Ad fraud is the silent thief of the digital age, silently syphoning away profits and damaging brand reputations. As the battle against ad fraud rages on, lead generation businesses are losing billions of dollars annually to malicious actors.

To shed light on the path toward a more profitable and secure future in lead generation, ad fraud solutions provider Anura and Phonexa recently co-hosted a webinar titled, “Source to Success: How Clean Lead Management Drives a More Profitable Outcome.”

Hosted by Anura CEO and Co-Founder Rich Kahn and Phonexa COO Jeff Schaffer the webinar delved deep into the art of creating a clean foundation for lead generation and management to mitigate fraud.

You can watch webinar on demand here.

Phonexa recently partnered with Anura to release an integration for clients and prospects to eliminate ad fraud and reduce spend on fraudulent campaigns. This innovative partnership equips lead generators, advertisers, and affiliate networks with the tools needed to effectively combat ad fraud and curtail wasteful spending on deceptive campaigns.

The following statistics underscore the magnitude of the ad fraud epidemic:

• Advertisers are projected to lose a staggering $100 billion to ad fraud this year alone.
• A quarter of all paid traffic is fraudulent, infiltrating marketing campaigns and diluting their effectiveness.
• Programmatic campaigns, a cornerstone of modern digital advertising, suffer from fraud rates averaging a startling 50%.

It’s a daunting reality, but Kahn and Schaffer’s captivating conversation offered a beacon of hope.

Let’s dive into the actionable insights and strategies shared by the two industry experts.

To help you gauge the effectiveness of your fraud prevention measures, we’ve introduced a brand-new tool: the Marketing Fraud Prevention Proficiency Quiz.

Take the Quiz

The Need for Operational Excellence and Focus To Ensure Clean, Fraud-Free Lead Intake

The webinar started with a conversation centred around making sure marketing efforts are efficient and effective in light of rampant ad fraud. Schaffer noted that experienced marketers utilise available technologies to analyse data and make business decisions in real-time.

“Clean and profitable lead management is not a ‘set it and forget it’ process,” said Schaffer. “Even a small percentage of unclean or fraudulent leads can not just drastically impact business economics in the near-term but it can completely torpedo established relationships, create compliance exposures, and more.”

Schaffer stressed that the ability to have real-time decisioning and having the tooling to be able to, at times, dynamically change and modify the customer journey is just as important as capturing clean data. Modifications made to the customer journey can be based on:

• Whatever first-party data the consumer may have voluntarily provided
• The behaviour of that consumer
• Any third-party data sources that can give you a more holistic view of that consumer
• Historical data derived from other sources

”Being able to have all of those touchpoints and all of the information about the consumer journey, motivations, other third-party [data] consolidated in one place is crucial,” said Schaffer.

“It’s a constant battle. Every week we’re seeing one or two new types of threats that are coming through that need some type of adjustment, some type of correction, or just some type of update to our machine learning to understand we’re already protecting against that type of attack,” said Kahn. “We’re very big on making sure we’re listening to the voice of the customer just like we expect lead generators to listen to the voice of their customers.”

Mitigating the Risk of Non-Compliance

The webinar then shifted to a discussion on regulatory compliance, particularly as it relates to spam calls from fraudulent sources.

“What the TCPA set out to do didn’t solve the problem. [Robocalls have] just gotten worse and worse because people are finding ways around it or just totally ignoring it,” said Kahn. “We believe that you do not have consent to call somebody if it’s a fraudulent lead that’s being filled out. The question is can you identify that fraudulent lead before it gets to the call centre? That’s where we step in.”

Schaffer then warned about the legal consequences of living in a “sue first, ask questions later” world.

“Anybody that’s ever been involved in a TCPA lawsuit or anything related to that knows it’s not fun,” said Schaffer. “What we’ve done is build out an ecosystem of partnerships where we’re able in real-time to integrate with not just companies like Anura [and others] to ensure that those leads never enter the ecosystem.”

“That’s where our relationship with Phonexa comes into play because if you’re in the lead space, you need a management system — you’re not going to do it with paper, you’re not going to do it with index cards,” said Kahn. “You need some type of [platform] to handle the volume and scale that a lot of these [your] clients have, and you have to have enough decisioning power before passing it on to a call centre to feel 100% confident that [you have] a real lead.”

Improving Overall Lead Quality To Boost ROI

Kahn then focused on the importance of filtering out fraudulent paid traffic to improve overall lead quality and, ultimately, increase ROI.

“If you’re selling those leads down to another client (a buyer) and 25% of those leads are fake and they’re not going to generate any return, that automatically waters down the ROI that they’re getting,” said Kahn. “It also [drains] their call centre resources because now it takes longer to reach somebody who’s not expecting their call, they’ve got the risk of TCPA violations, there’s a lot that goes on with that.”

With regard to affiliate marketers, Kahn then reiterated how buying and selling fake leads have a domino effect, resulting in dwindling ROI.

“When the ROI is lowered based on the source that they’re buying from, they’re going to want to smart-price what they’re paying per lead and reduce what they pay per lead because of that water down effect,” said Kahn. “Flip the switch — eliminate that 25% so that everything coming in has the potential to convert. You’re going to see a lift in ROI which means a higher demand for your traffic, and the worst [case scenario] is your customers are demanding more than you have because then supply and demand kick in and you can start raising prices again.”

For Kahn, it all comes down to developing high-quality traffic by using a variety of tools to ensure you’re delivering the best quality of leads possible, which will ultimately help grow your business.

In the affiliate marketing space, emphasising quality leads over high volume is the key to sustained growth.

Nurturing Leads and Guiding Them Through the Sales Funnel

The conversation concluded with Schaffer sharing strategies on how to support clients when nurturing high-quality leads. According to Schaffer, the more insight marketers have regarding a customer’s lifecycle — their intent, what led them down their path into your ecosystem, etc. — the better equipped you’ll be to optimise their journey, increase conversions and profitability, and provide a better overall customer experience.

“There’s no ceiling or limitation to the extent to which a business can A/B test various lead nurturing methods and work to optimise to a desired end result,” said Schaffer. “But, you can’t really do that until you trim the fat. You have to be able to make decisions based on data that is clean … and is as close to fraud-free as possible.

“Once you can confidently say that you’re operating with a truly clean dataset and you have the mechanisms in place to keep it that way, then you can make better decisions,” said Schaffer. “Giving the consumers the ability to interact in the way in which they want to is key as far as lead nurturing [as well as] having a singular system where you track all of that.”

By joining forces with Anura, Phonexa enables businesses to take a proactive stance against the threats of bots, malware, and human fraud in their lead processing operations.

Cheque out our latest blog to learn more about how Anura and Phonexa’s fraud-detecting integration works, and be sure to also review Phonexa’s go-to list of anti-fraud features and integrations.

To continue the conversation with Schaffer, connect with him on LinkedIn.

As affiliate marketing continues to transform the way businesses promote their products and services, affiliate networks grapple with an array of challenges like how to manage payments on a global scale, navigating complex compliance regulations across different countries, and optimising the affiliate lifecycle.

After announcing a partnership with leading payables automation platform Tipalti to launch an integration that simplifies and automates global payment methods for its clients, Phonexa hosted the latest edition of its Amplify webinar series featuring Zach Svendsen, Tipalti’s Vice President of Alliances.

Phonexa CMO Talar Malakian led a discussion with Svendsen to tap into his wealth of experience and profound expertise by thoroughly examining the intricacies of optimising global payments.

Why is the topic so vital for discussion? A recent report found that 76% of finance executives struggle with manual tasks that consume an excessive amount of their teams’ time and effort, with 62% citing automated payments as a key area where applying digital technology is greatly needed.

Here’s a recap of the strategies Svendsen shared during the Amplify webinar, equipping you with the knowledge and tools to navigate the ever-changing affiliate marketing landscape.

Watch the recording of “Scaling Your Network: Payment Strategies for Influencers & Affiliates with Tipalti” by clicking here.

Common Challenges When Managing Payments On a Global Scale

Svendsen kicked off the conversation by shedding light on the challenges affiliate networks face when managing payments globally. He cited the payee experience as the biggest challenge networks encounter today.

“[The payee experience] has proven to be a make-it-or-break-it issue that needs to be addressed by most organisations because if it’s neglected, it negatively affects the payment experience, brand loyalty goes down, and you’ll lose affiliates,” said Svendsen. “Knowing your payees and giving them the best possible experience is critical to build trust, be authentic, and ultimately to succeed.”

As the affiliate marketing industry extends its reach across borders, businesses encounter complex challenges related to international payments. From currency conversion to tax regulations, navigating the global financial web requires careful consideration.

“Our customers tell us – and our partners too – that they need a white-glove experience for all their affiliates that looks and feels the same as what their network does, and it starts with the payee onboarding, which can be a really slow process,” said Svendsen. “Going into different countries, it’s difficult to maintain a lean operating model that scales … a lot of companies use multiple services [and] find that they have an inability to transact regardless if they’re using those services.”

Managing Compliance and Regulations Worldwide

Svendsen also cited fraud as another big challenge affecting most businesses.

“Companies are often on the hook for noncompliance penalties, tax penalties, and GDPR [violations],” said Svendsen. “It can be very expensive from a time consumption perspective, and it’s generally just a huge waste of resources.”

Svednsen identified compliance as a pivotal aspect of affiliate marketing. Each country has its own set of rules and regulations, making it essential for networks to stay on the right side of the law.

“It’s bigger than just the payment side of it – there’s a laundry list of things that need to be done as companies go global. The first thing is just understanding the [local] compliance requirements in each country where you’re operating,” said Svendsen. “It behoves a lot of [networks] out there to partner with a company or build their own in-house system that has strong controls and fraud detection, checking against [Office of Foreign Assets Control] and other sanction lists to avoid noncompliance penalties and improve financial controls.”

Leveraging Automation for Increased Efficiency

Automation is transforming the way businesses handle their affiliate networks.

Phonexa, for one, is leading the charge by giving customers who are already using Call Logic, LMS Sync, and Lynx the ability to automate a variety of accounting tasks for free by using Books360 – a perfect integrated platform that allows clients to pay publishers directly, and invoice buyers accurately, safely, and efficiently.

Svendsen asserted that by leveraging automated solutions, companies can streamline operations, reduce errors, and provide a smoother experience for affiliates.

“[When] building a tech stack, it’s important to understand if it can solve multiple needs for multiple departments … the first thing is making it easy for everyone to onboard,” said Svendsen. “We try to promote self-service and reduce the amount of time it takes to onboard someone and then reduce all the status enquiries, too.”

Svendsen shared that areas where automation can reduce payment errors and increase efficiencies include:

• Verifying bank information
• Proactive payment status communication, such as emails
• Validating tax IDs, W9s, W8s, and other forms to ensure tax compliance
• Generating 1099 and 1042-S forms for clients and their payees

“The ability to pay in multiple countries in multiple currencies shouldn’t be overlooked, especially when scaling globally,” said Svendsen.

The insights shared by Svendsen are crucial for transforming network payment processes to streamline payments on a global scale in the modern digital era. As we move forward, these insights and strategies are the cornerstones for navigating the ever-changing affiliate marketing landscape, setting the stage for a more efficient, compliant, and successful future.

Stay tuned for more in our ongoing Amplify webinar series, and continue to connect with us for the latest updates.

To learn more about upcoming Amplify webinars, connect with Malakian on LinkedIn.

Whether it’s fake referrals, cookie stuffing, click fraud, bot traffic or misrepresentation, ad fraud can take a toll on your revenue streams.

Ad fraud is so profitable for criminals that it’s expected to cost advertisers $100 billion this year. Anura estimates that 25 percent of all paid traffic is fraudulent, and that programmatic campaigns have fraud rates averaging 50 percent.

Phonexa offers numerous third-party services to help you combat fraud, reduce unnecessary ad spend, and increase your bottom line. Check out our third-party offerings below.

Features You Get out of the Box

IP Analysis

IP Analysis detects and prevents bots and proxies. This service returns a fraud score based on 25 risk analysis data points. You can reject leads based on fraud score, mobile status, and country.

Geo By Phone

By using the Geo By Phone service, you can reject leads based on country or area code.

Basic Phone Number Validation

The Basic Phone Number Validation service allows you to validify a phone number based on the country.

Phone Number Analysis

The Phone Number Analysis feature is the most robust verification for phone numbers. This service provides a fraud score that you can use to filter leads, along with the ability to reject based on validity, active status, prepaid, VoIP, spammer, line type, country, carrier and time zone.

Email Hygiene

The Email Hygiene service provides real-time validation of email addresses. You can run this service and create a rule to filter out undesirable results, such as bot, spam trap or complainer.

Litigant Alert

The Litigant Alert service allows you to search the consumer’s phone number for existing TCPA, FDCPA, FCRA, and CFPB lawsuits. You do not need your own credentials for this service, but keep in mind that this subscription may be used for business analysis only, not for credit, insurance, or employment decisions. Phonexa is not a consumer reporting agency, and the data is not a consumer report under the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

Litigator Database Lookup

The Litigator Database Lookup service identifies leads as TCPA plaintiffs and litigators.

