Partner Program Optimization: A Guide For Financial Marketers

Before optimizing your partner program, give a new program time to grow and have legs to stand on. You’ll need about three months before you can see any relevant metrics or issues to fix. 

Then ensure you have a solid foundation to work with. A weak product, broken funnels or an insufficient budget can undermine even the best strategies. 

Make sure you do the following first before changing strategies, campaigns or partners:

Nail the fundamentals

• Ensure a strong product. Financial publishers are less likely to promote products they don’t see as beneficial for their audience, so make it clear why your product is different and why publishers should work with you. If your product doesn’t stack up to the competition and you don’t have any control over product features or offers, don’t invest in optimizing your partner program. Instead, leverage your marketing and customer data to make your product more appealing to your existing publishers until your product evolves.
• Have a realistic budget. You can achieve strong results even with modest funds, but if your CPA doesn’t align with publisher expectations and market standards, you may struggle to secure the right partners. Read more about how to optimize your partner program budget.
• Understand your success metrics. Clearly defined KPIs will enable you to tell if your current and future efforts are effective in reaching your business goals, whether you’re increasing brand awareness, net new customer acquisition, or both. Before changing tactics, ensure you have regular, comprehensive reporting in place to measure the volume and quality of leads.

Invest in proper tracking

Comprehensive tracking means you can look at granular data to make quality decisions about optimization. Tracking can be time-consuming to set up and run on your own, so we recommend you use tracking tools and platforms designed for affiliate marketing. 

Alongside your affiliate campaign metrics, keep an eye on how your overall marketing funnel is performing. While partners can drive traffic to your landing pages, you won’t hit your affiliate KPIs if potential customers can’t navigate your onboarding flow. So optimize your marketing funnel before you target improvements to your affiliate program. 

Discover the 8 common mistakes to avoid in financial app onboarding.

Communicate regularly with your publishers

Publishers and affiliate partners are great sources of information. They can help you find opportunities for new campaigns and understand where your product sits within your competitive landscape. They may also have ideas for your ad placements and editorial coverage that go beyond listicles and rate tables. 

When you only talk to your existing publishers to pitch a campaign, you’re likely underutilizing your partners. Affiliate marketing for financial services runs best when you have a genuine partnership and treat publishers as an extension of your team in your marketing efforts. 

If you don’t already have a solid relationship with your publishers, start to build one as you optimize your partner program by sharing data. For example, give publishers granular transparency at each stage of the funnel, so that they can optimize their performance. Or ask how they see you in the market and what you can do to improve your product or strategy.

Once you have strengthened your partner relationships, you can understand how to optimize your affiliate program with existing partners.

Get the latest affiliate marketing statistics to shape your strategy.  

1. Tackling optimization on your own

If you want to optimize your partner program in-house, start by laying out all the pieces of the puzzle. Analyze data and results from every campaign and publisher and review your reporting. 

Then, assess if your program meets expectations:

• Determine if your partner program is meeting your KPIs and influencing revenue. 
• Compare your recent campaign results against historical data to see if your performance has changed. 
• Reference industry data (more on this below) to see if your metrics are above or below a typical program.
• Study each partner and campaign to know which have brought in more volume and new revenue, identify underperformers, and understand if it makes sense to reach out to new potential partners.
• Map your partners and campaigns to the value of new accounts generated 6-12 months ago to understand lead quality.

This combination will give you a clear picture of your performance. For example, your current campaigns could show your average conversion rate is 0.75%. While that may seem like good progress, your rate is still below industry average. Understanding what’s causing this could reveal a weak area of your program, like underperforming publishers or not having the right campaign content or messaging to target the right audiences.

Once you have your analysis, tackle the problems easiest to solve first. Prioritize these quick wins based on what will bring the biggest uplift for the least amount of effort. That could be focusing on conversion rates, refining your customer funnel, experimenting with new messaging, or adding new types of partners into the mix. 

However, analyzing your program and implementing changes on your own can be resource intensive. If you want to save time and energy, you can rely on an agency’s help.

2. Working with an agency

An affiliate agency can help you analyze and optimize your partner program. While the basic process is the same as doing things in-house, an agency can help you pull data, save time, and offer another perspective on your affiliate program.

Agencies can also act as a useful measuring stick to spot areas you are lagging vs competitors if they understand your vertical. 

However, for companies who are in highly regulated industries like financial services, working with large affiliate agencies that serve multiple verticals often fall short. They may lack the expertise to assess your partner programs effectively, as they may not fully understand your product or key metrics.

Highly regulated industries also face greater compliance burdens and may have fewer potential publishers to partner with. 

This is when it can make sense to partner with a specialist agency that understands the specific hurdles financial firms face to advise you on optimizing and guiding your partner marketing program effectively.

Fintel Connect is a partner marketing platform, network and agency that specializes in financial services. We have 20+ years of experience running affiliate programs in highly regulated industries and founded our company because we believed financial services companies could get more out of their partner programs. 

We have helped many clients optimize their approach to partnership marketing and make significant improvements to their growth results. Clients like Live Oak Bank have increased approved accounts by 420% via the affiliate channel through Fintel Connect’s expertise and partner management advice. 

Here are some ways we can help you take your partner program to the next level. 

Get a fresh perspective and targeted recommendations with expert-led program audits

Fintel can conduct a full audit of your partner program, even if you’re not a current client. We provide an honest evaluation of your program and identify areas for optimization.

