15 Types of Affiliate Partners

Affiliates are an essential component of the partner marketing ecosystem; without them, brands simply could not have an affiliate program. As of 2024, the market value of affiliate marketing has surged past $27 billion, and industry experts predict its value will reach $47 billion by 2027.

These impressive growth stats tell us that it’s becoming more critical for brands to find the right partners to add to their expanding affiliate channels. However, finding the right partners—and launching campaigns that resonate with your brand’s audience and inspire action—isn’t easy. That’s especially true when you consider how many types of affiliate partners there are to choose from. 

This guide provides a high-level look at each, plus some examples and benefits of successful affiliate marketing programs.

Understanding the Different Types of Affiliate Partners

Many companies, even ones with established affiliate marketing programs, often don’t realize just how many different affiliate partner types there are to work with and the immense potential they can offer, regardless of the industry or business model a company falls in.

However, it’s important to note that there is no one-size-fits-all approach when building a partner strategy for your affiliate program. It takes careful consideration, planning and testing to ensure common goals are established between a brand and its affiliate partners.

Key Types of Affiliate Partners

Below is a list of some traditional and nontraditional affiliate partner types and their descriptions:

1. Content Affiliates

Content affiliates create relevant, customized and valuable content, such as product reviews and sponsored posts, to promote a brand’s products or services to their audience. These partners can include bloggers, product review sites, social media influencers and more.

2. Coupon and Deal Affiliates

Generally speaking, coupon and deal affiliate marketing programs feature some type of discount, promotion or special offer advertised by the affiliate. 

These may range from discounts and promotions offering a dollar or percentage off the user’s purchase to special deals and offers available exclusively through a specific partner. Regardless of the offer advertised, these types of affiliate marketing programs work to drive traffic to a brand’s site and increase conversions by engaging the deal affiliate’s loyal, highly influential users.

3. Loyalty and Cashback Affiliates

Loyalty and cashback affiliate marketing partners have dedicated and engaged user bases that look to these affiliate partner sites as resourceful shopping destinations. These affiliate sites give consumers the best rewards and offers available online. 

Depending on the type of campaign you’re running, rewards can be in the form of cashback, redeemable points, airline miles, college fund accounts and more.

4. Review and Comparison Sites

Affiliate sites specializing in reviews provide feedback for products and services on editorially-focused websites. The products and services have typically been purchased, vetted or used by the editors or other consumers. The result? Trusted reviews that inspire readers to take action and organic content creation for brands.

Similarly, partnering with comparison sites or shopping affiliates allows consumers to find the best product, service or deal. It also helps save consumers time, as these types of partners typically have a search-and-sort function by category, price, brand and more. Brands benefit by staying on top of current trends and competitor pricing.

5. Influencer and Sub-Affiliate Networks

Through their relatability and niche audiences, influencers can develop strong brand relationships founded on trust and authenticity. Influencer networks give brands access to thousands of thoroughly vetted influencers within the network, allowing campaign managers to save time and effort instead of creating one-to-one partnerships with individual influencers.

In the same vein, sub-affiliate networks offer brands an efficient and effective way to grow and scale their affiliate programs. Sub-affiliate networks may offer access to a variety of partners, including content creators, bloggers, influencers and more, enabling campaigns to drive significant traffic and revenue without the lag time required when creating one-to-one relationships with individual sites.

6. Affinity and Closed User Groups

These types of affiliate marketing partners deliver focused offers and content to a wide range of specific, highly-targeted affinity groups, such as: 

• Students
• Health workers
• Military members 
• Senior citizens 
• And more

This is done through a closed network that can only be accessed by the affinity group, which reduces the risk of leaked promotions.

7. Brand–to–Brand Partnerships

These enable brands of similar values or customer demographics to leverage each other’s customer base/reach to generate incremental revenue that enhances audience, reputation and overall brand strategy.

8. Email and Newsletter Affiliates

Email and newsletter affiliates create highly customized emails that appear to come from the brand, while reaching influential audiences by leveraging their historical data.

9. Lead Generation Affiliates

As the name suggests, lead generation, or lead-gen, affiliates generate high-value leads and motivate brands’ target audiences to complete a desired action, such as an application, form, email signup, subscription and more.

10. Mass Media Affiliates

Mass media affiliate marketing partners include notable online and offline publications and media companies that produce quality content and deliver it to their highly engaged, well-established audiences.

11. Mobile Affiliates

These affiliate partners can range from mobile networks and affiliates with a mobile app to mobile measurement and attribution providers. These partners can be compensated in a variety of ways, such as commission, cost-per-installs, applications and linked payments.

