models such as CPC (cost-per-click), CPL (cost-per-lead such as downloading a brochure or booking a test drive) or CPI (cost-per-install).

Benefits of CPC lead generation

• Allows for greater choice in publisher quality as well as highly targeted recruitment
• Increases traffic and the volume of quality users
• Quick response time to drive measurable user engagement
• Encourage users directly to a website

Benefits of  CPL lead generation

• Gives you the ability to collect data from highly relevant new users
• Provides consumer data which can then be shared directly into your CRM system
• The ability to retarget and re-engage users who are part of your CRM system
• Boosted your email database with new and engaged users

Benefits of  CPI lead generation

• Encourages app installs for your brand at scale
• Allows targeting of highly relevant users who have engaged with your brand
• Granular targeting on apps e.g. targeting by zip code or postal code.
• Focused app engagement with consumers without the distraction of other brands
• Allows retargeting with relevant adverts once they have downloaded the app to increase customer lifetime value.

Lead generation is an important tactic for sustainable brand growth. It can help to drive key KPIs such as brand awareness and new users with high lifetime value. If your objective is to acquire highly engaged new users or drive relevant traffic at scale to your site, then please get in touch to explore our lead generation opportunities. We can create bespoke packages which are tailored to unique campaign goals and KPIs.

If you’re a client of Rakuten Marketing and would like to learn more about how lead generation can help drive leads for your business, you can sign up for our exclusive webinar on the 13th of March 2019 I will be speaking in detail about lead generation alongside our partner ESB Connect. You can sign up for the webinar here.