US ZIP Code Validation

The US ZIP Code Validation allows you to verify zip codes. You can set up rules to reject if the zip code was not found or to reject certain states.

Integrations

Anura

With a 99.999% accuracy rate, Anura is a leader in identifying fraud. You can use this service to identify bots, malware, and human fraud. Using your established Anura credentials, you can run this service on your products within Phonexa to filter out suspicious leads and prevent spending resources on working fraudulent leads. See how the integration works in more detail here.

Jornaya Authentication API

Jornaya is a third-party service that tracks a consumer’s journey on your website and captures consent. With Jornaya, publishers have a tool to prove consumer consent, and in turn, provide higher quality leads. The Jornaya Authentication API service allows Phonexa clients to reject leads if the Jornaya LeadiD token is not valid.

Jornaya Lead Age

A major concern in the lead generation space is obtaining fresh leads. With the Jornaya Lead Age integration, you can create a rule to reject leads based on lead age in days, hours, or minutes.

Jornaya TCPA Guardian

The Jornaya TCPA Guardian service helps you authenticate TCPA consent and provides detailed information about the location and visibility of the TCPA consent and disclosures on the webpage. Using this information, you can reject a lead based on authenticity, TCPA consent type (active or passive) and TCPA disclosure mismatch. You will need your own credentials to utilize this third-party service.

TrustedForm

Our TrustedForm integration allows you to automatically claim the TrustedForm certificate using your credentials and send the masked TrustedFormURL to the buyer. You can also set up a rule to reject the lead based on age in days, hours, or minutes.

TrustedForm Ping

The TrustedForm Ping service is used for ping post products and allows you to obtain info about the TrustedForm certificate without actually claiming it. Just like the TrustedForm service, you can use TrustedForm Ping to reject based on lead age, as well as form input method, IP address mismatch and time on page. For example, if the form input method is “paste” and the time on page was only a few seconds, this could be indicative of fraud.

TrustedForm Retrieve Insights

The TrustedForm Retrieve Insights feature allows account holders to retrieve TrustedForm metadata associated with a lead. For this service, the TrustedForm certificate contains the metadata that can provide more insight into analyzing lead quality and identifying potential fraud. Note: this service cannot be used in conjunction with the TrustedForm Age service.

Impressionwise Email Lookup

If you have your own Impressionwise credentials, you can use Phonexa’s third-party integration to validate email addresses. Within the Impressionwise Email Lookup configuration, you can set a rule to reject an unwanted status, such as seed, bot, or disposable.

XVerify Email Lookup

Through Xverify Email Lookup, you can plug in your Xverify credentials and create a filter to reject leads if the email is high risk or invalid, among other things.

The Blacklist Alliance

The Blacklist Alliance service identifies leads as TCPA plaintiffs and litigators, helping you avoid costly TCPA lawsuits. You will need your own API key to use this service.

Next Steps

In addition to utilizing anti-fraud services, you can also use Phonexa’s basic features to filter out duplicates and configure present and do not present lists.

These features in tandem with routine monitoring of your lead performance using our comprehensive reports will help you stay on top of the game.

But don’t take our word for it, hear it from one of our clients in this case study about how they were able to reduce their fraud rate by 30%.

If you have any questions about how to implement these third-party services in your instance, please reach out to your Phonexa representative.

For questions, or to learn more about Phonexa’s all-in-one marketing automation solution for calls, leads, clicks, email, SMS, accounting, and more, schedule a consultation, email info@phonexa.com, or call (818) 800-0000.

Important: this article is a part of our affiliate marketing tech stack series, where we shed light on the most effective tools for affiliate marketing.

Artificial intelligence is conquering marketing at breakneck speed, leaving you no choice but to jump into the unknown of marketing AI tools if you’re not yet there. The right suite of AI tools can make a difference between losing and making money, so you can’t sit on the fence.

Long gone are the days when marketers handled their campaigns manually, burning the midnight oil to get things done. Today, they spend time supervising AI tools that toil day and night for the greater good of business success.

There’s no doubt that the history of AI tools is in the making, but it wasn’t quite so until ChatGPT came about to introduce AI technologies to the public.

The record-breaking AI writing assistant popped out of nowhere to empower people with yet unseen possibilities of generating quality content in a blink, writing code, answering questions, translating languages, and instant-completing tasks that take hours and days of hard work.

Source: Statista

Affiliate marketers saw it from a slightly different angle, though. For them, AI tools became a ticket to generating and converting more leads with less effort. And rightfully so:

• The right AI software suite can grow your affiliate income way above the average numbers by completing time-consuming marketing objectives in a blink, from content creation to ad placement to fraud prevention.

But that’s not a Cinderella storey. As helpful as AI marketing tools are, the competition takes no prisoners. You must fight hard to win your customers, whether you are a publisher, affiliate network, or advertiser.

Now, fighting hard mostly means choosing the right suite of AI tools for affiliate marketing and maximising your performance. This is exactly what we are going to do right now – acquaint you with the best AI marketing tools so you can compile the winning marketing toolkit.

Before we proceed with the list of AI tools, let’s put things into context by reviewing the underlying technologies used in modern AI tools.

The Underlying Technologies Used in AI Tools

It’s worth noting not all AI tools are perceived by customers equally well. For example, 48% of Americans are against AI tools that generate images of people’s faces in advertising. At the same time, when it comes to other content, it seems people don’t care much whether the creator is a human or a machine.

Let’s move to our comprehensive AI tools list that encompasses the best AI tools you might need to tackle different affiliate marketing challenges.

17 Best AI Tools for Affiliate Marketing

ChatGPT

The crowned king of AI writing tools, ChatGPT has acquired the first million users in 5 days after the launch and is only gaining momentum. Besides marketing, the AI writing assistant is most popular in technical, education, and business industries and is even used in real estate, insurance, and telecommunications. And why not? Everyone needs content, and creating quality content in seconds is a temptation too hard to resist.

The best generative AI tool can create and optimise content, assist in language translation, and integrate into your website and CRM for customer support, sentiment analysis, personalised campaigns, and more. As far as content creation is concerned, ChatGPT has very few rivals for its unwavering popularity and the truly unique insights it can provide.

Jasper

Using similar underlying technologies – deep learning and large-scale language models – Jasper is an AI writing tool geared towards creating business content rather than chatting with users. The untrained eye may not notice the difference, but marketers may benefit from Jasper’s on-brand content a bit more than from the genetic content that ChatGPT is able to create.

Last but not least, Jasper may surpass ChatGPT in structuring content. ChatGPT can also provide long outputs, but only if you clearly communicate your goals and interact with the AI to adjust the process. On the other hand, Jasper is built to create long-form content in the first place, requiring little to no intervention down the road.

Synthesia

Synthesia is an AI tool for generating videos with human-like avatars without actual filming. In affiliate marketing, you can use avatars to showcase products, cater offerings to different geographies, and personalise your campaigns.

The unique AI design tool also includes customisable video templates, for which you can select a matching avatar and narration style. When the core of the video is done, you can customise it however you see fit, including the title, background, language, captions, and more. The videos are shareable, downloadable, and embeddable.

Writesonic

Writesonic is one of the most comprehensive AI tools, allowing you to create content, images, audio, and even chatbots through four proprietary technologies: Chatsonic, Botsonic, Photosonic, and Audiosonic.

Murf

Murf is an advanced AI voice generator that can tailor AI voices to a target audience through customisable style and language. The service provides voices for marketing, customer support, education, podcasting, product development, and other niches so you can please every ear with the right voice.

If you want to go the extra mile in creating voiceovers, you can clone any real voice – including your own voice – into an array of custom AI voices. A single record is enough to get editable voiceover scripts for your marketing campaigns.

Grammarly

When it comes to polishing copies, the NLP-powered Grammarly AI writing assistant is second to none. Whether you craft a sales pitch or academic paper, Grammarly can correct your errors, misprints, and inaccuracies while estimating the overall quality of writing on a 0 to 100 scale.

With Grammarly, you can adjust your writing by four core parameters:

• Domain – academic, business, general, email, casual, or creative
• Intent – inform, describe, convince, or “tell a story”
• Audience – general, knowledgeable, or expert
• Formality – informal, neutral, or formal

You can review clarity, engagement, and delivery suggestions and create your own business style guide to govern your voice and style. Besides, you can cheque the content for uniqueness and identify possible plagiarism sources for non-original fragments.

Copy.ai

Copy.ai is another alternative to ChatGPT that doesn’t differ much in terms of the underlying technologies but may appeal to marketers due to its interface, structured templates, and unique AI tools designed for SEO-friendly, on-brand copywriting.

Content-wise, Copy.ai works with several language models, including GPT-3.5, GPT-4, Anthropic, and Azure. The model-agnostic approach enables more accurate and diverse outputs based on historical and real-time data.

Descript

Descript is an AI video tool for editing videos by changing text transcriptions. With Descript, you can create podcasts, YouTube videos, presentations, explainer videos, and other affiliate marketing videos, as well as adjust your videos to social media platforms.

Here’s how descript works:

• You upload a video, Descript transcribes it into written text, and then you can remove or change the text you want to edit. Once done, the video will automatically rearrange. Likewise, you can type the text you want to be transformed into audio (the system will generate the audio according to your synthetic voice model).

Editing videos by changing the text is a new opportunity, making Descript and AI tools alike a great choice for aspiring marketers and those daunted by complex video editing software.

Surfer

Surfer is an AI content writing tool with a strong focus on SEO, enabling SEO-optimised copies through six proprietary tools: Content Editor, Keyword Researcher, Surfer AI, Audit, AI Outline Generator, and Keyword Surfer Extension.

Without a doubt, Surfer can synergise with SEO AI tools like SEMrush, Google Analytics, and Ahrefs.

Bard

Bard from Google is one of the newest Google AI tools you may want to experiment with when creating content, generating simple code, or brainstorming ideas for your marketing campaigns. Bard pulls data from Google and learns patterns to provide meaningful outputs, but the true capabilities of this AI tool are still to be explored.

Wordtune

Wordtune is a generative AI assistant that provides writing suggestions, rewriting capabilities, and a content summariser. With Wordtune, you can improve the readability of your copies and adjust the tone to your specific marketing goals.

It’s hard to say whether Wordtune is superior to the top AI tools for writing like ChatGPT and Jasper, but you can try it yourself and see whether the outcome resonates with your style and quality expectations. The good news is that this Wordtune is freemium, so you can get the hang of it without overcommitting.

Runway

Runway is one of the most advanced AI tools for marketing creative content. The unique AI design toolkit allows you to create images and videos from text, expand images with context-aware elements, remove objects from videos, and more.

Runway’s toolkit includes:

• Gen-1 tool to generate new videos out of existing videos by entering text prompts
• Gen-2 tool to generate new videos from scratch by entering text prompts
• Tools to generate images out of existing images (or from scratch) by entering text prompts
• Tools to expand images by entering text prompts
• Tools to remove objects from video
• Tools to create a video out of uploaded images
• AI generator to create images for you

Runway is one of the cutting-edge AI design tools that can take your marketing to the next level.

PlayHT

PlayHT is an AI voice generator that can create realistic AI voices, convert text into speech in over 800 AI voices and 130 languages, clone human voices with unprecedented accuracy, and create customer pronunciations of niche terms and acronyms.

The AI tool allows the creation of IVR voice responses, audio articles, YouTube and TikTok videos, voices for game characters, and even the voices of celebrities. Likewise, you can use plug-and-play audio widgets to let your customers enjoy audio content right on the webpage.

DreamStudio

DreamSstudio is an AI image generation web application that uses Stable Diffusion text-to-image generation model, allowing you to create compelling visuals from text prompts and control how much the results will differ from the input.

DreamStudio is one of the most straightforward AI image tools – you can kick things off in minutes. Enter a prompt, select a fitting style, canvas size, and the number of images to generate, and you’ve done it!

AI Google

AI Google is not an AI tool per sae but a platform where Google presents its AI studies tools. While you cannot apply Google AI directly in your marketing campaigns, you can use it to learn more about cutting-edge AI technologies and new tools emerging in the AI market.

Podcastle

Podcastle is an AI text-to-speech converter geared towards podcasts. The podcasting toolkit includes audio and video editors, a recording studio, a revoice, and a hosting hub, allowing you to create studio-quality podcasts faster.

Anyword

Anyword is an AI content writing tool that unlocks valuable content insights by scoring your content, ads, and copies alongside providing a powerful AI engine, different language models, and copy optimisation. On top of that, Anyword predicts how your content will perform after publishing.

With Anyword, you can choose the winners before committing to a particular content style and form. The five marketing dimensions the platform addresses – ad intelligence, website intelligence, copy scoring AI, brand guidelines, and target audiences – ensure you hit the right customers with the right message.

Increase Your Affiliate Revenues With Phonexa

Whether you are an affiliate, affiliate network, or advertiser, you can step up your affiliate marketing game with our comprehensive marketing automation software suite. Phonexa’s eight proprietary solutions will govern your campaigns across different digital marketing avenues, streamlining heterogeneous data within one intuitive dashboard.

