A Message from our CTO, Gurjit Singh - “Affiliate Marketing Trends to leverage in 2025”

Customers Demand Mobile-First Affiliate Experiences

With mobile commerce on a continuous rise, affiliate marketers must ensure their campaigns remain mobile-friendly across all devices. Customers favor mobiles for their ease of use, speed, convenience, and personalized experience. They are ideal for keeping all on-the-go audiences engaged and offer tailored recommendations and offers, fostering deeper engagement and brand loyalty. Additionally, embracing mobile affiliate marketing also helps you stay competitive in the ever-changing marketing landscape and fortifies your company for long-term success. Mobile marketing expands marketers' reach to new demographics and niches that remain unexplored in traditional marketing practices. Mobile-friendly affiliate links direct users to mobile-optimized versions of landing pages or apps. As the users seamlessly navigate from links to website pages, the whole process is frictionless and reduces bounce rates. It spikes conversions and click-through rates of affiliate links in general.

Mobile attribution monitors users’ first engagement with a shopping ad or an affiliate link. It tracks subsequent steps users take, such as app installs or in-app purchases. As affiliate marketing on mobile devices witnesses tremendous growth, accurate tracking of in-app sales and conversions becomes paramount. In-app tracking reveals crucial insights into partner performance and customer behavior. It helps brands make well-informed and rational decisions. In-app tracking requires marketers to give credit to every sale or customer touchpoint while calculating ROI. It enables marketers to identify and select the most profitable channels and campaigns for better outcomes. By doing so, marketers weed out ineffective channels while making strategies. This also enhances user experience, spurs growth, and drives profitability.

Video Commerce and Livestream Affiliate Shopping

Affiliates showcase their products and services in an interactive, memorable way by creating engaging and informative videos. These videos provide a clear and direct understanding of the features, benefits, usage, and other aspects of affiliate products. They make users more engaged and drive them to click the affiliate links appended with the videos. With alluring and authentic videos, affiliates personalize their relationship with their audience, fostering trust and loyalty. High-quality videos also enhance brand reputation and reach broader audiences, which is easier than ever.

Marketers leverage livestream shopping videos to advertise products on social media platforms. These livestream videos often trigger instant buying decisions from viewers. With a quick click of the "Buy Now" button or affiliate link, customers complete their shopping journey. Influencers, producers, or brand reps showcase products on digital platforms through livestream affiliate shopping. Affiliates earn commissions for every sale or conversion generated through those streams. Livestream encourages one-on-one interaction with customers, answering their live queries and engaging them in the best possible way to drive sales while watching. Furthermore, it gives advertisers immediate feedback, enabling them to make strategic adjustments for future scenarios. Marketers grab the users' eyeballs with limited-time discounts and special promo codes, which generate urgency to boost sales. Additionally, marketers link to affiliate partners by tagging products in their videos. By doing so, they efficiently monitor their sales.

Privacy-First Tracking and Cookie Deprecation

Privacy-first ad tracking and cookie deprecation give utmost importance to user consent for data collection and processing. It regulates the use of personal data and mandates the use of privacy-compliant attribution tools and technologies. Privacy-first tracking involves the use of ethical, compliant, and secure attribution models for effective campaign measurement. This method handles the user's data responsibly and securely. It requires companies to comply with industry-standard regulations such as CCPA and GDPR. It emphasizes the use of first-party data and does not rely on third-party cookies.

With consent-based tracking, marketers must obtain user permission to access, modify, or delete user-specific data. Marketers implement end-to-end encryption methods to secure data at rest and in transit. It deepens trust between consumers and the brand. By doing this, marketers guarantee privacy for end customers. Thus, customers demonstrate an inclination to purchase goods or services. It often promotes sustainability and brand loyalty. Ethical and transparent tracking methods are essential in today's privacy-conscious world. It provides you with a competitive edge in a world that is experiencing a dynamic shift in algorithms and privacy regulations.

