Grow with the flow: An affiliate marketing solution like Awin helps businesses of all sizes snag growth opportunities throughout the funnel. Explore how to solve marketing challenges and unlock powerful partnerships that can reach consumers everywhere.
Marketers are no strangers to high-pressure/short-timeline challenges.
Specifically, e-commerce marketing professionals likely find themselves caught in the tangle of scaling customer acquisition, improving conversion rates, retaining customers, and demonstrating that ever-so-coveted ROI, all at the same time.
What’s a low-risk, performance-based way to tackle all of these challenges at once like an all-star defensive lineman? Affiliate marketing.
To learn more about it, we teamed up with Awin, an affiliate marketing technology platform that e-comm businesses can use to create revenue driving partnerships. We’ll walk through what affiliate marketing actually is, and how with it, there’s a solution for every goal.
From reach and relevance to conversion and retention, there’s an affiliate for that.
Let’s understand how it works.
Affiliate partnerships: What are they, and who uses them?
Affiliate marketing is a performance-based channel where publishers (also known as affiliates or partners) earn commission for driving specific actions—like sales, leads, or clicks—for advertisers (aka brands or merchants).
Brands collaborate with publishers to achieve a variety of goals that align with their marketing KPIs, like building awareness, increasing conversions, and retaining customers all the way across their sales funnel.
By having these trusted sites or sources support your business, you can create buzz, drive awareness, and boost sales.
Unlike traditional advertising models where you often pay up front without knowing exactly what you’ll get in return, affiliate partnerships are grounded in performance. This means you only pay when a shopper completes a defined action.
How and where is affiliate marketing used?
Affiliates can help solve virtually any marketing challenge.
Want to drive brand awareness or traffic to your store? Influencers, content creators, and editorial publishers are experts in discovery. They can build trust, influence consideration, and drive engagement through authentic reviews, recommendations, and promotional offers.
If you want to turn more browsers into buyers, tech partners within the affiliate channel can drive conversions through on-site optimization tools. This includes real-time messaging, dynamic product feeds, or personalized overlays that engage shoppers right at the point of sale.
Need to boost retention or tap into new audiences? Referral partners can empower loyal customers to become brand advocates, while brand-to-brand partnerships (also known as retail media) allow one brand to promote another in post-purchase emails, order confirmation pages, or loyalty communications, creating added value for shoppers and extra revenue for partners.
Together, these diverse affiliate relationships form a flexible, scalable mini universe that enables brands to reach consumers with the right message at the right moment.
How do you pick the right partners?
The key is choosing the right mix based on your goals. Think about reach and relevance: where do you want to show up, and when? Whether it’s building awareness through social media and editorial content, converting intent-driven traffic with smart tech integrations, or nurturing loyalty after the sale, affiliate marketing offers a low-risk, high-reward solution.
And because you only pay when results are delivered, the model minimizes wasted spend and ensures your budget is tied directly to performance, making it one of the most efficient and accountable channels in the marketing mix.
The tech: How does it work?
Affiliate marketing might sound complex, but in practice, it’s surprisingly simple, and that’s part of its appeal.
Unlike some marketing tools that require long onboarding processes, steep learning curves, or unclear ROI, affiliate marketing platforms, like Awin, are built for ease and efficiency. They act as your gateway to the affiliate ecosystem. Instead of building relationships with publishers and partners from scratch, you gain access to a curated network of trusted affiliates all within a single platform.
With the right technology on your side, you can create an affiliate program quickly, experiment with different strategies, and track the results in real time. Everything is driven by performance, so you know exactly what's working and what’s not, making it easier to optimize and scale over time.
This is especially valuable for smaller teams that need to move fast and make every marketing dollar count. Affiliate marketing can give you a clear path to measurable outcomes without the upfront risk you could potentially take with more traditional channels.
Your affiliate platform also takes care of tracking, reporting, and commission management, so your team can focus on strategy and growth. And once your foundation is in place, the channel can evolve with your business.
The possibilities: Stay in control, stay scale-worthy
Marketers, one thing remains clear with affiliate marketing: You stay in control.
Whether you’re a one-person shop or a megabrand, you can grow at the pace most suited to you and your budget. Add partners, adjust commissions, and target specific audiences as your business evolves and scales.
If you’re ready to leverage everything affiliate marketing has to offer, Awin’s rolled out the red carpet of possibilities. From launching your first-ever program to scaling an existing one, tap into a platform that can facilitate, track, and organize every possibility, every step of the way.