Get an all-in-one performance marketing software suite now, or schedule a free online consultation to learn more about how Phonexa can help you generate and convert more referrals.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are AI tools?

AI tools are artificial intelligence tools that can solve business goals faster and much more accurately than human marketers, sales representatives, and analysts.

There are dozens and hundreds of paid and free AI tools for affiliate marketing and traditional marketing for that matter. Alongside popular marketing AI tools, sales AI tools, and AI content writing tools, you can find tools for more exotic applications like AI productivity tools or AI recruitment tools.

What are the best AI marketing tools?

Here are the AI marketing tools you may need for different marketing objectives:

• AI writing tools – ChatGPT, Jasper, Grammarly, Copy.ai, Surfer, Wordtune, Anyword
• AI video tools – Synthesia, Descript, Runway, Pictory, Fliki
• AI audio tools – Murf, PlayHT, Lovo, Podcastle
• AI SEO tools – Surfer
• AI research tools – Surfer
• Comprehensive AI tools for content creation – Writesonic, Bard

At the end of the day, the choice of AI tools always depends on your specific marketing goals.

For example, if you are willing to engage customers with interactive content, you may want to leverage AI video tools like Synthesia; if you need on-brand content, choosing on-brand AI content generators like Jasper might be the path of least resistance.

What AI tools like ChatGPT can I use to create content?

Besides ChatGPT, you can try the following paid and free AI writing tools:

• Jasper
• Grammarly
• Rytr
• Neuraltext
• Writeconic
• Copy.ai
• Wordtune

Explore our AI tools list on this webpage to find your best AI tools for writing and content creation. And if you don’t find the one you need, feel free to search for free AI tools online – the web is abundant with free and paid AI tools for business, including tools not represented on this webpage, such as sales AI tools or AI recruitment tools.

ChatGPT vs. Jasper – which AI content writing tool is better for business?

ChatGPT and Jasper are two leading AI tools for content writing that, however, are designed for different objectives: Jasper – for creating business content; ChatGPT – for chatting with users. But then again, the ChatGPT-generated insights are so in-depth and well-structured that you may want to combine these two best AI copywriting tools when creating marketing content.

Does Google penalise AI content?

Google does not penalise AI content.

Here’s what Google Search Central Blog says about AI-generated content:

“Appropriate use of AI or automation is not against our guidelines. This means that it is not used to generate content primarily to manipulate search rankings, which is against our spam policies. Our focus on the quality of content, rather than how content is produced, is a useful guide that has helped us deliver reliable, high-quality results to users for years.”

Long storey short, you can use AI content writing tools to create unique, valuable, and problem-solving content.

Important: this article is a part of our affiliate martech stack series, where we shed light on the most effective tools for affiliate marketing.

In the ever-evolving affiliate marketing world, paid media tools are extremely effective in generating and converting referrals at scale, especially if you are an affiliate or affiliate network. Advanced paid media tools can turn your marketing campaigns on a dime, paving the way to increased reach and profits.

In affiliate marketing, you can’t only advertise using earned media because you don’t own enough to reach all potential customers. And even if your media stack is truly powerful, you will always look for expansion, won’t you?

Paid media tools can help you plan, execute, and evaluate your paid advertising campaigns, whether you promote through social media, programmatic, or native advertising.

We’ve compiled a list of the best paid media tools for affiliate marketing, but before digging into it, let’s categorise and explain paid media advertising types so you can understand what opportunities you have when it comes to affiliate marketing paid media.

Paid Media Types

And now to the paid media tools themselves!

TOP 14 Best Paid Media Tools for Affiliate Marketers

Google Ads

For anyone familiar with paid media tools, Google Ads needs no introduction. Drawing billions and billions of revenues from their ads in the United States alone, Google provides auction-based paid advertising opportunities on Google Display Network, YouTube, and countless partners.

Google’s Paid Media Tools

You can ensure the most comprehensive targeting by combining different advertising media and the right set of paid media tools. For example, you can target proactive users with Search Network while leveraging demographic or behaviour-based targeting with  Display Network.

Meta Ads

Uniting Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger under one roof, Meta offers limitless cross-platform advertising opportunities through Ads Manager.  The Android- and iOS-compatible media toolkit allows you to create and track ads on the go, knowing which ads fulfill your marketing objectives and why they perform better.

Meta Paid Ad Tools

With around 3.88 billion people using Meta products, Meta paid media tools are an extremely effective marketing weapon, spanning popular social media and messengers. Unlimited reach and targeting variations allow you to hit the right referral with the right ad at the right time while staying cost-effective.

LinkedIn Ads

LinkedIn Ads connect you to almost a billion professionals, including those looking for job opportunities and possessing unparallelled skills. With twice the buying power of regular web leads, the LinkedIn audience is one of the best referrals to tap into.

Kicking things off with LinkedIn ads involves four simple steps:

1. Choosing your campaign objectives: increasing awareness, drawing referrals to a website, boosting engagement, generating leads, and more.
2. Selecting your target criteria: the audience you want to display your ads to. For the selected target audience, you will see the total audience size, the expected CTR rate, the 30-day spend for the ads you run, and the number of clicks you are expected to get.
3. Choosing one of the four ad formats: Text Ads, Messages Ads, Dynamic Ads, Sponsored Content, or you can mix several ad formats.
4. Select your budget and display schedule: your daily ad budget, campaign timeline, and bidding strategy.

Once your LinkedIn advertising campaign is up, you can access one of the best paid media analytics tools to measure impressions, clicks, social actions, spending, and more success metrics.

LinkedIn Ad Types

One big advantage of LinkedIn paid media tools is that they enable company targeting alongside contact targeting and retargeting, allowing you to reach the B2B referrals you seek. Likewise, the diverse targeting options can easily cover your affiliate marketing needs.

Twitter Ads (now X Ads)

With over 1.7 million monthly visits, Twitter Ads can help you achieve multiple affiliate campaign goals, such as driving traffic to a website, promoting by certain keywords or a specific social media account, and more.

Twitter Ad Types

Twitter ads are quite diverse and complex to understand, but there’s an X Ads Manager to help you set up and run your advertising campaigns. The Manager describes everything you need to know, including ad campaign structure, metrics, filters, activity, audience details, etc.

SEMrush

The all-in-one digital marketing software suite is mostly regarded as SEO-focused, but it provides quite a few paid media tools to reckon with (note, however, that SEMrush isn’t an ad placement tool):

• Display advertising tools for competitor research
• PPC keyword tool to optimise your keyword placement, including AdWords campaigns
• Ad builder to drag-and-drop or create compelling ads

Among many other things, the advertising toolkit from SEMrush allows you to monitor competitor ads, analyse Google Shopping ad campaigns, optimise your ad spend, and leverage your social media presence through content scheduling and ad performance tracking.

WordStream

WordStream is an absolutely stunning suite of paid media tracking tools for evaluating and improving your PPC campaigns across popular platforms like Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Bing Ads, and more.

The platform’s paid media toolkit includes Google Ads Performance Grader, Website Grader, Free Keyword Tool, Facebook Ads Performance Grader, and Free Business Listings Grader, all designed for tracking and optimising your paid ad campaigns. The paid social media analytics tools from WordStream are among the strongest on the market.

WordStream is a comprehensive yet very intuitive paid media tool that can revolutionise your marketing campaigns. Moreover, some functionality is free, so you can get the hang of this paid monitoring tool without premature financial commitment.

Keyhole

Keyhole is a paid social media marketing tool that helps analyse and improve your social media presence in real-time and strategically, including influencer campaigns. With Keyhole, you can optimise post times, visualise your social media strategy, and improve the collaboration between your marketing team members.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a social media management platform with paid social media tools to unfold, track, and analyze paid posts from one place. The service works with Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram paid ads, helping you to manage heterogeneous paid social media campaigns from a single user-friendly dashboard.

With Hootsuite, you can:

• Target ads based on location and demographics
• Optimise ad spend
• Increase engagement on social media
• Synergise your paid and organic social media campaigns
• Integrate other paid media tools and platforms like HubSpot, MailChimp, or Salesforce

Above all, Hootsuite makes it easier to reach and engage social media audiences by allowing you to turn your best social media posts into ads, displaying them to more high-intent customers.

Optmyzr

Optmyzr is a comprehensive PPC management software with paid media tools for creating, tracking, and optimising your paid marketing campaigns. From performance insights to strategic gaps to expansion opportunities, Optmyzr covers it all with three proprietary products for paid media: Optmyzr Core, Campaign Automator, and Optmyzr for Amazon Ads.

Optmyzr Paid Media Tools

Acquisio

One of the best suites of paid media tools for affiliate marketing, Acquisio runs AI-powered PPC management software and Acquisio Turing software for paid search ad campaigns:

• Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Software: SEM software and tools for paid search ad campaigns can help you set up, track, and analyse your campaigns across Google and Bing while optimising your spending and effectively replacing manual work.
  • Campaign automation based on product feeds
  • Customisable marketing templates
  • Instant campaign copying from Google Ads to Bing Ads
  • Built-in KPI tracker and cross-channel reporting
  • Self-improving AI for real-time and strategic campaign optimisation

• Acquisio Turing: Powered by Machine Learning (ML), Acquisio Turing software can improve your bid and budget management to draw and convert more quality referrals at a lower cost.

You can scale your affiliate campaigns without losing quality and safely predict outcomes to choose the best marketing strategy for specific business objectives. Likewise, you can track your campaigns in real-time and update them on the fly as new referral data arrives in the system.

Taboola

As an affiliate marketer, you might know where some of the sponsored content at the bottom of articles comes from — Taboola. The world’s leading native advertising platform effectively connects affiliates and advertisers, allowing you to draw referrals to merchants through promoted and sponsored content.

Taboola offers the following paid media tools:

• Taboola Feed – a scrolling content feed at the end of articles
• Taboola Pixel – referral and affiliate tracking functionality
• Creative Insights – insights into content performance like engagement and conversions

Taboola also allows exchanging traffic with third-party websites and using its content marketplace. Whether you are an affiliate, advertiser, or affiliate network, Taboola can give you a head start in the fight for referral attention.

HubSpot

While HubSpot isn’t particularly known for its paid media tools, it does provide some for managing paid media campaigns, including:

• Ads software to create personalised advertising campaigns
• Ad tracking software to auto-track paid ads on social media

With HubSpot, you can choose what happens after a referral clicks on your ad. You can auto-save contacts of users who have interacted with your ads, send an internal notification to your sales team, or add potential customers to a specific contact list based on their interaction.

That said, committing to HubSpot for paid media tools alone might not be as good a choice as if you’re already using the platform. Speaking of which, if you already use HubSpot CRM, you can use it to create audiences for your paid ad campaigns.

StackAdapt

StackAdapt is a self-programmatic advertising platform that provides programmatic ad solutions for B2B, finance, government, healthcare, retail, and travel. The unique suite of paid media tools spans from digital to traditional advertising, covering your affiliate marketing from A to Z.

Programmatic Paid Media Tools with StackAdapt

TheTradeDesk

TheTradeDesk is a media buying platform where advertisers can run digital ad campaigns, including programmatic ad campaigns. Among the paid media tools you can get are tools for real-time bidding, advanced data management, cross-device campaign tracking, and reporting.

Overall, TheTradeDesk is designed for big market players who manage complex campaigns across multiple marketing avenues, channels, and locations. However, even smaller affiliates may use the media buying opportunities to generate and sell traffic to merchants.

One Software Suite To Rule Them All

Whether you are an affiliate, advertiser, or affiliate network, you can close the loop between leads, clicks, and revenues with a unique marketing software suite from Phonexa. Uniting eight proprietary partner and performance marketing solutions, including paid media tools for affiliate marketing, Phonexa unlocks actionable referral insights, issues payouts, and so much more.

Phonexa’s software package includes (everything at only $100 a month):

• Lynx – affiliate marketing and click tracking software
• HitMetrix – user behaviour recording and analytics software
• LMS Sync – lead tracking and distribution software
• Call Logic – call tracking and distribution software
• E-Delivery – email and SMS marketing software
• Cloud PBX – cloud phone system
• Opt-Intel – suppression list management software
• Books360 – automated accounting software

Explore the subscription plans now, or schedule a free consultation to learn more about how Phonexa can elevate your affiliate marketing.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are paid media tools?

Paid media tools are software, platforms, and services that help marketers – including affiliates, advertisers, and affiliate networks – automate and improve paid advertising campaigns.

There are around a dozen types of paid media tools for various aspects of marketing. For example, paid social media monitoring tools – or paid media tracking tools – are used to track and improve ad performance on social media platforms; reporting tools for paid media provide real-time and historical social media ad performance reports; and so on.

The good news is that some platforms provide a comprehensive suite of paid media tools, so you don’t have to juggle around. Explore the top media tools on this webpage to make up your winning paid media toolkit.

What are paid social media tools?

Paid social media tools are software, platforms, and services that help marketers manage their social media marketing campaigns, including affiliate campaigns. With the right paid social media tools, you can draw more referrals from social media while tracking the customer journey for unmistakable attribution and constant campaign improvement.

