Affiliate marketing is a powerful marketing strategy by which a company taps into a network of affiliates to promote their products on their site. The affiliates are then paid a commission based on the amount of traffic, conversions, leads or sales generated by the promotion. 

By partnering with affiliates, which mostly consists of influencers, bloggers, paid search focused microsites, email lists and large media websites to help you promote your business, you will significantly expand your customer reach, provide leverage to your marketing campaigns and eventually boost sales.

It is a popular tactic to drive sales and generate significant online revenue. With this, you can save yourself all the struggle dealing with the grueling monotony and daze of traditional marketing by letting other networks promote your business for you, so you can focus on more important things to run your firm. This is the concept of affiliate marketing. 

Sounds good, right? But how do you tap into a network of affiliates to begin with?

This is where affiliate marketing software comes in.

Affiliate marketing software are solutions that offers a proprietary network that connects businesses with affiliates. It allows advertisers to grow, track, and manage affiliate marketing campaigns through the use of automations that can monitor online revenues, engagements, fulfill commissions, and generate reports and summaries through a centralized and customizable dashboard that can be viewed by both the business and the affiliates. Businesses may also use partner management software to optimize relationships with their sales partners, including affiliates.

Point to consider when looking for an affiliate marketing software

• An interface that is accessible by you and your affiliates

At the most basic level, you need a solution that is going to let you manage your affiliates, campaigns, and referral rates – and your affiliates need a place to go where they can monitor their own performance, have access to creatives, and seek assistance if needed. 

• Integrations with the tools you use

It’s important that the affiliate platform you use integrates seamlessly with any platforms, plugins, eCommerce, membership, or communication tools that you use in order for you to manage your program effectively and keep the process user-friendly for your affiliates.

• Reports and tracking

Data is integral to figure out what’s working and what’s not; therefore, this should be a priority when choosing an affiliate platform. 

Data should include key performance indicators (or KPIs) like conversion rate, reversal rate, click-through rate, cost per click, lead, sale, incremental sales, revenue, number of sales actions, active affiliate rate, return on ad spend, average order value, and traffic growth. 

• Customizable

It’s important that the platform you choose makes it easy to add, edit, and manage any creatives you want to use.

• Quality support

Does the platform you’re assessing have a proven track record of providing effective support to paid customers? This can make a huge difference down the line if you run into any issues that you can’t solve on your own. As with most software sold online, money-back guarantees are especially important because they remove any financial risk you assume when purchasing the product. 

List of Top Affiliate Marketing Software ( for small businesses)

PartnerStack 

If you’re looking for a simple and straightforward customizable set of tools to manage your affiliate program, PartnerStack is one of the best options in the market for you. They built their platform on the emphasis of not only making your business successful but also your partners’. It is the only platform built for SaaS, designed to deliver predictable revenues and optimize growth for eCommerce businesses and their partners. With PartnerStack, businesses can easily create and launch new affiliate programs that are easily customizable based on their goals. 

They also have a referral solution so your business can fully monitor the activities of your customers and accurately compute the traffic they generate. There is a reward program that incentivizes customers based on referrals.

Every affiliate partner on PartnerStack gets access to their own dedicated dashboard that makes it easy to assess their performance, access resources, claim payments, and explore other new programs to be a part of.

 

Post Affiliate Pro 

Post Affiliate Pro is intuitive, efficient, effective, and infinitely expandable and customizable. It is a software solution that can track the affiliate networks of your online business or eCommerce websites. Its special components include tracking features, campaign automation options, as well as payout management tools so that you can check affiliate performance at ease and make sure that their commissions are paid on time.

You will be given access to the Merchant panel and your affiliates to the affiliate panel so that they can see their stats and manage and have easy access to the promotion materials.

Starting with a fee of $97.00 per feature per month, this affiliate software runs your entire affiliate program from top to bottom. 

 

ClickBank

Whether you’re new to performance marketing or an established online business looking to scale, Clickbank will enable you to grow sales while minimizing the work.

ClickBank is one of the largest marketing and sales platforms on the web, with thousands of products and companies of different niches in their network. No wonder, the company has been around for more than two decades. It has over 200 million customers worldwide and has garnered a strong reputation with bloggers, entrepreneurs, and digital marketers over the years.

