Affiliate Portal Whitepaper - CRMJetty

1. Afliating Enhancement Fueling Revenues with Affiliate Programs Through a Secure Portal Vision Document

3. Contents Introduction 5 6 6 6 6 The Global Market Merchants Publishers End users/customers Reason to Have a Affiliate Portal 6 6 7 7 Small Role of Affiliates in the Business Process Why Not Managing Affiliates with CRM? Security and Safety Concern Problems Transformed to Solutions With Affiliate Portal 8 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 11 General Problems That Organization Face: Fraud Clicks Building Trust Sign-up fees Disputed payments Broken offers and Voucher Codes Unique codes Poor matches Solution That Portal Renders Fraud Trust Sign-up fees Late and Disputed Payments Broken offers and Voucher Codes Unique codes Smart matches Vision Document Partner Portal 3

4. Core Features of Affiliate Marketing That a Portal Checks 11 12 12 12 12 12 12 13 13 13 13 Performance Marketing Affiliate Marketing Affiliate Networks (Cost Per Action Networks) WebMaster, Publisher, Advert Advertiser Tracking Fraud Shave Lead Offer How Advertisers Currently Use Data 14 15 15 15 15 16 16 Pre-sale User Profiling Geo Targeting Personalization ISP Prospecting & Pre-Targeting 16 16 17 Post Sale Understanding Data Path Product Level Data Affiliate Data Futures 18 18 Consumer insights Objective of The Affiliate Portal 19 Vision Document Affiliate Portal 4

5. Fueling Revenues with Affiliate Programs Through a Secure Portal Everyone is familiar with services such as Uber and Booking.com, but few people are aware that they are affiliate programs. An affiliate program is a marketing environment, where an affiliate mediator is involved in driving a promotional campaign while an advertiser pays for the end results. Any advertiser can create their own affiliate program. They can create it independently or by using existing affiliate channel programs. In the latter case, the advertiser is subject to the affiliate's costs, along with that, it also needs them to to cope up with potential fraudulent actions on the part of affili- ates. Moreover, the affiliates lack trust in the advertiser, as they find it difficult put their trust it will not results in being concealed or tampered with. Such shortcomings can be eliminated with the estab- lishment of an affiliate network that can manage all roles of both publisher as well as the parent website. An affiliate portal is the perfect solution for both as it combines the benefits of both, mer- chants as well as affiliate. It helps an advertiser to easily create an affiliate offers and turn them into profits through affiliate advertising campaigns. This will be stored in distributed registries of the portal at enterprise end and would be released the affiliates. These rewards can be paid through smart payment gateways that guarantees security with policy honesty and transparency for the productive engagement affiliates generates. It works as a smart anti-fraud system developed to bring more transparency and efficiency in the affiliate program. It will also prevent the affiliates to engage in fraudulent activities with an independent, decentralized system that will be manage everything from both the ends. Vision Document Affiliate Portal 5

6. The Global Market Merchants These which have their products or services to sell. Using an Affiliate Portal, Merchants will be able to market their services through a affiliate or a network of affiliates. Publishers These are businesses, websites and individuals that publish products and services of some other companies. Affiliate Portal will use advance CRM features to match Publishers with Mer- chants. End Users/Customers These are the buyers and visitor who visits the merchant website through the affiliate. They make purchase on these websites and generate the sales for merchants. are Parent Website, offerings and Reason to Have a Affiliate Portal Small Role of Affiliates in the Business Process Affiliate programs are more specific towards products and centred around the commission generation. Affiliates program might be having less roles and scope of features but it has a broad criticality that stands out to be outmatched with an important feature. The portal can help the organizations to build a dynamic solution that will help them to streamline their engagement with their affiliates. Thus, they require less features and more snip- pets. But managing these features is a tough task as the data they process is critical and possess numerous complexities. It is also difficult to go manage all these information sharing and han- dling with emails. Vision Document Affiliate Portal 6