Among the best paid social media tools are Emplifi, Keyhole, and Hootsuite. Likewise, you can set up paid media campaigns on social media through Google Ads and Meta Ads.

True or False: Paid social media monitoring tools are not any more effective than free tools?

False. Paid social media monitoring tools are more effective than free tools because they provide advanced tracking and analytics features. However, free social media tracking tools can also be helpful for smaller campaigns or less demanding marketers.

A web page serves as one of the most widely embraced means of engaging with clients or partners, attracting visitors, and establishing trustworthiness.

It’s not solely a platform for promoting products; rather, it’s a platform for constructing a meaningful online identity that deeply connects with our intended audience.

Source: Rachael Kay Albers

To excel in affiliate marketing, it’s essential to assemble the right affiliate marketing tech stack and use customisable, SEO-friendly, and performance-oriented web page design tools.

Affiliate marketing has become popular so fast due to its win-win nature – advertisers, brands, and solopreneurs drive traffic and increase earnings, while affiliates earn money for their marketing efforts.

In order to create a memorable and conversion-ready website, affiliate marketers need a fail-safe formula to make sure the front-end visualisation of web pages is exceptional.

Designing the way a website looks is important, but business owners and marketing pros also understand that how easy it is to navigate and make purchases is a big part of a website’s success.

With the help of professional web design tools, you have the power to shape the customer experience by gently directing visitors and clients toward the web pages that matter most to you.

Before we dive into the best web design tools, let’s take a moment to understand what these tools are and which types are essential to assemble the perfect affiliate marketing toolkit.

The Top Web Design Tools

So, what are web design tools? These are software applications or resources that web designers and developers use to create, design, optimise, and maintain websites.

These tools help streamline the web development process, making it more effective. Here are some common categories of online web design tools:

• Graphic design tools
• Website builders
• Content Management Systems (CMS)
• Front-end frameworks
• Back-end frameworks
• Prototyping and wireframing instruments

While there are numerous web design online tools available on the Internet, each offers unique features tailored for different needs. Moreover, they differ in how they organise specific tools and panels. We present you with a handpicked collection of essential resources that every affiliate marketer and web designer should have in their toolkit. We’ll analyse both paid and free web design tools.

Source: GIPHY

Adobe

Adobe web design tools are multifunctional and extremely powerful.

You can get an all-purpose suite of perfect design and development tools, including Adobe XD and Adobe Dreamweaver. Adobe XD integrates seamlessly with other Adobe products like Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Effects.

The platform offers a range of options essential for web design, such as:

• Artboards
• Layers
• Symbols
• Grids
• Guides
• Masks
• Gradients
• Shadows
• Animations

Adobe XD features a repeat grid tool for efficient duplication and editing of multiple elements simultaneously. It also boasts a voice prototyping feature for adding voice commands and responses.

You will make web design enjoyable with the features of Adobe XD. It has a single window that switches between design and prototype modes. It offers a contextual property inspector that adapts to the selected element and follows a more streamlined workflow.

Adobe tools for web design are available for both Windows and Mac, with a mobile app for design preview and testing on smartphones and tablets.

Canva

While primarily known for graphic design, Canva also offers web design tools capable of creating an attractive and breathtaking page.

Canva is perfect for those who want a visually stunning online presence.

Explore the key characteristics of the solution:

1. The user-friendly design platform is suitable for a broader range of users: non-designers, affiliate marketers, and small businesses can create diverse visual content, from social media graphics to presentations.
2. A drag-and-drop interface, pre-designed templates, and a collection of stock photos and illustrations, making Canva accessible to beginners. Canva offers basic free web page design tools and a paid Canva Pro plan with more advanced design instruments. Canva also has web design collaboration tools, but they are more limited compared to Figma.

Figma

Figma is one of the most popular cloud-based tools for web design with interactive prototypes and web and app user interfaces.

What is the best about Figma? The tool excels in real-time collaboration. Multiple users can work on team projects simultaneously on the same design file.

Figma offers a wide range of web design capabilities, including:

• Vector editing
• Advanced layout tools
• Design components
• The ability to create interactive prototypes.

Figma simplifies designer-developer communication by offering developer handoff tools. It provides both great free web design tools and paid plans for teams and individuals.

Wix

Wix allows users to create breathtaking websites with a drag-and-drop interface. One of the most responsive web design tools proposes many templates and features, making it suitable for beginners and small businesses.

Wix is a cloud-based website building and hosting platform with which you may create spectacular and efficient websites. The best part is that you don’t need extensive coding or technical skills.

This popular type of web design tool proposes:

• A variety of templates covering lots of industries or styles
• Extensive customisation options for fonts, colours, layers, and text
• App Market with applications and widgets
• Wide e-commerce and affiliate marketing capabilities
• Website security and hosting services
• Basic SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) tools
• A built-in blogging platform

WebFlow

Webflow is a web design and development tool that bridges the gap between design and code.

With it, designers for affiliate marketing companies can create responsive websites without actually writing code. Even with little coding knowledge, it is possible to produce an impressive web page.

Here are some interesting facts about Webflow:

1. Webflow offers a visually oriented design interface — you can see how your website will look in real-time as you develop it.
2. Webflow offers a CMS, particularly useful for blogs, e-commerce stores, and other content-heavy sites.
3. Webflow allows to create rich interactions and animations without writing code.
4. There are various hosting plan services for the web pages.
5. Webflow offers e-commerce capabilities: you can create online stores featuring product catalogues, shopping carts, and payment processing.

The no-code platform is also attractive for extensive educational resources through its “Webflow University.” This includes tutorials, courses, and web design best practises to help users get the most out of the platform.

WordPress

WordPress is the world’s most popular content management system (CMS), offering both ease of use for beginners and extensive customisation options for developers.

In 2003, WordPress was born as a personal publishing system by Mike Little and Matt Mullenweg. Today, it’s powered by PHP and MySQL, licenced under GPLv2, and used by over 43% of websites worldwide.

WordPress is focused on providing high-performance, safe-and-sound, and accessible software that empowers individuals and communities to share their storeys and ideas on the Internet.

Its web page design tools are favoured by plenty of users, from beginners to experienced professionals.

SquareSpace

Squarespace offers elegant and professionally designed templates that are easy to customise.

Squarespace is a playground for creating impressive websites with ease. It’s the go-to web design tool and platform for artists, entrepreneurs, and anyone with a creative spark.

Squarespace combines design, hosting, and essential website functions into a single platform for creating and managing professional websites.

Stunning templates, drag-and-drop simplicity, and built-in hosting make Squarespace a dream for crafting your online presence. Plus, it’s got your back with 24/7 customer support.

Whether launching a business, promoting affiliate products or services, or starting an online blog, Squarespace is where your website dreams become reality.

Shopify

Shopify provides all the tools necessary to set up an online store, making it a first-rate choice for businesses selling products online.

While it’s not a web design tool per sae, Shopify offers a platform and a set of essential instruments for affiliate marketers and businesses to create and manage online stores. Examine a few key points about Shopify:

1. The platform provides an intuitive and user-centric interface.
2. With Shopify, you can build fully functional online stores with professionally designed templates.
3. It offers responsive web design tools, assuring your shopping site looks and functions well on various devices.
4. Its e-commerce-specific features include product management, inventory tracking, order processing, and safe payment gateways.
5. Shopify has an extensive app store with numerous third-party apps and plugins like SEO optimisation, marketing tools, and customer support solutions.
6. Shopify provides marketing tools like email marketing, discounts, and abandoned cart recovery.
7. Shopify also provides a robust Point of Sale (POS) system for businesses with physical retail locations, allowing you to sync online and in-person sales seamlessly.

InVision

If you are looking for a web design tool that incorporates prototyping and cooperation tools, InVision is an excellent choice. It excels in developing interactive prototypes of web designs.

Designers can easily turn static design mockups into interactive and clickable prototypes and add interactive elements such as buttons, links, hover effects, and transitions for a more realistic representation.

InVision simplifies the collaboration process by enabling designers to share prototypes with clients, team members, and stakeholders. Reviewers can leave comments directly on the design, making it easier to gather feedback and make necessary revisions.

This web design tool can integrate with other popular tools like Sketch and Adobe XD, as well as project management and collaboration platforms like Jira and Slack.

Visme

Visme is a versatile web design tool that allows users to create not only websites but also other visual content. It’s great for those looking to tell storeys through visuals.

Visme is a versatile and user-oriented visual content creation platform. It allows users to design:

• Presentations
• Infographics
• Reports
• Social media graphics

With its drag-and-drop interface and a massive library of templates and assets, Visme makes it easy for users to create engaging and professional visuals. It also offers collaboration and data visualisation features.

Sketch

Sketch is a vector-based web design tool for macOS, favoured by many UI/UX designers. It proposes a large assortment of plugins and integrations for seamless design workflows.

Sketch offers a smart layout feature that automatically adjusts element size and position based on content, as well as provides customisation and flexibility options.

The solution is exclusively available for Mac and necessitates third-party apps or plugins for design preview and testing on other devices.

Sketch relies on extensions for enhanced functionality and compatibility with other tools like Figma, InVision, and Zeplin.

Marvel

Marvel is an app and web design tool that allows designers to create interactive prototypes and wireframes.

It’s a web and mobile app design and prototyping tool tailored to the needs of web designers and product teams. Marvel is known for its user-friendly interface and seamless integration with design workflows.

Here’s what you need to know about Marvel:

• Ease of use due to drag-and-drop functionality
• Creation of interactive prototypes
• Rich collaboration opportunities
• Design specs and assets for developers
• A high degree of flexibility

Marvel integrates with design tools like Sketch and Figma, allowing you to sync your designs in real-time. This ensures that your prototypes always reflect the latest design changes.

GIMP

GNU Image Manipulation Programme (GIMP) is an open-source raster graphics editor, similar to Adobe Photoshop. While it’s not a website builder, it’s essential for web designers and developers for image editing and optimisation.

It is often compared to Adobe Photoshop in terms of its functionality but stands out as free software, making it accessible to many users.

Examine some key points about GIMP:

1. GIMP is released under the GNU General Public Licence (GPL), which means it is free to use, modify, and distribute.
2. GIMP is available for multiple platforms, including Windows, macOS, and various Linux distributions.
3. GIMP offers a wide range of tools and features for image editing and manipulation: photo retouching, image composition, colour correction, layer masks, and adjustment layers.
4. The well-known platform proposes advanced filters, brushes, text instruments, high-bit-depth images, and colour profiles.

Bootstrap

Bootstrap is a widely used front-end framework that makes web development easier. It offers pre-designed components and CSS classes that adapt well to different screen sizes.

Originally created by Twitter and now maintained as an open-source project, Bootstrap has become a go-to choice for web designers and developers. It equips them with a handy collection of pre-made, responsive design elements and CSS styles to streamline their work.

Examine the key features and benefits of Bootstrap:

1. One of the standout characteristics of Bootstrap is its responsive 12-column grid system.
2. Pre-designed user interface components include buttons, forms, navigation bars, modals, and alerts.
3. While Bootstrap provides a default set of styles, it’s highly customisable.
4. Bootstrap comes bundled with a collection of JavaScript plugins, such as carousels, tooltips, and models.
5. The solution is designed to work seamlessly across various web browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer, ensuring broad compatibility.

Google Web Designer

Google Web Designer is a free website design tool for developing HTML5 content, including ads and simple websites. It’s a beginner-friendly option for those just starting.

Google Web Designer combines the best of both realms: user-savvy design tools and advanced coding capabilities.

Below are the principal attributes of GWD tailored for designers and affiliate marketers:

1. Intuitive interface: Simplifies design with drag-and-drop functionality, eliminating the need for extensive coding.
2. HTML5 and CSS3 support: Generates code compatible with modern web standards, ensuring seamless integration across devices and browsers.
3. Responsive design: Offers templates and tools for creating responsive layouts, and adapting content for various screens.
4. Interactive elements: Easily add animations and interactivity for engaging user experiences.
5. Ad creation: Specialised tools for creating dynamic and responsive HTML5 ads, ideal for online advertising.
6. Google integration: Seamlessly collaborates with Google services like Drive and Ads for project management and deployment.
7. Custom code: Allows advanced users to add custom HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for creative flexibility.
8. Real-time preview: Provides a live preview across devices and screen sizes before publishing.

Web Design Tools You Should Never Avoid

In the digital age, a well-designed website serves as your digital storefront and brand voice.

Affiliate marketers, in particular, understand the importance of a captivating online presence in their quest for success. But achieving this requires the right instruments, and we’ve presented you with the 15 best web design tools to help you on your journey.

These tools empower you to create websites that not only promote products but also resonate with your target audience.

From Adobe’s all-purpose suite to the drag-and-drop interface of Wix, from the real-time collaboration capabilities of Figma to the visually-oriented design of Webflow, these website design tools meet every need of an affiliate marketer.

Get Your All-Encompassing Affiliate Marketing Toolkit at Phonexa

Phonexa’s single operating solution for performance-based marketing helps create customised campaigns, improve the user experience, and drive revenue.