12. Technology Affiliates

Technology affiliates are typically third-party plug-in or widget designers who may present brands with a suite of technology solutions that can allow them to connect with consumers through all stages of their journey and lead to conversions. For example, your brand may partner with a technology affiliate that installs a plug-in onto your brand’s website to improve conversions and traffic.

13. Registry Affiliates

Registry affiliates give advertisers—who might not have a formal registry—the ability for their products to be included in online registries for people celebrating life events, like weddings or the arrival of a new baby.

14. Search and Trademark Plus Affiliates

Search and trademark plus (TM+) affiliates bid on branded, trademark plus terms or non-branded keywords to drive traffic to a brand’s website. This practice can block competitors and unauthorized bidders from generating search traffic through a branded or trademarked term and generate exposure.

15. Card-Linked Offer Affiliates

Lastly, card-linked offer partners provide targeted offers to consumers based on purchasing behavior and leveraging card transaction data as a source of truth for a sale.

Affiliate Partnership Examples

Some examples of affiliate marketing campaigns include: 

• Partnering with a social media influencer to promote a product or service.
• Launching a coupon affiliate program with a podcast host whose demographic overlaps with your brand’s. 
• Leveraging a mobile app’s audience to increase conversions on in-app ads.

Benefits of Working with Different Affiliate Partners

Launching an affiliate marketing program can come with numerous benefits, including: 

• Lower startup and maintenance costs: Generally speaking, you’ll incur limited costs when launching an affiliate campaign outside of an initial investment in identifying your partners. From there, it’s up to the affiliate to generate converting content and earn commission on sales.

• Pinpointed marketing: Affiliate marketing allows you to put your brand or products in front of highly qualified users who overlap with your target demographic. In many cases, an affiliate’s audience may be more trusting of their recommendations and more interested in purchasing products they advertise, resulting in a higher likelihood of conversion.

• Reduced risk—and high ROI potential: Low startup and maintenance costs combined with a qualified audience help reduce the risk of an affiliate campaign while positioning your brand for a higher return on investment compared to other advertising strategies.

• Increased campaign flexibility: Finally, affiliate marketing is generally flexible, allowing you to grow or refine your campaign with little or no extra investment.

Choosing the Right Affiliate Partners

Whether you’re a company that is just getting started with an affiliate program or you’re a brand with an established affiliate program, consistently recruiting and activating affiliate partners is vital to your program’s success.

If you want to continue growing your program and taking advantage of the incremental potential that’s out there, you’ll want to supplement your program with new partners that are coming onto the scene. Additionally, it’s important to consistently evaluate the current affiliates in your program in case any of them have gone stagnant, and if they have, encourage (and incentivize, if needed) them to become profitable again.

When it comes to deciding who you should partner with and how, there are important steps to take and factors to consider:

1. Determine the Goal(s) and KPIs for Your Affiliate Program

Setting a goal for your affiliate program and figuring out what key performance indicators you plan to measure success by is crucial to determining what affiliate partners are most likely to help you reach those performance outcomes.

Depending on their capabilities and business model, affiliates can help with everything from converting customers, increasing revenue and new customer acquisition to brand awareness, high-value lead generation and much more. That’s why it’s important to also consider the affiliates’ promotional method(s), the amount of traffic and engagement their site has, the type of content they post and their relevance to your brand.

Most brands find that having a healthy combination of traditional partners, niche sites and unique or new-to-market partners in their affiliate program allows them to realize the most value in terms of scale and growth.

2. Refine Your Communication Approach to Affiliates

However you decide to structure your communication system with your affiliate partners—be it to invite them into your program and provide them with creative assets or share an upcoming campaign with them—it’s imperative that your communication has an element of personalization. By also giving as many details about your program as possible, your partner will have a better understanding of how it would benefit them to promote your products or services.

It’s important to be aware that communication between traditional and nontraditional affiliates might be different. When speaking with traditional affiliates, there is already an understanding of the performance model, the tracking options available, what is needed to get the partnership set up, etc. With nontraditional affiliates, you might need to first lay the groundwork for expectations when setting up a performance model.

3. Collaborate with an Experienced Affiliate Marketing Partnerships Development Team

These steps are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to recruiting, activating, optimizing and building long-standing relationships with affiliate partners, which is why we suggest utilizing an experienced Partner Development team to help you navigate the intricacies and nuances.

Ready to skyrocket your brand’s success with high-performing affiliate partners?

Connect with our team to transform your affiliate program today!