Our process involves reviewing all your affiliate data to uncover overlooked opportunities and offering a fresh perspective. Fintel’s financial specialization means we can benchmark your statistics and marketing funnel performance against industry standards. We also leverage our own experience in running campaigns and exchanging insights with our vetted publisher network, so you can more clearly spot areas of improvement.

After the audit, if you choose to continue to work with us to manage your affiliate program, we continue to act as a strategic partner. You’ll have a dedicated team for your account who’ll know the details of your affiliate program and can provide tailored advice for scaling your program.

And, unlike other agencies, we are all financial services experts, so you’ll never have to explain what a certificate of deposit (CD) product is or lay out what financial regulatory requirements like UDAAP or FINRA are. 

Want to arrange an audit of your affiliate marketing program? Contact us today. 

Find the root causes of an underperforming program with tracking & reporting designed for financial services

We often see companies that can’t get a full picture of their partnership data because their tracking isn’t robust enough. This makes it very difficult to find what parts of your partnership program you need to optimize. 

Fintel offers a suite of tracking and reporting tools, including click-level conversion metrics. Our end-to-end tracking means you can analyze and pay out events throughout your marketing funnel, from loan applications to funded accounts. Because you have granular detail of events throughout the customer journey, you can more easily see where leads are falling off to act on them quickly. 

We have multi-media support so you can separate traffic by source (e.g., paid ads vs email) to give you a better understanding of each campaign’s performance. This, combined with real-time data sharing, means you can optimize campaigns as they are running. 

And our analytics are specifically designed for financial services, which makes it easier to find and interpret marketing data. For example, you can identify a funded loan approval separately from a new account. 

Finally, we know it can be a challenge to implement end-to-end campaign tracking into complex and legacy systems, which is why Fintel’s technical experts are here to help. 

We can recommend improvements to your current approach and collaborate with your team to implement changes. Our technical support includes scoping, evaluating, providing tailored instructions, screen sharing to provide guidance where needed, and ultimately performing end-to-end tracking tests to ensure your new setup works as expected. 

Improve your partner mix and speed up onboarding with our fully vetted affiliate network and standardized ToS

Finding the right affiliate channel partners is normally a time-consuming task, including sifting through potentially fraudulent affiliate requests. A cumbersome onboarding process, which includes multiple consultations from your legal department and compliance teams, can further slow growth.

To build a rich and varied partner ecosystem more easily, Fintel Connect can help you implement your partner strategy.

Our fully vetted affiliate network contains quality publishers suitable for financial services firms. Many of our network partners have worked with financial clients before and understand regulatory requirements and reporting. This way, you’ll avoid sifting through irrelevant partners, and speed up your affiliate discovery.

An example of publisher invitations in Fintel Connect

We advocate for you with our publishers from day one, so you will also have guidance and warm introductions to new partners, from publishers and influencers to content creators and vloggers.

And if you want to deepen your relationships with current partners, we can suggest different campaign strategies or placement types so you can get more out of current affiliates.

To quicken partner onboarding, Fintel has a standard Terms of Service (ToS) that you can customize. It outlines in clear language the affiliate behaviour, legal and compliance specifications, and reputational and branding agreements that affiliates must accept to participate in your affiliate program. Our ready-to-use ToS is easier for affiliates to understand and will save time with approvals from your legal and compliance teams. 

Fintel also monitors and enforces your ToS among your partners, lessening your compliance burden. We will track affiliate behaviour and can act on your behalf to resolve any potential term violations. 

Tap into partner insights to measure program and product competitiveness

Publishers are a wealth of information for affiliate programs, making them an excellent resource for feedback on your performance and insights into new initiatives. 

We encourage our clients to share data so publishers can help you understand where to optimize your program. For example, our publishers have helped banking and fintech clients identify potential reasons for funnel drop offs by drawing on their experience with competitors in your industry. 

Our publishers can also tell you how your product stacks up against competitors and suggest improvements based on their audience data. They can articulate the points that make a difference to conversions so you can tweak your product accordingly. 

If you want to learn more about building strong affiliate relationships, read about Fintel’s strategy: Why take a partner-first approach to your affiliate marketing if you’re a financial services firm

An enterprise bank felt stuck with their affiliate program and weren’t seeing affiliate-led growth. So they came to us for a partner program audit.

As we got to know the bank’s program, we discovered they were creating a new contract for each partner, and then manually setting up each publisher in their vendor system for payments. This bottleneck meant they could not onboard affiliates quickly enough to scale their partner program and meet their ambitious customer and business growth goals. 

Fintel Connect lessened their team’s administrative burdens significantly. The bank took advantage of our customizable ToS to create a standardized agreement for partners. They could now send over terms as soon as a partner agreed to work together, speeding up their onboarding process.  

The bank also relies on Fintel to facilitate partner payments, which makes things faster and easier for their finance team.

Together, we grew their program to 30+ partners in five months because our infrastructure gave them the structure and support to move more quickly and within the bounds of their compliance requirements. 

Partner program optimization can be the difference between mediocre affiliate results and campaigns that meet all your KPIs. 

Fintel Connect has worked hard to find opportunities and refinements for our financial services clients for years. If you are a financial institution who is ready to improve your partner performance and get better insights into your affiliate program, talk to Fintel Connect today.