Improve your affiliate marketing campaign performance with Phonexa’s comprehensive software suite. Schedule an online consultation to unlock the best ways for marketing success.

Frequently Asked Questions

There’s no way around it: whether an affiliate or advertiser, you can only beat the competition with advanced content marketing tools for affiliate marketing. As more and more revenues are drawn from content marketing globally, AI content marketing tools can put you in the spotlight on the world business stage. Important: this article is a part of our affiliate marketing tech stack series, where we shed light on the most effective tools for affiliate marketing.

The affiliate content marketing race never stops, with budgets growing and marketers going the extra mile to understand their content performance. Most place their bets on videos (45%), short-form articles (21%), and success storeys (28%), but what really matters is what they use within almost all their strategies: content marketing tools for affiliate marketing.

No matter what affiliate content you create, you can’t go far without automated content marketing tools in the era of automated affiliate marketing. From spelling chequers like Grammarly to design interfaces like Canva to comprehensive marketing ecosystems like Google Marketing Platform, you can do faster and better with the right suite of affiliate marketing tools.

The only question is, how do you choose the right content marketing tools and maximise their potential while not overcommitting (read: overpaying)?

The answer is in the all-embracing content marketing tools listicle you can see below, a part of our affiliate marketing tech stack series. We’ve compiled a unique list of paid and free content marketing tools that can supercharge your affiliate marketing campaigns regardless of whether you are an affiliate, advertiser, or affiliate network. Source: GIPHY

Your 15 Best Content Marketing Tools for Affiliate Marketing

SEMrush

  SEMrush is one of the most comprehensive content marketing tools for affiliate marketing, offering vast research opportunities across SEO, social media, and PPC campaigns.  Above all, though, SEMrush allows you to

• Synergise content marketing and SEO by choosing the right keywords for your campaigns
• Publish and promote your content timely by leveraging its content marketing planning tools

SEMrush Content Marketing Toolkit

With SEMrush, you can understand what content your referrals crave and how to make it resonate with them and rank well on Google.  Price: $129, $249, and $499 per month if paid monthly. Paying annually saves you up to 17%. No free plan.

BuzzSumo

  BuzzSumo is one of the best content marketing tools for researching trending topics and discovering resonating idaeas, also offering API-driven reporting. For example, you can identify the most popular questions on Quora and respond to them with your content, a feature quite unique with content marketing tools.

BuzzSumo’s Content Marketing Tools

  You can use BuzzSumo on the go through its Chrome extension or API-integrate it into your CMS or lead management software for an overarching view of your campaigns.

Price: the Content Creation subscription plan costs $199 per month, or you can enrol in a 30-day free trial. The more advanced subscription plans – you may not need them for content creation solely – cost $299, $499, and $999 per month, depending on the features.

Canva

  Canva is one of the best content design toolkits for affiliate marketing, employing a huge library of design elements and a user-friendly drag-and-drop editor for quick content design. Among the most popular content to design with Canva are advertisements, infographics, banners, e-books, guides, social media graphics, and print materials.

Canva’s design software suite is truly all-encompassing, offering solutions for marketing, sales, agencies, internal communications, creative teams, and more. The platform even runs its online design school, so you can get a head start in this marketing avenue. Price: Canva offers one free and two paid subscription plans at $14.99 and $29.99 per month if paid monthly. Paying annually saves you up to 16%.

Trello

  Trello is one of the content marketing management tools that help you bring it all together, improving your workflows. Not offering much for content creation directly, Trello might be useful for coordinating teams with its universal dashboard – including market strategy templates – and Editorial Calendar.

But then again, it may not be reasonable to commit to Trello for content marketing purposes only, as there are quite a few more advanced content marketing tools out here. On the other hand, if you already use Trello for project management, you might be happy to squeeze some extra value out of its content marketing toolkit. Price: a basic free subscription plan and three paid subscription plans costing $5, $10, or $17.50 per month per user, depending on the features.

HubSpot

  A beast in the digital marketing world, HubSpot doesn’t provide much in terms of affiliate content marketing tools, but can nevertheless be of some help.  The one product to look for if you’re an affiliate marketer is the CMS Hub, the content management system that helps you create SEO-friendly, multi-language pages and content, including blogs, with its proprietary Blog Maker.

Other than that, using HubSpot’s content marketing tools is only reasonable if you already use Hubspot for other marketing purposes. Price: HubSpot CMS Hub is a part of the CRM Suite Starter package that costs €30 per month if paid monthly or €20 per month if paid upfront annually.

Hemingway Editor

  One of the narrow-focused content marketing tools for affiliate marketing, Hemingway Editor does what its name suggests, allowing you to improve your written content across the board. The application highlights suggested edits with different colours so you can easily grasp the nature of the suggestion.

Likewise, the app grades readability, estimates the reading time, and counts the number of paragraphs, sentences, words, and characters in the copy. Some style suggestions include the overuse of passive voice, an overly complex sentence structure, and redundant adverbs. Price: the online version is free; the app costs $19.99 as a one-time payment.

Grammarly

  Grammarly is one of the most helpful tools used in content marketing across the globe, helping content creators polish their style, adjust their tone of voice, and correct errors of all kinds, from spelling to grammar to punctuation.  The Grammar suite includes a citation generator, essay chequer, paraphrasing tool, AI writing tools, style guides, analytics, and more features for error-free, on-brand writing.

The free version of the app enables basic prompts and tone detection, whereas the paid versions include advanced features like sentence rewrites, vocabulary idaeas, a plagiarism chequer, and more. The paid versions cost €12 per month for individuals and €15 per month for businesses.

Buffer

  Carved out for social media marketing, Buffer provides two types of tools for content marketing that affiliate marketers might be interested in:

• AI publishing tools that help you craft content faster, brainstorm ideas, get social media post suggestions, repurpose posts for various social networks, and develop an effective posting schedule
• Engagement tools that keep you aware of the most important interactions with your content on social media and prioritise your responses in the right way

Price: a free plan and three paid plans costing $6, $12, or $120 monthly, depending on the features.

Uberflip

  One of the best tools for content marketing, Uberflip runs a unique content experience platform that works across three major marketing avenues: customer journey, audience intelligence, and customer experience. The proprietary affiliate marketing toolkit helps you create personalised campaigns with real-time insights from leading B2B data providers. Uberflip unlocks:

• Demand-generation campaigns
• Effective digital sales rooms
• Increased customer engagement through personalised content at scale
• AI content recommendations
• Advanced lead capturing
• Content analytics

An extremely powerful content marketing research and reporting tool, Uberflip helps you optimise your content flows from start to finish so you can create content that reflects your referrals’ true needs and wants.

Airtable

  When it comes to marketing content management tools for affiliate marketing, Airtable can set you apart by enabling an overarching view of your campaigns, strategic planning, and omnichannel approach. With all your campaigns moving in sync, every employee knows what they do at a certain time and how this contributes to the big picture.

Airtable marketing suite includes:

• Tools for cross-department goal-oriented marketing planning
• Tools for marketing campaign management
• Charting and integrations for data-driven marketing decisions

Price: a free subscription plan and two paid plans costing $24 and $54 per month if billed monthly or $20 and $45 per month if billed annually.

AnswerThePublic

  AnswerThePublic is one of the content marketing analysis tools that can give you insights into the innermost desires of your referrals by analysing the Google queries that usually go unnoticed. On top of that, the service provides a search listening tool that analyses and informs you of potentially profitable questions your target referrals ask on Google.

Price: a 7-day free trial and three subscription plans costing $9, $99, and $199, depending on the features.

Loom

  Loom is one of the video content marketing tools that simplifies creating engaging affiliate videos, including vlogs with built-in CTAs. Loom also enables engagement insights, a vast library of drawing tools, and comments and emojis on the user side.

Price: a free and paid subscription plan priced at $15 per month per creator if paid monthly or $12.50 per month if paid annually.

Zoho

  A comprehensive marketing platform, Zoho doesn’t offer too many content marketing tools, but there’s one thing worth your attention: the SalesIQ product. The SalesIQ suite of digital marketing engagement tools can help you with:

• Tailored messaging through automatic triggers
• In-depth on-site user engagement analytics
• Routing referrals to the best-matching advertiser
• Content performance insights
• Integration with major marketing apps

Price: Zoho SalesIQ product includes a 15-day free trial and a free basic version. The paid subscription plans cost €10, €17, and €25 per month if paid monthly or €7, €12.75, and €20 if paid annually.

Adobe

  Since you all know Adobe, let’s just mention its stellar suite of interactive content marketing tools – Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, InDesign, XD, and more – that can help you make your content engaging and clickable. From intriguing CTAs to ads to videos, the sky’s the limit to what you can create with Adobe products.

Price: the all-inclusive Creative Cloud package costs $54.00 per month, whereas individual apps cost $4.99 to $29.99 per month.

MailChimp

  Geared towards email marketing, MailChimp provides a Generative AI tool to help you create quality branded content in minutes and connect to Canva to import your designs. Speaking of integrations, MailChimp integrates with over 300 third-party tools and platforms so you can streamline your content marketing to the best of your abilities. Among other prominent content marketing features are data-driven recommendation and A/B testing, both helping you create top-performing content for your target referrals.

Price: MailChimp offers one free and three paid subscription plans at $13, $20, and $350 per month, depending on the features.

Bonus: Google As Your Secret Affiliate Marketing Weapon

  Last but not least, your most powerful and free content marketing tool for affiliate marketing might as well be…Google. The digital giant has come a long way to become a household name for search. Here are some of the many Google’s content marketing tools:

• People also ask. The “People also ask” feature – appearing after you’ve searched for something on Google – provides related questions, helping you understand the broader interests of your target audience.
• Google Search Console. More of an SEO than a content marketing tool, GSC can give you insights about how your content performs in search across multiple parameters.
• Google Trends. Analysing how the market demand changes over time can give you valuable insights into keywords, article topics, and your content marketing strategy.
• Google Analytics. With Google Analytics, you can understand which content draws the most attention and conversions.

These features are only a drop in the sea of content marketing opportunities from Google, but it’s also worth mentioning that most of the tools are not geared toward content marketing but complementary fields like SEO.

Step up Your Affiliate Marketing Game with Phonexa

Phonexa’s performance marketing software suite will bring home the clicks, leads, and calls you crave, all while uniting your most wanted content marketing tools under one roof and within one comprehensive marketing strategy. From closing the loops to tapping into untapped markets, Phonexa’s eight proprietary solutions, including affiliate marketing and click tracking software, will improve your business across the board regardless of whether you are an affiliate, advertiser, or affiliate network.

Here’s the software package you get for only $100 per month:

• Lynx – affiliate marketing and click tracking software
• LMS Sync – lead tracking and distribution software
• Call Logic – call tracking and distribution software
• E-Delivery – email and SMS marketing software
• Cloud PBX – cloud phone system
• Opt-Intel – suppression list management software
• HitMetrix – user behaviour recording and analytics software
• Books360 – automated accounting software

Intrigued? Get it all at an affordable price right now, or schedule a free consultation to learn more about Phonexa’s software suite.

Frequently Asked Questions

Important: this article is a part of our affiliate martech stack series, where we shed light on the most effective tools for affiliate marketing.

Even the most compelling content may be lost in the search pages if not optimised for Google crawlers. However, the right suite of SEO tools can make Google fall in love with your content through multiple on-page and off-page improvements.

You can only succeed if you’re constantly on the customers’ radar, with SEO being your ultimate exposure instrument. SEO helps you climb the search rankings like no other tool, interpreting Google’s taste into strategic insights like what content they crave, how to structure your website, and where to advertise.

The role of SEO in marketing is undisputed, but the lack of resources and tools is still a major hindrance. Even though SEO ranking tools of all scales and types are always available, it’s extremely challenging to compile a winning SEO toolkit:

• On the one hand, opting for a single “all-encompassing” SEO toolkit might deprive you of the unique insights narrow-focused tools can provide. On the other hand, juggling multiple SEO tools might make you miss the forest for the trees.

So, how do you combine the best of many worlds of SEO reporting tools, SEO content optimisation tools, eCommerce SEO tools, and other optimisation instruments? How do you cover your SEO needs through and through while not overcommitting?

Source: GIPHY

We’ll get to it in a while. For now, read on.

First Things First: What Can SEO Tools Help You Achieve?

The most noticeable effect of using the right SEO software correctly would be a rise in your search rankings. It’s no secret that the first search engine page receives the lion’s share of attention, with the CTRs spreading as follows:

• 1st search position – 39.8%
•  2nd search position – 18.7%
• 3rd search position – 10.2%

But the enhanced visibility is just one of many improvements the right suite of SEO ranking tools can grant you. Besides, you can increase your conversion rate, improve user experiences, and engage your customers more effectively.

7 Most Popular Types of SEO Tools

With SEO permeating multiple business avenues, there are so many different tools that it would take pages to name them all. For example, there are special SEO tools for Excel that help you synergise SEO and Excel, SEO tools for Mac owners, and many more.

What Is the Difference Between SEO Tools and SEO Software for Business?

Before we dig into the best SEO tools of today, let’s resolve the common dispute about SEO software and SEO tools. The gist of the dispute is whether SEO software and SEO tools are the same or these are different concepts.