7. Why No to Managing Affiliates with CRM? With more number of users in you CRM, ERP of any other business software, system also becomes insecure and unsafe. Affiliates have very limited role the parent organizations and it often hap- pens that they pay less attention to the user manuals, training programs and other guidelines related to your tool. It makes them handy with your critically important business software. Such handyness of business management tool to mass number of affiliates creates threat to the system, which can result in losing or misplacing crucial business data. Their carelessness in man- aging your business processing software can also cause system errors. It is also a bad practice to manage all your affili- ates and communicate with them via CRM. As your CRM is already managing all the employees and other important business officials, adding more users will loaden it up with more users. Inclusion of affiliates will also make your CRM messed up with such additional information overload that your affiliate program possesses. Another issue with this is the addition of extra cost with your CRM licencing. As the major CRMs are paid and accessible with user licence, which is necessary for every CRM user. So, when you include affiliates as CRM user, there would be requirement for more licences. And this will increase the operational cost for the organiza- tion. Security and Safety Concern The quantum amount of affiliate is quite high in numbers. When an organization manages all these affiliates through a CRM, ERP or with any other business software, the flow of information from a mass users loads your business software. It messes up the information sharing base espe- cially when they work without a role specified accessible. In such an environment, the informa- tion also becomes difficult to arrange and sort, resulting into a messed up data loop. Vision Document Affiliate Portal 7

8. Problems Transformed to Solutions With Affiliate Portal

9. General Problems That Organization Face. An affiliate program has a critical process to deal in context with publishing links of numerous prod- ucts with a unique id that is trackable. In this process, there are certain points, where it is necessary to store and share information. Sharing this information becomes difficult for both organizations as well as affiliates. Hence, it often creates miscommunication between both. Some of these issues are as follows: Fraud Clicks Bot and spam programs also generates clicks and creates bogus traffic. Both partners and merchants have to keep track of such clicks through daily, weekly and monthly reports. Man- aging these reports in daily monthly reports is a tough task and also end up with confusing report. Disputed Payments As affiliate marketing has a complex process and require a transparency with precision. With an ordinary and messed up system, it becomes diffi- cult to track record of every single link. Such system often misses out links and clicks lead them to have disputes. Affiliate have issues with Merchants in such cases as they do not pay them leads, which miss out from their system. Building Trust Studies says that industry is suffering from affili- ate mistrust as almost every one out of four traffic redirection is fake. An affiliate must trust that after they redirect the traffic to the parent website and it successfully accomplishes a visit, it will result in them receiving the payment. Broken Offers and Voucher Codes It is big problem for affiliates and especially for websites that offer coupons and vouchers. As most of the offers codes, vouchers and coupons affiliates redirect, are broken links or expired offers. This happens due to lack of a streamlined system between affiliates and parent website. Sign-up Fees Both Merchants and Publishers have to spend thousands of dollars for sign ups in the CRM or ERP software to manage their business roles. This cost further increases when there comes a recurring monthly fee. This is one of the reasons that restrict small to medium enterprises to and dissuade them to stay away from affiliate marketing as they cannot afford to incur expense more than their earning. Unique Codes Another problem that enterprises face is gener- ating unique codes for the affiliates. It also cre- ates a need for them to check that they do not provide same link to multiple affiliates. Affiliates also have to cross check the links codes and proper way of reusing these links. Affiliate Portal Vision Document 9

10. Poor Matches Publishers drive traffic and leads for the merchants that are of less use and renders less productivity. To maintain a performance analytics record of affiliates, merchants need such data of theri productivity. Generally normal accounting softwares fail to provide such reports. Solution That Portal Renders Fraud Using an affiliate portal, there can be a track of each and every single click. The portal will store all the data and share it with both publisher as well merchant. This way, both can track and see which user was redirected, which reached them and what purchase they did. Late and Disputed Payments A portal tracks and maintains information in real time. It enables the enterprises to add credits to their affiliates, which can be encashed by fund transfer whenever affiliates wish to withdraw them. Portal works on an automated process, which eradicates the payment disputes. Payment history and confirmation reports also keep the system confusion-proof. Trust A portal saves all the data and make it visible to affiliates. It also bring utmost efficiency in the system, which help them to gain trust. With this, they would be able to track in real time, where a successful task completion triggers the system to execute credit in their account and release funds with intervention of any middle man. Broken Offers and Voucher Codes An affiliate has the ability to send alerts and noti- fication to the affiliates for their latest offers and notifications for removing the older ones that has expired. Affiliate portal can also automatically remove outdated offre codes and coupons from the affiliate dashboard. It will also disregard leads for discarded offers and would not count com- mission for them. Sign-up Fees Affiliate Portal will work on single license and comes with a one time fee or monthly recurring fee, which includes single licensing cost and does not ask for separate license per user. This takes down the barrier for entry of small to medium enterprises. This creates a collaborative environ- ment where more businesses engage with each other. Unique Codes Affiliate portal will automatically generate the unique codes in the system and assign them to affiliates. It will track these link and will also verify that every affiliate is using different codes. The portal eliminates the cyclic usage of same link and will reward affiliates only on the codes that are issued to them. Affiliate Portal Vision Document 10

