How to Create a Successful Customer Acquisition Strategy in Affiliate

New customer acquisition is an essential piece of many brands’ marketing strategies—without new customers, there is no business! And we think the best place to start with any marketing strategy is with data (always and forever).

CJ is uniquely positioned to help drive your new customer acquisition strategy because we offer the tech foundation that allows you to capture and understand customer status data. Track and measure the data and the strategy will follow!

This article will cover how to set up your CJ program to pass customer status and the awesome CJ tech and solutions that support a successful new customer acquisition strategy.

How to Track and Measure New Customers in CJ

So, you want to understand the percentage of new, lapsed, and return customers being referred through affiliate and develop strategies that target each. Great! Here’s what you’ll need to do to get started.

The first step to enhancing your CJ integration is to start passing the appropriate data. There are over 120 vertical attributes that you can pass via your CJ integration, one of which is customer status. You may need to work with your technical or development team to determine if you have this data point available to pass in real time. For example, many brands use the customer’s login status or email address to define the customer status at the time of the transaction. This solution also allows you to define what qualifies as a new, lapsed, or return customer for your brand, which ensures that what you’re reporting to CJ is meaningful to you.

If you’re unable to pass customer status at the time of transaction, fear not! You can populate this value once the customer status is known using our Tracking API or through our data transfer files.

The vertical attributes that you add to your integration should align with your business goals and KPIs. If acquiring new customers is your goal, consider adding the customer status parameter to your CJ integration. Once you’ve enriched your transaction level data, make sure to share this update with your publishers so they’re aligned with your company goals.

Ready to move forward? Submit a case via CJ’s Support Center to discuss next steps.

Pro Tip: If there are any other vertical attributes you’d like to pass to CJ, filling out an Integration Questionnaire for your vertical from the Support Center can help you determine the right ones.

CJ’s Customer Analysis Dashboard

Once the customer status parameter has been implemented and the values are getting passed consistently for your CJ-referred sales, utilize CJ’s Customer Analysis dashboard in Insights to view key performance metrics from your new, lapsed, and return customer segments.

The Customer Analysis dashboard allows you to segment your data by date range (day, month, or year). Scroll through the Customer Analysis dashboard to view graphs with data by KPIs such as revenue, AOV, and more. You can also filter the dashboard by partners, action trackers, etc. Once you’ve found the data you’re looking for, select the download icon in the right corner of each graph to download the data.

The data you gather from the Customer Analysis dashboard can answer questions like:

• What percentage of my affiliate transactions came from my new, lapsed, and return customer segments?
• Which of my publishers is driving the highest volume of new customers?
• Are specific links in my program driving more of one customer segment than another?

If you have business goals surrounding specific customer segments, this data can inform strategic decisions you are making for the program and help you reach those goals!

New Customer Acquisition Strategies

Now that you’ve enhanced your CJ integration to track the customer’s status and you’ve used the reporting to better understand each segment, it’s time to start implementing some strategies.

Commission More on New Customers

Situational Commissioning is a CJ solution that allows advertisers to commission differently on the things that are most valuable to their business. It gives advertisers the ability to offer different commission rates based on certain situations (such as new versus returning customers), to incentivize publishers, and influence purchase behavior. Here are some examples:

• A loyalty/cashback publisher could utilize the higher bounty on new customers to increase their member cashback rate, thus drawing in potential new acquisitions.
• You can also choose to arm your coupon/deal publishers with a unique new customer offer, while highlighting the additional commissions they would earn for spotlighting this offer on their website or social media.
• Publishers that send promotional emails love to highlight new customer offers.

New Publishers Reach New Audiences

Recruitment is another strategy you can implement to acquire more new customers. By introducing new partners into your program, you’re simultaneously introducing your brand to new audiences. CJ’s Recruit Partners solution was built to help advertisers identify meaningful relationships and is constantly being enhanced with more and more useful features!

Here are a few ways you can use Recruit Partners to help you find new publishers, and thus, new customers:

• Looking to diversify? Filter your search by Promotional Model and/or Property Type.
• Leverage the on-demand social media reach and engagement stats powered by CreatorIQ to better understand the audience of social properties.
• Understand how large a property’s reach is and where its customers are located with embedded metrics from SimilarWeb—easily view Last Month’s Total Visitors, Top 5 Geo Distribution, and more.
• Use the CJ Spotlight badge to discover publishers that are vetted by CJ’s Publisher Development team based on their potential size, engagement, trustworthiness, and more.

Once you’ve identified those you’re interested in, you can push publishers an offer to join your program directly through the Recruit Partners interface.

Invest in Publishers Throughout the Path to Purchase

Finally, consider using Affiliate Customer Journey reporting to gain even deeper insight. Once you’ve used the Customer Analysis dashboard to identify publishers that are driving a high percentage of new customers and/or new customers with high AOVs, Affiliate Customer Journey reporting can help you understand how these publishers are interacting with your customers. Do some of these publishers have a presence in the discovery or evaluation phases of the customer’s journey? If so, you know that they’re capable of driving new customer sales, but their customers may not always convert. There may be an opportunity to book placements or media campaigns with those partners to help gain additional exposure with these audiences.

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New customer acquisition is essential for most brands and CJ’s products and solutions make it easy for you to track, analyze, and come up with new customer acquisition strategies within the affiliate channel.

Get started today by submitting a case within the CJ Support Center to enhance your CJ integration to start passing the appropriate data!