Here’s the answer:

• In theory, SEO software is a comprehensive suite of various SEO tools. In practise, SEO software and SEO tools are used interchangeably, so we won’t differentiate either.

With that, it’s time to proceed to our tailor-made list of SEO tools for big and small businesses. We’ve thoroughly researched the market to compile the 10 most comprehensive automated SEO tools for marketers, SEO specialists, and content creators.

Your 10 Best Automated Big and Small Business SEO Tools

Google Search Console – the Best Free SEO Reporting Tool

Google Search Console (GCS) is an undisputed leader in SEO analytics, allowing you to monitor the performance of your website and pages in Google’s search results and against competitors. From clicks to impressions to click-through rates (CTR), GSC unlocks multiple aspects of the customer journey across locations, devices, and timeframes.

Aside from a stellar SEO toolkit, GCS has two major advantages over other SEO tools. First, it’s absolutely free. Second, it’s developed by Google, home to 85% of all search requests, and thus provides the most accurate data and smoothly integrates with other Google SEO tools like, for example, Google Analytics.

That said, those promoting in search engines other than Google will unlikely find value in Google Search Console. On a similar note, GCS doesn’t provide backlink analysis and rank tracking and only enables limited SEO data for privacy reasons.

Google Trends – Free Trend Monitoring Tool for SEO

Google Trends is a simple trend-monitoring SEO tool that identifies trending topics and searches. You can explore how particular queries perform in specific locations, business categories, search types (for example, YouTube search), and against each other.

Like other Google’s proprietary SEO tools, Google Trends is free and draws official data from the biggest search engine. That said, this SEO tool is quite limited and thus should only be used as a complementary instrument.

SEMrush – the Best Paid SEO Project Management Software

SEMrush might be the best-paid suite of SEO analytics tools out there, allowing you to dissect marketing campaigns to the smallest detail, including keywords, competitors, internal performance, backlinks, and PPC.

With SEMrush, you can combine SEO research with marketing, advertising, and social media research. This comprehensive approach provides an overarching view of your campaigns so you can strike the right balance between SEO and your other marketing efforts.

Over the years, SEMrush has grown into one of the biggest SEO names, with an all-encompassing SEO toolkit. It even includes tools for SEO content writing that suggest the most effective keywords, fix link issues, and improve content readability, tone of voice, and originality aside from SEO optimisation.

Price-wise, the all-in-one SEO tool costs $129.95, $249.95, or $499.95 monthly, depending on the features. Paying annually saves you up to 15%, or you can enrol in a 14-day free trial to test things out before committing.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider – the Best Freemium SEO Audit Tool

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is an SEO audit tool that crawls your website much like Google crawlers do, collecting SEO data and searching for issues and potential improvements. Unlike most other SEO tools, the Screaming Frog is a desktop-based app that you can use offline with higher security and privacy.

The SEO Spider identifies broken links, audits redirects, analyses metadata and page titles, creates sitemaps, and evaluates your SEO performance progress. For a more comprehensive view, you can integrate the Spider with Google Search Console and Google Analytics.

Price-wise, the free version allows crawling 500 URLs annually and enables basic features like searching for broken links, redirect audits, and metadata reviews. The all-inclusive paid version costs $259 per year.

Google Analytics – the Best SEO Tool from Google

Google Analytics is not an SEO tool per sae, but it can be of tremendous help if you want to synergise web analytics and SEO. Google Analytics can analyse website traffic, track conversions and bounces, and interpret user behaviour across touchpoints.

Here’s an example of how Google Analytics can work together with other Google software and third-party SEO reporting tools:

• Imagine you need to evaluate several high-performing pages for further SEO optimisation and capitalisation via organic and paid traffic. For this, you can sort pages by conversions in Google Analytics and then analyse the top-performing pages in your SEO tool.

By the same logic, you can address the pages with high bounce rates, low CTR, and other issues. Long storey short, Google Analytics allows you to see the problem from the marketing perspective so you can focus your SEO efforts on what matters.

Google Analytics is free in its basic version, but it also has an advanced version called Google Analytics 360. The latter provides features and capabilities way beyond standard, enabling the most complex and deep data analysis. However, it comes at a price: Google Analytics 360 costs $12,500 per month and thus is only viable for the largest enterprises.

Ahrefs – the Best Non-Google SEO Reporting Software

Ahrefs is one of the best non-Google SEO reporting software. As you might expect from the software of this level, Ahrefs offers keyword research, backlink and content analysis, site audit, rank tracking, competitor analysis, and many other types of organic analytics.

Here are some unique features Ahrefs provides:

• Link intersect – identifies websites that link to competitors but not your website
• Keyword difficulty score – rates keyword difficulty from 0 to 100
• Content gap analysis – identifies overlooked keywords that your competitors rank for

Ahrefs is an especially strong SEO content writing tool. By evaluating the keyword difficulty, search volume, and geography, you can develop a realistic content strategy while avoiding overcompetitive or unprofitable keywords.

Ahrefs costs $99, $199, $399, or $999 monthly. Paying annually gets you two months for free.

Similarweb – All-in-One SEO Reporting Toolkit

Similarweb is a wide-ranging SEO and marketing intelligence marketing platform spanning website, keyword, content, competitor, and PPC analysis. The two strongest features of Similarweb are competitive intelligence and traffic and keyword analysis.

Through multi-dimensional analytics and integrations with tools like Google Analytics or SEMrush, Similarweb can provide a holistic view of your online performance while enabling detailed analytics across digital marketing metrics like website traffic, demographics, competitors, content types, and more.

Similarweb offers free and paid tools and a 7-day free trial. The paid subscription plans cost $149 or $399 per user if paid monthly and $125 or $333 per user if paid annually. Besides, there are custom subscription plans for SEO teams and large SEO agencies.

Moz – Overarching Suite of SEO Tools

Moz unites some of the best SEO reporting tools to improve search engine rankings and online visibility. Like other renowned SEO toolkits, Moz covers every imaginable SEO avenue except social media, PPC, and email analytics.

In terms of its scope and offering, Moz is similar to Ahrefs and SEMrush, with the advantages being some free functionality (domain analysis, keyword explorer, link explorer, competitive research, and SEO metrics research) and a 30-day free trial. The paid plans cost $99, $179, $299, and $599 if paid monthly and 20% cheaper if paid annually.

Small SEO Tools – a Freemium Suite of Affordable SEO Tools

Small SEO Tools is a collection of free and paid SEO tools that serve small objectives across content optimisation, backlink analysis, website management, and more.

The biggest advantage of Small SEO Tools is that hundreds of its tools are free and ready to be used immediately in the browser. As for the paid plans, they include a plagiarism chequer, a paraphraser, and a reverse image search tool, all priced individually depending on the usage limits and payment schedule.

Seobility – a Website SEO Audit Tool

Seobility is a comprehensive SEO platform that focuses on the technical issues that may impact your search rankings: broken links, plagiarised content, suboptimal metadata and keyword usage, and more.

There’s a 14-day free trial and a free subscription plan allowing you to crawl 1,000 web pages, use 10 keywords, cheque 100 external links monthly, and make five tool requests per day (for example, SEO Chequer). The paid plans cost $50 and $200 if paid monthly or $480 and $1,920 (20% cheaper) if paid annually.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I pick an SEO Tool?

Whether an agency SEO tool, B2B SEO tool, or individual SEO tool, it must be affordable, scalable, accurate, integrable, and provide the required depth of research. Be ready to combine several SEO instruments, especially if you use free or cheap SEO tools.

What is the best SEO software for small businesses?

Among the best SEO tools for small businesses are Ahrefs, Moz, Similar Web, Google Analytics, Google Trends, and Google Search Console. Remember, your best SEO software for small businesses must be affordable and employ enough tools to analyse your SEO performance comprehensively.

Besides, choosing SEO tools depends on the specific aspects you want to address. For example, if you want to improve your on-page SEO, you might want to use a tool carved out for this specific problem – like, for example, SEMrush or Screaming Frog SEO Spider.

What is the best enterprise-level SEO software?

Among the best enterprise SEO software are Similarweb, SEMrush, and Google Search Console:

• Similarweb starts at $149 per user per month if paid monthly or $125 per user per month if paid annually
• SEMrush starts at $129.95 per month if paid monthly or $108.33 per month if paid annually
• Google Search Console is free

Are there free or cheap SEO tools?

Here’s a list of free and cheap SEO software for large and small businesses:

• Free SEO software: Google Search Console, Google Trends, Google Analytics, Bing Webmaster Tools, and Google Keyword Planner
• Freemium SEO software: Screaming Frog SEO Spider, Similarweb, Moz, Small SEO Tools, and Seobility

Many paid and freemium SEO tools provide a free trial, but the most advanced functionality is usually unlocked within the paid plans.

What is SEO software for agencies, and is it different from regular SEO software?

Agency SEO software must be able to run multiple campaigns while not sacrificing analytics quality, whereas regular SEO software doesn’t necessarily need much processing power. Among the distinctive features of agency SEO tools are multi-channel management, white label reporting, user-client communication tools, scalability, integrability, and billing ad functionality.

In the intricate landscape of affiliate marketing, staying ahead requires finely tuned tools that match the complexity of your affiliate programme.

Two essential tools commonly used by affiliate marketers are lead tracking and distribution systems and customer relationship management (CRM) software. While these may seem synonymous at first glance, delving deeper reveals distinct purposes and functionalities that set them apart.

In a world where every click, impression, and interaction is valuable, businesses must harness the power of advanced systems to effectively manage their outreach efforts. To maximise leads and optimise conversion, it’s imperative to understand the unique roles that lead tracking and distribution systems and CRMs play.

Whether you’re a seasoned marketer or just starting your journey, this blog will equip you with the knowledge needed to decide which tool best suits your specific marketing goals.

Join us as we navigate through the intricacies of these tools, dissecting their features, functions, and applications.

Lead Management and Distribution Platform for an Affiliate

A lead management and distribution system allows you to track, route, and sell all your incoming leads to your network of buyers in real-time. Sophisticated lead distribution software provides form builders, integration builders, and affiliate and publisher management tools out of the box.

So while CRMs are used by the end service provider (advertisers, brand, buyer), lead distribution systems are used by lead generation companies who then sell leads to the end users (typically via ping post systems for automated, intelligent routing across multiple buying entities and brands).

Lead Generation and Distribution

This platform focuses on capturing and managing leads generated through various marketing channels, such as affiliate websites, online ads, and social media. It ensures efficient distribution of these leads among affiliates, ensuring fair allocation and maximising conversion opportunities.

Ping Post Software for Dynamic Lead Distribution

Ping post software is a dynamic lead exchange solution that swiftly matches and dispatches incoming leads to the most suitable buyers, ensuring rapid and efficient lead distribution in real-time.

Affiliate and Publisher Collaboration

The platform facilitates communication and collaboration between affiliate marketers and publishers. It often includes features to track the performance of different affiliates, their lead conversion rates, and commissions earned. It can also include builders for publisher forms and APIs for integrations.

Tracking and Attribution

An affiliate-focused platform emphasises accurate tracking and attribution of leads and sales to specific sources — either individual publishers or campaigns across channel sources. This is crucial for calculating commissions and compensating affiliates accordingly.

Conversion Optimisation

The platform may offer tools to help affiliates optimise their lead conversion strategies. This could include A/B testing, landing page optimisation, and other techniques to increase conversion rates.

Real-time Analytics

Real-time reporting and analytics are often essential components, allowing affiliates and the organisation to monitor lead performance, track campaign success, and make data-driven decisions.

Customer Relationship Management System

A CRM system enables you to systematically arrange your sales leads, document insights, and monitor engagements as you guide each lead through your sales journey.

While you likely have a grasp of what a CRM entails, it’s worth emphasising that CRMs lack features related to buying and selling leads, and additionally tracking multiple sources of traffic from affiliates, publishers, and other channels.

Usually, a lead’s final destination resides within the CRM of the service provider. Consequently, advanced lead systems often seamlessly integrate with various CRMs.

Customer Data Management

A CRM system manages detailed information about individual customers or prospects. It tracks interactions, communication history, preferences, purchase history, and other relevant data.

Sales and Marketing Automation

CRMs automate and streamline sales and marketing processes, such as sending follow-up emails, tracking sales opportunities, and managing customer segmentation for targeted marketing campaigns.

Pipeline Management

CRM systems help manage the sales pipeline by tracking leads as they progress through various stages of the sales process, from initial contact to closing a deal.

Customer Service

CRMs often include customer support features to manage and track customer enquiries, complaints, and support tickets. This helps ensure timely and effective customer service.

Forecasting and Reporting

CRMs provide tools for sales forecasting, performance analysis, and generating reports to assess sales team performance and overall business health.

Integration with Marketing and Sales Tools

A CRM system may integrate with various marketing automation tools, email marketing platforms, and other sales-related software to provide a comprehensive view of customer interactions.