11. Smart Matches Based on high end CRM technologies, affiliates portal generates reports that are useful for affiliates. It will generate useful recommendations for both Publishers and Merchants. Such en- gagements will also better their relation- ships and drive higher ROI. analytics Core Features of Affiliate Marketing That a Portal Checks Affiliate Portal Vision Document 11

12. Performance Marketing It is a marketing industry, whose goal is to achieve concrete, measurable results. Its distinctive feature is the ability at all stages to see a specific, quantitative indi- cator that reflects the outcome of each individual marketing activity (e.g., site visi- tor cost, application cost, call cost, order cost, and end cost of attracting the cus- tomer who has carried out the target ac- tivity). WebMaster, Publisher, Advert A professional marketer or a group of marketers within a single account in an affiliate network) who advertises the product or service for advertisers and receives a cash reward for the target action of the client. Advertiser In this context, Advertiser is the one who incentivizes affiliates to engage custom- ers by creating offers and paying the affiliates (often through affiliate net- works) for targeted customer actions that match the conditions of the offer. Often, advertisers describe possible ways of attracting customers by providing mate- rials, ready-made templates, scripts, and so on. Affiliate Marketing It is an internet marketing industry that works on the basis of a payment model for affiliates (web-masters) for each tar- geted action by their customers (order, purchase, install, etc.). Advertisers often do not work directly, but through affiliate networks (CPA Networks). Tracking Tracking of many different campaign metrics in the affiliate marketing process. For example - time, source, or number of target activities. Affiliate Networks (Cost Per Action Networks) Services in the sector of affiliate market- ing, offering affiliates remuneration on the basis of the CPA model and providing advertisers services necessary for the establishment of affiliate programs. Affili- ate networks charge advertisers for cus- tomer actions, pay commissions to affili- ates and charge commissions for the ser- vice. Vision Document Affiliate Portal 12

13. Fraud In terms of affiliate marketing, different ways of deceiving the affiliate advertisers and their network, in order to obtain a monetary reward. Varieties of fraud may be: Emulation of target actions, spoofing the source of introduced clients (cook- ie-stuffing), deceiving using misleading ads to increase the like- lihood of target action (for example, by using a significantly lower price than the offer of the advertiser) and others. customers by Fraud Shave Lead Shave A deception of the affiliate network or the advertiser by an affiliate, which down- plays the performance of an advertising campaign in order to pay less. Offer Lead It is a target based action program that intend to generate a response from the towards an ad campaign. It drives traffic in form of registrations, application installations, calls, sales, orders etc. Offer It is an advertising proposal that attracts the targeted activities from advertisers along with other affiliate networks. Vision Document Affiliate Portal 13

14. How Advertisers Currently Use Data Tracking data and using data are two very different things. The customer journey is not simple and ensuring that brand en- gagement is created along all touch points – including post purchase (how valuable was the final customer) – is key to any marketing campaign. Awareness to Post-Purchase Data Cycle Looking more closely to the system we can examine the different types of data that are useful for each stage of the customer journey in more detail. 14