It provides merchants with a range of powerful and useful product insight, research, and reporting tools for your e-commerce website that is guaranteed to help give you sales funnels for driving traffic to your product sales pages. Some of their features that are well praised by their worldwide users include their reliability in payments and the ability to set your own payment threshold.

 

Rakuten Marketing Affiliate

With over 20 years of experience in affiliate and performance marketing, Rakuten Marketing Affiliate has been on top of its game in connecting consumers with brands and products. They bring together advertisers with valuable audiences and help publishers monetize their content. From affiliate screening to performance monitoring, this platform can easily help you achieve your marketing goals by tracking and managing the performance of your affiliate programs. What’s more, it comes with more advanced tools such as brand protection and program optimization to help you move your campaigns forward.

In terms of benefits, this is one of the easiest affiliate networks to use. You can get approved by many affiliate programs once you accomplish their simple sign-up process. There are huge brands that you can promote through Rakuten, and you can also create links and banners with ease. 

 

Impact 

Impact is another well-known partnership automation software that specializes in helping brands scale every type of partnership, including affiliates, influencers, strategic business partners, mobile apps, publishers, and more. It automates every stage of the partnership process from discovery, recruitment, onboarding, engagement, and optimization. Over the years, it became the go-to affiliate solution platform for marketers, affiliate managers, and business development leaders. 

With their wide network of brands and affiliates, it enables you to search by brand to see who is driving traffic for your competitors. and identify partners by content based on search rankings to ensure a fitting and dynamic collaboration.

 

Everflow

Everflow allows businesses to fully benefit from what referral marketing has become today. It is a reliable, cloud-based partner marketing tracking platform designed to help performance marketers conveniently manage affiliates and ad campaigns. It takes pride in its simple, clean experience and powerful affiliate marketing features that enable users to automate, track, manage and analyze their marketing campaigns from a centralized dashboard.

Everflow pricing starts at $395.00 based on usage per month for up to 50K clicks.

 

CAKE 

Cake is a cloud-based affiliate marketing solution designed to help businesses in the performance marketing industry such as advertisers, networks, and publishers to manage partner campaigns using custom targeting, whitelisting, reporting, and data security tools. Their highlight features include campaign management, lead generation, rewards distribution, partner marketing, and contact management.

The platform enables businesses to manage, measure and optimize marketing performance in real-time and can measure click and conversion rates based on custom targeting parameters.

 

Fintel Connect

Fintel Connect’s affiliates are dedicated to financial services, making it less arduous for brands to find a partner who can promote their services. The network of publishers also benefits by being able to easily find companies that they can work with. 

With Fintech, brands in financial services can gain access into a network of affiliate marketers who are focused on banking and fintech and find the right partner who can help them broaden their audience reach. All they have to do is sign up and choose the best candidate among the affiliate members. 

Fintel Connect has a team of experts that assists merchant clients and publishers in ensuring that their needs and requirements are met. So if you’re a business client, you can get help from a team of seasoned marketers to grow your program. 

 

TUNE (formerly HasOffers)

Tune is one of the industry’s most flexible SaaS platforms for building, managing, and growing partner programs and networks. It is trusted by innovative affiliate marketers, iconic brands, and some of the largest global performance advertising networks, including Shopify, Groupon, Chewy, Credit Sesame, and Grammarly.

The TUNE platform was designed to work for any partner across any digital channel, including app, mobile web, and desktop. It provides performance automation tools to help streamline workflows and reduce repetitive manual tasks while giving you protection from fraud as it automatically detects and rejects click fraud. It also has easy-to-use payout rules with customizable pay periods, currencies, and payment processors to increase transparency and trust.

 

Partnerize

Hundreds of the world's largest brands use Partnerize real-time technology to manage more than $6B in partner programs and financial exchanges across 214 countries and territories worldwide. They simplify partner management with the use of proprietary AI and machine learning to help you optimize performance.

Partnerize allows you to find and convert target audiences at scale with automated, data-driven partner discovery and recruitment and Make data-driven decisions with real-time analytics and actionable insights.