• Limited scope: While lead tracking systems excel in monitoring individual leads’ interactions, they lack the comprehensive capabilities required by affiliate marketers for managing affiliates, tracking multiple channels, and analysing overall campaign performance. Conversely, a CRM system is designed to holistically manage customer relationships, encompassing lead nurturing, sales processes, customer support, and more.
• Lack of affiliate-specific features: Do the unique requirements of your affiliate network necessitate specialised features, such as commission tracking, affiliate recruitment tools, and performance reporting? If so, keep in mind that a lead tracking system typically lacks these affiliate-specific functionalities, making it unsuitable for meeting the diverse needs of an affiliate marketer.
• Inadequate commission management: Affiliate marketers must accurately attribute commissions to individual affiliates based on their referrals and conversions. Lead tracking systems often lack the granularity required for precise commission tracking and attribution, leading to disputes and dissatisfaction among affiliates.
• Limited reporting capabilities: Comprehensive reporting is crucial for affiliate marketers to analyse the performance of different affiliates, campaigns, and channels. Lead tracking systems may offer basic reporting functionalities, but they may not provide the level of granularity and customisation required to gain valuable insights for optimising affiliate marketing efforts.

The Role of Tracking Solutions in an Affiliate Network’s Overall Infrastructure & Tech Stack

• Centralised Performance Tracking: Affiliate tracking solutions are the backbone of an affiliate network’s tech stack, providing centralised performance tracking for all affiliates and campaigns. These solutions capture data on clicks, conversions, and revenue generated by affiliates, offering real-time insights into campaign performance. The ability to track and analyse data from various sources empowers affiliate marketers to make data-driven decisions and optimise their marketing efforts effectively.
• Affiliate Recruitment and Management: Tracking solutions facilitate affiliate recruitment and management, allowing affiliate marketers to onboard new partners seamlessly. With affiliate-specific features like referral link generation and registration tracking, tracking solutions simplify the process of enrolling affiliates into your programme.
• Advanced Attribution Models: Tracking solutions offer advanced attribution models that go beyond last-click attribution, such as multi-touch and first-click attribution. These models provide a more comprehensive view of the customer journey, ensuring your affiliates receive fair credit for their contributions throughout the conversion funnel.
• Real-time Analytics and Reporting: Affiliate tracking solutions equip marketers with real-time analytics and reporting capabilities, enabling them to monitor performance, identify trends, and respond quickly to changing market dynamics. With intuitive dashboards and customised reports, affiliate marketers can gain insights into the efficacy of their affiliate programme and optimise their marketing strategies accordingly.

While lead tracking systems serve a particular purpose in monitoring individual leads, they fall short as a comprehensive CRM solution for affiliate marketers. The unique demands of affiliate marketing require a specialised tracking solution that offers affiliate-specific features, commission management, and comprehensive reporting capabilities.

Looking for ways to maximise your affiliate marketing performance? Get your enterprise-grade affiliate marketing software suite, or book a free consultation to learn how Phonexa can help you harness the power of automated performance marketing solutions.

As consumers, we want our data to remain safe and certainly out of the hands of bad actors with ill intentions. However, on the other end of the spectrum, some businesses would do just about anything to acquire more consumer data to attempt involuntary outreach to sell their products and services.

While it’s relatively easy to obtain and misuse targeted consumer information, what may materialize after this gross violation is rather unpleasant.

That’s why local and federal lawmakers and regulating bodies dedicate millions of dollars in resources and massive efforts every year to protect user data from being misused in the hands of unseasoned businesses – even more if a business has any type of presence in California.

With the implementation of the California Consumer Privacy Act, the state has embraced the privacy rights of consumers by requiring businesses to make significant changes to their data privacy and collection practices.

For Phonexa, safeguarding customer and prospect data is of paramount importance, primarily because of the multi-dimensional nature of our all-in-one platform for marketing automation that encompasses hundreds of touchpoints with client data, and of course, our firm commitment to the MailCon community.

Read on to find out more about California’s consumer protection laws and how your startup can dodge any mishaps along the way with the use of compliance technology.

What Is CCPA Compliance? 

The CCPA was put in place to make California businesses more transparent in collecting and using consumer data. It also requires qualifying businesses to implement specific procedures, policies, and rules to protect the personal information of any consumer they come across.

Under CCPA regulations, businesses have to disclose the categories of personal information they collect during the information gathering process of the client’s data.

Which Organizations Must Comply With The CCPA?

If your company or startup organization falls under the scope of the following categories, then you must comply with CCPA regulations:

• Your company has an annual revenue of at least $25 million;
• If your business makes at least half or 50% of its annual revenue from selling personal information or leads of your California-based consumers;
• If your organization buys, sells, or discloses the personal information of more than 50,000 California residents in the same year (i.e., lead generation and distribution networks).

In other words, if you work in the lead generation and distribution industry, whether as part of an affiliate network or an independent contractor, your company may be subject to CCPA regulations.

Beginning in 2023, the CCPA will apply to startups and other companies that make at least 50% of their annual revenue from selling or sharing the personal information of California-based consumers.

What Do CCPA Laws Mean For Startups? 

1. Consumer identifiers
2. Protected characteristics
3. Data filed under the description of “personal information” (Civ. Code § 1798.80)
4. Geolocation data
5. Commercial information
6. Biometrics
7. Information on employment
8. Information used for profiling consumers
9. Search history or other internet activity or information (cookie-collected data)
10. Education status (if private from the public)
11. Audio, visual, electronic, olfactory, or thermal information

Then, of course, comes the part where businesses and startups must inform consumers of their intent when generating the above information. The following are intent types:

1. The purpose of collecting or selling this consumer’s information;
2. The category of the personal information that you are collecting.

This information should be found in the company’s “Use of Data” section in its “Privacy Policy” document. It must be presented to the consumers before they agree to give their personal data to the company.

Since the CCPA regulatory body requires you to update this list once a year, you must also disclose whether your company has collected, sold, or disclosed any consumer personal data in the last 12 months.

While the CCPA is a win for consumers, many startups feel rather shuffled handling this added layer of compliance and regulation.

However, the way startups should see it is that this is a power shift that helps companies help themselves by evaluating the ethics of how they gather and use consumer data.

How Has Phonexa Adapted To CCPA Regulations? 

Due to the robust nature of the Phonexa platform and its functionality of handling tons of consumer data per day, we’ve implemented compliance tactics and many checkpoints for errors within our platform to make sure that this data is handled ethically and with care.

For instance, Opt-Intel, our compliance and suppression list management product, allows you to secure your compliance by streamlining automated data transfers, providing compliance messages and tips, and more.

Here are several ways Opt-Intel tackles CCPA data regulations:

• Compliance Notifications: Opt-Intel keeps users in the loop on all of their compliance concerns with constant notifications and other tools that help any inconsistencies in compliance while keeping users aware of any CAN-SPAM violations.
• Opt-Out Domain White Labeling: This feature allows users to maintain email hygiene using tools and customizable options for opt-out.
• Automated, Safe Data Transfers: Transferring data to your partners is a hassle, especially if you’re working with networks, publishers, and advertisers. This tool lets you send critical data to partners without compromising consumer information.

When evaluating CCPA regulations and how they affect your startup’s operations, you must also consider how you can ensure that the consumer data you’re using and providing can be secured.

Better yet, you should focus on only collecting the consumer data of people who actually want to be contacted by your business. With that, you can use automation tools such as Opt-Intel to achieve a more harmonious and efficient manner of managing real-time opt-outs and “no contact” or email cleansing requests.

It will not only help you manage your suppression lists, but it will give you total control over your list suppression to ensure that you have a healthy list of consumer data.

Want to feel even more confident about your CCPA compliance? You can do so by using this industry-leading email solution that supports everyone across the board — from performance marketers to advertisers, networks, and large agencies.

In a way, Opt-Intel is the solution many in the email industry have been looking for — it’s the extension of Phonexa’s commitment and support of users of E-Delivery, our email and SMS product, as well as the MailCon community of email and omnichannel marketers who are always on the lookout for best practices to guide them toward a better relationship with any new CCPA updates or general CCPA compliance requirements.

Contact us to learn more about how Opt-Intel can power your startup’s next stage of compliance. 

To get more insight about the MailCon community and how it gathers thousands of email and omnichannel marketing professionals — including compliance parties — click here. 

Impactful networking and valuable learning materialise every time the email and omnichannel marketing community gathers at MailCon, and that’s exactly what happened at this year’s Phonexa-owned-and-operated event, hosted at the Caesars Forum in Las Vegas from April 17 to 19.

The three-day conference featured numerous networking opportunities, highlighted by the inaugural SaaS pitchfest, the kickoff party at Topgolf and the afterparty at Brooklyn Bowl – all of which further cultivated the collective mission of the ever-growing MailCon community.

With nearly 600 attendees and over two dozen sessions, the 2023 event covered tracks across all email and omnichannel marketing areas – from compliance, behavioural science, deliverability, and everything in between.

Here are some of the highlights from the conference.

1. Keynote: Navigating Consumer Behaviour Changes — 3 Components to Drive Email Engagement

Olivia Balicki, Senior Manager at Deloitte Digital (Moderator)

Umberto Castaldo, Head of Strategy at Deloitte (Keynote)

Sitha Ngy, Group Creative Director at Deloitte (Keynote)

Nick Ingham, MarTech Leader at Deloitte Digital (Keynote)

As noted in the 2022 Deloitte Experience Management Personalisation Survey, some 79% of brands rate themselves as delivering great personalised experiences. However, they don’t know that there is a disconnect with the consumer – with only 37% saying that brands are doing this well.

What does this tell you about email and its importance in the customer conversion journey?

1. Email is an increasingly important part of the marketing mix
2. Brands are falling behind customers’ expectations

The above-mentioned facts drive a rather sobering conclusion – marketing teams cannot keep evolving in silos; instead, they need cohesiveness to drive a different type of change that keeps up with customer demand.

For these Deloitte and Deloitte Digital execs, it all boiled down to the following three approaches:

1. Have a human conversation: For too long, marketing messaging has been one-way and often irrelevant. With the deprecation of third-party cookies, it’s more important than ever for brands to get to know their prospects and customers better using zero and first-party datasets. Use that insight quickly and consistently to optimise your messaging across channels and be human.
2. Strike a balance between creative freedom and production scalability: As messaging becomes more data-driven and personalised, marketers must build efficient production processes that incorporate the creativity and human element customers expect from one-to-one channels while efficiently delivering at scale.
3. Don’t get stuck in first gear: You are likely never done with investing in technology; your marketing automation platforms and datasets constantly evolve. Experience strategy, creative, and production teams must work closely with capability development teams to push the experience boundaries that drive growth. Think about lifecycle-based marketing and AMP for email, which has brought interactivity possibilities to drive engagement.

2. Keynote: Add Some BS to Increase Your Email Response Rate

Nancy Harhut, Co-Founder & Chief Creative Officer at HBT Marketing

You increase your response rates when you write emails using behavioural science – or, as Harhut says – “BS.”

Why? Because behavioural science allows you to take advantage of the scientifically-proven decision-making shortcuts people use when determining which emails to open and read. These hardwired behaviours result in automatic, reflexive responses, which means you can prompt people to engage with your email without giving it a second thought.

And how’s that achieved? Through the use of the following science-backed behavioural tactics that bring more eyeballs to your email in their saturated emails. Here’s how Harhut described it.

1. “Eye magnet” words: When it comes to subject lines, frontloading terms like – free, new, you, trends, top, because, instantly, sale, now, and offer – will naturally attract the human eye, prompting better open rates across the board.
2. Position your message for fast response: Tap into the principle of scarcity by making them feel special through exclusivity and time-pressed through urgency.
3. Remember the consistency principle: Once people commit to a service or product, they remain consistent. When creating emails, remember that the first small yes will lead to many subsequent larger ones, so the more relevant your content and offerings remain, the better your outcomes will be. To get this under your scope, remind people of their earlier “yes” while also escalating your asks.
4. Use social proof: We do what other people do, especially if they’re like us. So show your target audience that others have already done what you want them to do. This creates a sense of trust and relevancy, so your offering sticks with these targets far longer.
5. Loss aversion: Negative can deliver positive results for consumers because they are twice as motivated to avoid pain than to achieve results. Speak to your customer’s pain points and help them avoid “making mistakes.”
6. Availability bias: This is the human tendency to rely on information that comes readily to mind when evaluating situations or making decisions. Reversing this back to marketing and emails, think about personal relevance. If it can be recalled or imagined, it’s more likely to allow it to happen, turning doubters into buyers. To be effective at this, stir people’s memories or imaginations before you ask them to respond.
7. The authority principle: Always think about what can immediately make you look better than your competitors and make a play on that without bashing them. When done right, people will recognise and respect the authority you instill in your offerings and positioning.
8. The journalist’s rule: Use the 5Ws and 1H (who, what, when, where, why, how) in question format to generate curiosity and offer to fill an information gap.

3. Debate: What is the Best Channel for Lead Conversion?

Kassandra Urias, COO of Channel Automation (Moderator)

Vic Sun, CEO of Channel Automation (#TeamText)

Lisa Jones, CEO of EyeMail (#TeamEmail)

Teddy Liaw, CEO of NexRep (#TeamVoice)

During this unique debate and interactive session, the panel actively involved the audience in their discussion to help them determine the best marketing channel for conversions. Is it calls? Email? SMS?