15. Pre Sale A key stage in the customer journey is initial brand awareness - first impressions count and are proven to lead to conversion. The affiliate channel uses data in a number of ways to maximise the efficiency of brand awareness. The main way is through the abilities of various tracking solutions to analyse the customer journey from first click to final conversion. In addition various partners can target users according to the demographics. More examples are detailed below. It’s this stage in the journey where affiliate data delivers back high value to other marketing channels by providing sales data to add to the fully integrated marketing programmes. User Profiling A few attributes that you must go through before adding any affiliate are: Geo Targeting Delivery infrastructure, physical store locations or propensity to purchase based on geographic demographic; the ability to pinpoint a customer’s location at home and at work are core drivers for the majority of advertisers. This could be using data to target a specific location. For instance, take a retailer which has a low physical presence in a large city centre. Online is key to acquiring a new, affluent customer base. Or for an advertiser with a limited delivery infra- structure – it may be more cost effective to deliver customers direct to a store in a particular location. Affiliate data is ideal to use to isolate both objectives. Personalization Customer profiling is a key attribute to successful campaign management. What sets affiliate data apart from other forms of online advertising data is that the final conversion factor is based on actual and not modelled sales data. This is unique to affiliate acquired data and contextualises the range of other behavioural analytics in a completely fresh framework whether producing single customer views or ag- gregating years’ worth of consumer data. Vision Document Affiliate Portal 15

16. This is data collected by publishers and advertisers and can drive highly accurate targeting – eg insurance products for women or display advertising retargeting at customers who have viewed, but not purchased a specific product. This form of ac- curate targeting is more likely to result in a conversion, thus improving an advertis- er’s ROI. ISP If specific IP ranges are known to apply to specific broadband suppliers, for exam- ple, it’s possible to build targeted marketing campaigns to just certain broadband users. This is ideal for the Telecoms and media markets. Prospecting & Pre-Targeting As customers connect with brands, the ability to capture their information and engage with them is key. For example, when a new product is due to be launched, there’s often a stage where targeted customers are given the opportunity to place a pre-order. This early adopter approach – typical in the telecoms, media and publishing industries – gives marketers advantages in what are often highly competitive market places. Post Sale Understanding Data Path The ability to understand the data path your customer took to purchase is complex. There are wide variety of options is available across the channel. The key is being able to apply equal as well as quantifiable analysis techniques to be able to interpret the data in unique ways to make a specific advertiser’s campaign more competitive and profitable. This requires advertisers and agencies to draw on the expertise of all channels through networks, tracking platforms and publishers if they’re to understand optimisation for future campaigns. This means in many cases – establishing new communications channels between suppliers and in-house. Vision Document Affiliate Portal 16

17. Product Level Data Most affiliate networks can supply advertisers with product level data for their cam- paigns. This not only allows advertisers to reward publishers with specific commissions for different items in the basket, but also gives advertisers useful sales data insights. For some marketers, this kind of evidence can unlock additional funding through internal budgets or supplier funding, and so open up more integrated campaign development. Customers Website A Website Contact Module User CRM Publishers Merchants Authenticate User Authenticate User Portal Sign Up Verified User If User is Merchant If User is Publisher Portal login Manage Account Profile Settings, Payments, History Reports Manage Publishers Account, Profile Settings, Payments, History, Reports Manage Approval/ Rejection of publisher Send Request to merchants If merchants accept request Yes Manage Deals and Offers of publisher Manage store and Products No Provide Live Support to publishers Revise and Resend request

18. Affiliate Data Futures Affiliate data is constantly evolving as more of it is integrated across the value chain. A brief review of some ways that publishers and advertisers are developing their strate- gies to make the most efficient use of affiliate data exposes significant opportunities for now and in the future. These are specific examples of innovative ways in which affiliate data is being used col- laboratively to drive advertisers’ marketing plans forward and improve customer/brand interaction. Most of these innovations are not yet standard but demonstrate the impor- tance of integrated thinking, planning and execution when maximising online perfor- mance spend. Consumer Insights Publishers have a unique insight to your customers – much like shop owners have across physical footfall. Many publishers have been collecting data from their cam- paigns with advertisers for over 15 years and have amassed a significant amount of insight into consumer behaviour over that time. Top-tier publishers provide additional insight into an advertiser’s through purchase activity across multiple brands. Publishers such as cashback, voucher code, comparison or closed-user-group models such as loyalty and ‘club’ models possess unique consumer data, spending habits, income, brand preference, demographic and more. These publishers are expert in compiling this data into actionable insights. For instance, portal segments its database of 4 million members by demographic, pur- chase behaviour and channel engagement to enable the right message to be dis- played at the right time. This segmentation across channels (online, mobile and in-store), has already demonstrated that members targeted this way spend and trans- act on average 3x more than a single channel message. Vision Document Affiliate Portal 18