AI-Powered Personalization

AI-powered personalization allows marketers to transform complex user datasets into manageable segments. These segments predict users' changing behaviors, interests, purchasing habits, and preferences, and analyze trends. By using personalization, marketers craft messages and campaigns tailored to each segment, improving conversion rates and user satisfaction. Predictive analytics enables marketers to evaluate historical data and anticipate future user behaviors, such as purchasing decisions or specific interactions with the brand. As a result, marketers refine their strategies to align with user needs and aspirations. It results in increased personalization and enhances user experience. By dissecting granular historical insights, marketers allocate their resources more judiciously, thereby training their guns on those channels and campaigns that are estimated to generate the highest returns.

The Dynamic Content Optimization mechanism adjusts the content format, messaging layout, and visuals based on the user's past interactions, preferences, and real-time behavior. Marketers leverage AI-driven chatbots and voice assistants to assist users in making affiliate purchases by offering them personalized suggestions during their conversations. AI-based algorithms retarget users by delivering relevant follow-up ads, based on their past purchasing history, using their preferred channels, and at preferred time slots. On the whole, AI-based personalization decreases CPA and focuses on acquiring and retaining high CLV users, thereby increasing ROI.

Sustainability and Cause-Driven Partnerships

Brands are increasingly collaborating with affiliates that support sustainability initiatives. These initiatives encourage affiliates to promote eco-conscious products, zero-waste solutions, environmental campaigns, ethical fashion, and community-oriented services. According to industry experts, affiliate marketing is showing a paradigm shift towards value-based commerce. By creating educational or informative blogs about sustainability, affiliates share their views on eco-conscious products on various content marketing or social media marketing channels. They post stories or short-form videos on causes a brand supports, and the influencers and content creators play a significant role in directing consumers' purchasing behavior towards more ethical options.

It is a win-win strategy for both affiliates and brands as affiliates receive engaged audiences who are purpose-driven. These are the audience who want their purchases to make a difference in society. Affiliates integrate these sustainable practices into their campaigns to connect closely with their Gen-Z customers. On the other hand, affiliates prefer environmentally conscious brands that champion social causes. Brands that align with such causes authentically drive more conversions, earn long-term trust and credibility with next-generation consumers, and gain long-lasting business value.

What Should Marketers Focus on?

Building smarter, forward-looking, ethical, and transparent affiliate experiences that feel personalized and align with the changing aspirations of today's consumers should be the ultimate focus of tech-savvy marketers. Marketers must move away from focusing on a transactional approach driven by sales and revenues. They must embrace mobile-first marketing, rich video content, privacy-consciousness, personalization, and sustainability approaches into their daily activities. These trends blend to form a future-oriented, resilient ecosystem that boosts performance and leads with purpose. By doing so, brands build their credibility and foster loyalty in a technologically driven marketing landscape.

How are We at Offer18 Keeping up with the Trends in Affiliate Marketing?

According to Gurjit Singh, CTO at Offer18, “Our Campaign Tracking Platform identifies and assigns credit to the various touchpoints and channels contributing to app installation or user conversions. Our pioneering tools and frontier technologies track app installs, in-app events, and shifts in user behavior. The Offer18 Android SDKs enable cross-channel tracking and user segmentation. For accurate segment-wise results, SDKs consolidate data from diverse marketing channels, analyze user interactions, and integrate with other third-party analytical tools. We have embedded privacy principles into the core of our DNA. It has given us complete control over our tracking mechanism. We have also introduced first-party data mechanisms. AI-based reporting feature in software recommends suggestions to users and tailors campaigns based on their behavior, intent, and preferences. Marketers at Offer18 prioritize partnerships with ethical, ecologically conscious, socially responsible, and value-driven brands. We have embedded cause-driven marketing into our core working philosophy. By embracing these trends in our marketing framework, we have seen the effectiveness of the campaign increase manifold.“