As each panelist took sides in the discussion, they uncovered critical data and insights about each channel. Sun represented team SMS and discussed the immediate benefits SMS yields for brands.

When it came to SMS versus email, it was uncovered that text messages generate a whopping 98% open rate, with only 10% of them being reported as spam.

Regarding click-through rates, SMS generated 45-to-98% open rates, as opposed to 2.78% with emails. Response time with SMS is only 90 seconds as compared to the 90-minute window with emails.

Ultimately, SMS yields ease for users and nearly instant results for marketers. A suggested way to accomplish better SMS activity is by following these tricks:

• Use Instagram Stories to opt-in for SMS
• Send content with promo codes to your email list to get mobile numbers
• Use QR codes or hashtags for CTA
• Upsell with a discount code
• Get reviews and UGCs
• Provide instant gratification to users on tasks
• Engage conversations via auto and manual

As a contact centre solutions provider, Teddy Liaw put all his bets on voice and calls being the most conversion tools. Liaw dove deeper into the intimacy and personal connection that direct phone calls with prospects and clients allow that sometimes SMS or email can lack.

Then there was the debate around email. Jones spoke on interactive or AMP for email and video-in-email experiences that have elevated the traditional concept, making emails a simple and instant channel to send and receive messages, information, and files, creating a trustable paper trail.

The audience then participated in an online poll, where 64% of voters said email was the most effective channel for lead conversion, while text messages were second with 27%, and voice or calls took the least favoured position with 9%.

A Bright, Omnichannel Future for the MailCon Community

On day two of the event, MailCon CEO Kristen Haines headlined a panel keynote with Phonexa Chief Creative Officer Armen Karaoghlanian and Chief Marketing Officer Talar Malakian as the trio unveiled the future vision and plans for the email marketing conference.

With new programming, tracks, topics, and workshops, MailCon’s operations will focus on offering more value and opportunities to keep the Community engaged and learning throughout the year with carefully-curated events, each unique to a distinct marketing specification.

“The MailCon Community is in for a great surprise in the coming months and years as we expand our event operations and focus on new event programming, tracks, topics, and more. The 3.0 version will offer more value and opportunities to keep our community engaged throughout the year with carefully curated events, each unique to an area of focus, with MailCon being the tentpole event,” said Haines. “Email marketing will remain the essence of MailCon, but now at a larger scale, with an expanded event programme covering more marketing channels and customer interactions; and Phonexa’s growth and resources fuelling it.”

More announcements about new event programming will be made in the coming months.

Stay tuned and connected with MailCon to stay in the loop.

Important: this article is a part of our affiliate martech stack series, where we shed light on the most effective tools for affiliate marketing.

There is hardly a more effective way to promote a company than by word of mouth. Referral software and marketing tools can maximise the impact of your referral programmes so you can acquire more organic leads and turn your customers into brand advocates.

With 92% of customers trusting recommendations from family and friends, a well-incentivising referral programme can grow your customer base exponentially. There’s no better way to spread the word than through customers sharing their success storeys.

That said, running a referral programme manually is quite time-consuming, if not impossible. To be effective with referral programmes, you must prop them up with referral software – a set of tools designed to manage routines such as tracking, distributing, and converting referrals.

• Referral marketing software can help you set up referral campaigns, track their performance, and distribute referral rewards like loyalty points, discounts, gift cards, or cash to those who have met the criteria.

Referral software is of tremendous help for businesses running several referral programmes. Without jumping hoops and juggling reports, you can get an overarching view of your campaigns, seeing where your referral marketing goes and how to improve it.

Source: GIPHY

And now, let’s move to the best referral marketing software you can find online. The presented referral software solutions will help automate your referral programme, bring in new customers, and strengthen the loyalty of constant buyers.

Top Referral Software

Referral Candy – Customer Referral Tracking Software

Highly effective customer referral tracking software ReferralCandy allows you to create segmented and well-targeted referral campaigns through:

• Audience segmentation – allocating referrals for target groups
• Custom ad targeting – displaying different ads to different target groups
• Choice of rewards – tailoring rewards to different referrer and referral groups
• Post-purchase emails – hitting referrals with a well-timed post-purchase email
• Coupon codes for Shopify subscription products – promoting your referral programme via coupon codes if you sell subscriptions using Shopify

On the referral side, the process is as simple as it can be: they get a unique referral link to promote, and they get the chosen reward for every referred customer. On your side, you can manage your referral campaign’s key metrics and automatically detect suspicious transactions – for example, self-referrals – to prevent referral fraud.

ReferralRock – B2B Referral Software

ReferralRock is a B2B referral software platform that allows you to create and launch your custom referral programme in a few days, possibly with expert help. Among the referral incentives are cash rewards, coupons, merchandise, and gift cards.

Here are some opportunities you get with ReferralRock:

• Creating an on-brand referral experience through custom branding, built-in referral offers, and a referral programme visual editor
• Differentiating between referrals through multiple sharing options, personalised links, and a dedicated tracking and sharing portal
• Customising referral incentives for specific marketing goals through a choice of rewards and integrations with CRM systems like Salesforce and HubSpot

ReferralRock allows you to build referral programmes that reward both the referrer and the referred, a win-win for both. Both parties may get the same discount on the same products, or the rewards may differ depending on how you’ve configured the offer (besides two-sided rewards, there are bump, recurring, milestone, and tiered rewards).

InviteReferrals – Referral Automation Software for Social Media

InviteReferrals is mobile app referral software designed specifically for social media users, making the referral programme available on your Facebook fan page or website. The software works across all platforms and devices, including mobile, tablet, and desktop.

The software toolkit provides:

• Referral campaign automation
• Support for over 25 languages
• Spam and fraud prevention
• Two-sided rewards for registration and app installs

The referral automation software from InviteReferrals includes in-depth customer journey tracking: link clicks, registrations, app installs, and more. Likewise, you provide referrers with convenient sharing options across major social media platforms, messengers, and email.

Mention Me – Medical Referral Management Software

Mention Me is a referral marketing platform that covers six major verticals: finance & insurance, health & beauty, food & beverage, travel & hospitality, and fashion. The unique AI-driven referral marketing software from Mention Me identifies, activates, and maximises the impact of brand advocates to turn them into profitable referrers.

The uniqueness of Mention Me is that it provides rare medical referral management software, also known as patient referral management software or physician referral software. This medical referral software can help medical institutions acquire more new patients while incentivising their best personnel and existing patients.

Like other online referral programme software, Mention Me provides tracking links for proper attribution. The detailed analytics of referral programmes will allow you to double down on the most effective and eliminate unprofitable marketing channels, growing your customer base and ROI.

Friendbuy – Popular Online Referral Marketing Software

Friendbuy is a referral marketing software that supercharges referral programmes through referral templates, dashboards, anti-fraud control, automated rewards, and analytics & reporting. Likewise, you can integrate Friendbuy with your technology stack, including your other marketing, lead generation, and CRM software.

While Friendbuy may not offer unique features, its easily shareable links and codes will spread your referral campaigns like wildfire to grant you ever-increasing referral revenues and customer loyalty.

Referral Factory – All-in-One Software for Referral Programmes

Referral Factory is an online referral programme software that features over 100 referral programme templates, a drag-and-drop referral programme builder, and advanced promotional and analytics tools so you can distill vast amounts of data into actionable marketing insights.

With Referral Factory, you get:

• Intuitive interface and tools to build a referral programme from scratch without coding knowledge
• Extensive customisation options to personalise your referral programme for specific audiences, including ads and rewards
• Ease of link generation and sharing so referrers can seamlessly spread the word and track referrals
• Automated referral analytics to manage your referral campaigns for heterogeneous audiences and across all media
• Integrations with CRM, lead management, and email marketing software to create a coherent marketing strategy

Through partners in over 50 countries, Referral Factory allows you to reward users from different locations and in multiple currencies and reward types, including cash, coupons, vouchers, and more.

Genius Referrals – B2B Referral Software

Genius Referrals is a suite of referral software solutions for referrers, affiliates, influencers, and B2B companies, all simplified with widgets and ready-made templates for brand advocating, referral capturing, and post-purchase referral acquisition.

The referral marketing software suite from Genius Referrals includes:

• Referral software
• Affiliate referral programmes
• Influencer marketing software
• B2B partner programme solutions
• Employee referral programmes
• Newsletter referral programme solutions

With fixed and variable rewards for referrers and referrals, you can effectively turn strangers into customers and customers into brand advocates. Among the supported reward types are single, double-sided, multi-tiered, multi-level, fixed, and percentage rewards in cash, products, gift cards, vouchers, account credits, discount codes, and more.

Growsurf – Referral Software for SaaS

Growsurf is referral software for SaaS that helps you build a referral programme without coding knowledge through distinctive features like an automatic link generator and white labelling. With Growsurf, you can embed code snippets into your marketing channels to promote instant sharing.

It takes only a couple of days to integrate the plug-and-play referral software into your CRM and align it with your other marketing solutions. Growsurf works best for SaaS, fintech, and B2C market segments, but you can safely try it for different niches as well, considering it has a 14-day free trial.

Extole – Omnichannel Referral Marketing Software

Extole is a comprehensive customer growth platform offering acquisition and retention programmes and referral software. The biggest advantage of Extole is that it creates omnichannel experiences while personalising the offering for every referrer and referral, all through enterprise-level referral marketing tools and customer acquisition software.

Extole Referral Marketing Toolkit

Extole’s referral software may not offer revolutionary features; however, its alignment with customer engagement and retention tools may become the tip-scaling advantage for marketers craving all-in-one referral platforms.

Saasquatch – Referral Software for SaaS with Gamification

Saasquatch is a referral marketing software suite that employs tools for referral, loyalty, and lifecycle programmes. Among the most distinctive referral software features are gamification, reward triggers, and referrer leaderboards.

The platform is geared towards SaaS, retail & eCommerce, fintech, and telecom industries, enabling multiple integrations and an app-centric user experience. You can even use an online referral programme ROI calculator to predict the financial results of your future campaigns.

Talkable – Compliance-Ready Referral Software

Talkable is referral software that allows the creation of custom referral programmes and maximises their success on the fly and strategically. From A/B testing to segmentation to fraud prevention to reporting, the referral software toolkit contains everything you need to hit the right referrer and referrals with the right offer at the right time.

It’s worth noting that the referral campaigns can be made CCPA and GDPR-compliant so you can stay on the legal side of the fence while reaching as many referrals as possible. Similarly, Talktable provides industry-leading fraud prevention and detection algorithms, allowing you to limit the marketing practises within your campaigns.

Influitive – Customer Advocacy Referral Software

Influitive is an online customer advocacy and engagement platform offering a referral software toolkit complemented with tools for review generation, social media performance amplification, product adoption growth, and more.

With Influitive, you can effectively manage customer preferences, leverage your social media presence, grow product adoption, obtain customer feedback, and drive more customer referrals while not sacrificing the quality of your service.

ReferralHero – Referral Software for SaaS

ReferralHero is an all-in-one referral programme platform that provides referral software for SaaS, fintech, blockchain & crypto, and mobile applications designed to streamline your referral marketing in just two weeks.

The referral software toolkit is quite advanced, including widgets, on-brand designs, memorable referral links, customisation options for social media platforms, and localisation opportunities. You can create a referrer leaderboard, segment users by engagement, and enable behaviour-triggered emails for timed promotions.

Buyapowa – Comprehensive Referral Software

Buyapowa is a comprehensive reward marketing platform that offers referral marketing software alongside multiple reward programmes: affiliate programmes, brand partner programmes, influencer programmes, and more.

Buyapowa includes all features mentioned in our referral tools list while making it possible to manage different referral programmes from a single place.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is referral management software?

Referral management software – also known as referral software or referral marketing software – is software designed to run, track, and analyse your referral marketing programmes. Referral software can bring it all into a single dashboard so you can effectively manage your referral campaigns.

Affiliate vs. Referral Marketing; Affiliate Software vs. Referral Software

Affiliate and referral marketing are not the same:

• Referral marketing incentivises existing customers to promote the advertiser’s offering
• Affiliate marketing incentivises and manages third-party ad campaigns that promote the advertiser’s offering

Is there free referral marketing software?

Here is some free referral marketing software that you can use for a limited time:

• InviteReferrals – 14-day free trial
• Growsurf – 14-day free trial
• Referral Factory – 15-day free trial
• Genius Referrals – 30-day free trial
• ReferralHero – free trial

At the same time, there’s little to no truly free referral marketing software, meaning you’ll likely have to buy a subscription.

Where Can I Get Healthcare Referral Management Software and Patient Referral Management Software?

Here are some of the companies that provide healthcare referral management software:

• Nisos technologies
• GRM
• ReferralMD
• Mention Me

It’s worth noting that few companies provide narrow-focused referral software like physician referral software, medical referral management software, or even employee referral software, so you might need to align the “general” referral software you have access to with your specific marketing objectives.