19. Objective of The Affiliate Portal subscription costs are unreasonably high. Small businesses are forced to find alter- native marketing strategies, but this need not be the case. The Partner platform will be able to assist small businesses in achieving their marketing goals by signifi- cantly lowering the barrier to entry. 1. Create an affiliate network that supports the advanced Pay Per Action model Our highest priority is to offer Merchants and Publishers complete confidence in Affiliate Marketing schemes. By creating an environment in which trust is not required, Merchants will rest in the knowl- edge that they only pay for the comple- tion of clearly defined end user tasks, and Publishers will rest knowing they will be paid for their efforts. 4. Increase network wide ROI by intelligently pairing Merchants with Publishers By building a self-learning AI capable of providing recommendations, we aim to increase ROI for all customers on the net- work. Pairing Merchants with Publishers and achieving consistently high success rates is difficult, especially when left to humans. However, amounts of historical data we can anal- yse trends to determine what works and what does not. By using modern machine learning techniques we can provide rec- ommendations to Merchants and Pub- lishers, resulting in higher rates of suc- cessfully completed end user tasks, ulti- mately generating more revenue all round. 2. Eliminate fraudulent Affiliate Marketing activity The industry is plagued with issues around trust, disputes and fraud. By using Smart Contracts on the Blockchain and moving away from the Pay Per Click model this will be effectively eliminated, creating better relationships between Merchants and Publishers. This relation- ship is critical as in most affiliate pro- grams less than 10% of affiliates drive 90% of traffic and conversions. with such vast 3. Remove the high barriers to entry for small businesses Running Affiliate Marketing campaigns for small businesses is often not financially viable because entry fees and monthly Vision Document Affiliate Portal 19

20. 5. Decrease end user frustration by purging inactive Voucher Codes 6. Support exclusive offers and Voucher Codes Current systems make it impossible to assign Voucher Codes to a Publisher exclusively. This is often attempted but breaks down because the Voucher Code is essentially public information and can be used by other Publishers. With Smart Contracts and Blockchain technology we can ensure the correct Publisher receives the reward even when exclusive Voucher Codes are used. Many Voucher Codes on the web are inactive and do not work, either because they have expired or were never activat- ed. An invalid Voucher Code is a source of immense frustration for the end user and has a negative impact on their E-com- merce experience. Using our plugins for 3rd party platforms, Merchants can import their Voucher Codes directly into the Affiliate portal dashboard and have them stored on the Blockchain, ready for distribution to Publishers. Should a Vouch- er Code expire or be altered this will invali- date the Smart Contract, be removed from the platform and the feeds across the network updated. As a result there will be no invalid Voucher Codes anywhere within our network. 7. Utilise Affiliate Marketing in new and emerging technology With a steady increase in people access- ing the internet through smart devices, wearables, virtual/ augmented reality and the IoT, there is a gap in the market for Affiliate Marketing that we will look to occupy. Our goal is to stay one step ahead of the industry and offer unique ways to use Affiliate Marketing with emerging technologies and sectors.1 Vision Document Affiliate Portal 20

21. Add Value to Your Affliates Program Through CRMJetty Portal. Engage Smarter. CRMJetty is a business intelligence solution provider for corporates across all the indus- tries. We specialize in CRM applications with major technologies like Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, SugarCRM, and SuiteCRM. Our next generation solutions add improvisation to your process to make it more productive, cost- effective, user-friendly and customer oriented. Tour crmjetty.com to learn more. For more information, connect with us at: Phone: US : +1 (408) 329-9693 UK : +44 20 3893 2693 India : +91-91067 47559 Email: sales@crmjetty.com Copyrights. All Rights Reserved CRMJetty.