What’s the Best Affiliate Marketing Software in 2022?

Are you looking to boost your sales this year?

Setting up an affiliate program may be the answer, but first you need an affiliate marketing software partner.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is encouraging other people to promote your product in exchange for a commission.

Affiliate marketing is a great way to boost your sales without investing in SEO or 

Affiliate marketing is often referred to as referral marketing but there’s a key distinction:

• Affiliate marketing is usually about enrolling other people that may not be your clients. These may be niche bloggers and influencers
• Referral marketing is about getting your customers to bring more customers in exchange for a reward, be it cash or a discount or both.

While both are great ways to boost your sales, this article will focus on affiliate marketing software.

Additionally, affiliate marketing is often referred to as partner marketing. While terms are often used interchangeably, to avoid confusion keep in mind that “partners” are paid regardless of the results, i.e. whether the sale has happened or not, while affiliates are paid post-sale, i.e. after they refer an actual customer who made a purchase.

In affiliate marketing, a commission may be paid for sales (i.e. someone referred by your affiliate bought something from you) or leads (i.e. someone referred by your affiliate became your email subscriber or requested a demo but they haven’t paid yet).

What Are Key Features of Affiliate Marketing Software?

The fundamental features behind any affiliate marketing software are:

• An ability to generate a custom tracking URL allowing to assign sales to a specific affiliate
• An ability to analyze and store cookies to assign delayed sales (e.g. when a customer referred by an affiliate link purchases the product the following day by coming directly to the merchant’s site)
• A dashboard allowing a merchant to see their current affiliates and how many sales each one generates
• Secure data storage to guard privacy of affiliates

There are many more features that can help make an affiliate program really effective, including:

• A way to approve affiliates (to be able to control who is promoting your product)
• An ability to create custom coupons to help affiliates generate more sales
• A seamless shopping cart integration that requires no coding
• Relationship management features allowing you to build closer and longer-term partnerships with best selling partners

PayKickstart

PayKickstart is a multi-feature shopping cart and affiliate marketing software that includes all the features needed for any type of business to succeed. PayKickstart can power just about any affiliate management program, from SaaS businesses to digital and physical sales.

PayKickstart has high reviews on just about any platform, like Capterra and Trust Radius:

PayKickstart affiliate management solutions include:

• Approve or deny affiliate requests
• Sale and lead tracking allowing you to attract best affiliates
• First and second tier commissions 
• Branded affiliate tracking links
• Powerful and customized reporting
• Automated affiliate bonus delivery and affiliate contest management, etc.

PayKickstart has a powerful affiliate marketplace offering some of the top affiliate programs out there.

PayKickstart supports multiple payment methods (including PayPal, credit card and bank transfers) and multiple currencies (with automated currency conversion). You can onboard affiliates to promote your SaaS, subscription, or one-time products.

On top of that, PayKickstart affiliate management solution is already included in its shopping cart software, so there’s no complex integration required.

Post Affiliate Pro

Post Affiliate Pro is an affiliate marketing tracking software that allows merchants to create and manage their own affiliate program.

Post Affiliate Pro offers PayPal and Stripe integration but lacks custom payment integration, back transfers and Authorize.net/Braintree integrations.

Post Affiliate Pro is missing most shopping cart software features, like templates, invoicing, currency conversions, and more.

The platform starts at $129 per month that lets merchants track up to 1M impressions, events, clicks and sales every month. 

ClickBank

ClickBank is an affiliate marketing software and a marketplace. It also includes some e-commerce platform features that will be most helpful for digital content creators and sellers.

Like PayKickstart, Clickbank allows to track both sales and leads (i.e. email signups).

Clickbank doesn’t offer any email marketing, webinar or membership integrations.

There’s also no support for delayed commissions, manual or automated approval of affiliates or affiliate contest management.

Clickbank works on a commission basis by keeping 7.5% + $1 of the purchase funds. There’s also a $2.50 pay period processing fee.

First Promoter

First Promoter is an affiliate marketing platform allowing SaaS businesses to set up, manage and track any type of referral based marketing programs.

Being a SaaS affiliate marketing solution, First Promoter doesn’t promote one-time payments.

There’s also no way to create and manage affiliate bonuses and contests.

PartnerStack

PartnerStack is a “partner” management platform that works with B2B SaaS businesses.

It has a marketplace, automates recruiting affiliates and offers email marketing automation that scales onboarding partners based on their activity.

PartnerStack starts at $500 per month plus an additional 15% fee on partner payouts.

iDevAffiliate

iDevAffiliate is an affiliate software that integrates with major shopping carts but doesn’t offer one of its own.

iDevAffiliate starts at $39 per month and the cheaper plan limits your affiliates to up to 50,000 clicks per month.

Tipalti

Tipalti is a payable automation solution that includes a partner management solution.

Tipalti supports multiple payment methods and is best used for businesses that sell globally.

Tipalti starts at $149 per month, and the pricing is designed to grow with the merchant.

What’s the Best Affiliate Marketing Software in 2022?

Affiliate marketing can become a great way to boost your omnichannel marketing results.

Obviously, choosing an effective affiliate marketing solution is the first crucial step to creating an effective program.

Once your program is set up and you start onboarding affiliates, changing a platform will be extremely difficult.

Choose a solution that fits your needs, budget and offers a seamless integration.

Ann Smarty

Ann Smarty is the Brand Manager at Internet Marketing Ninjas, as well as co-founder of Viral Content Bee. Ann has been into Internet Marketing for over a decade, she is the former Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Journal and contributor to prominent search and social blogs including Small Biz Trends and Mashable. Ann is also the frequent speaker at Pubcon and the host of a weekly Twitter chat #vcbuzz

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