In the iGaming industry, many affiliate managers rely on specialized software to grow their brand and improve the program overall. We recently spoke with Anastasia Borovaya, Product Owner of Affilka by SOFTSWISS to learn more about Affilka, an affiliate management software platform designed for the iGaming industry. Read what Anastasia had to say below…
Affiverse: Why do you think that affiliate marketing is so important in the iGaming industry? How does it help the industry to grow?
Anastasia: “Online gambling is a high-risk industry. As it’s becoming increasingly more regulated, it takes a toll on the variety of both offline and digital marketing means available to iGaming operators. Such constraints pave the way for affiliate marketing – and it outscores all other marketing means in terms of efficiency.
Affiliates reach out to the most relevant audience. Thus, iGaming businesses can concentrate on nurturing and converting their leads rather than finding them. I’m probably stating the obvious here: you don’t search for the relevant traffic yourself, you come to those who already have it. So, why reinvent the wheel?
With affiliate marketing it’s extremely easy to measure your marketing campaigns’ success and returns on investment: you can track the actual traffic flow to your websites, analyse conversions from views and clicks to registrations and deposits, calculate the average revenue for the referred players, predict players life-time-value and calculate your profit margins.
Plus, affiliate rewards are mostly performance-based – you pay only for the actual tangible results. Of course, affiliates work with listing fees and advance payments, but these normally serve as security in case conversion and retention rates of a specific brand are super-low.
The number of online gambling websites is going through the roof. It’s a hugely competitive environment. To keep affiliates engaged, operators improve their iGaming websites to make them more fascinating, user-friendly, and, most importantly, safe for players. Shady businesses die away, while secure and trustworthy brands run the show. For me, this is the best indicator of how the industry is growing, rapidly transforming gambling into gaming – a pleasant, enjoyable, and safe past-time available to anyone.”
Affiverse: Can you tell us a bit more about the benefits of Affilka and how it can help affiliate managers?
Anastasia: “The Affilka Platform offers everything you need to create an affiliate program for your iGaming business needs. It incorporates such features as affiliate and media management, comprehensive player reporting, support of multiple affiliate tiers, an array of commission plans and postback events, payments and rewards management, dynamic tracking, and whatnot.
Our key features include a super-flexible commissions constructor, built-in payment processing methods, dynamic tracking as well as in-depth reporting. The system is fault-tolerant and resistant to high loads of traffic. It’s our primary goal to ensure that your referral links are working 100% of the time delivering traffic to your iGaming websites.
At Affilka we have a most amazing team of account managers dedicated to our customers’ success. They provide almost round-the-clock assistance on platform usage and conduct regular product training sessions, making the customer onboarding process smooth and day-to-day business operations straightforward and enjoyable. Trust me, impersonal support ticketing systems bite the dust in comparison with our dedicated account managers efficiency.”
Affiverse: Why did you decide to create a standalone solution for affiliate marketing?
Anastasia: “As you know, Affilka used to be built into the SOFTSWISS Casino Platform. The limitations of such an arrangement from a business perspective were pretty obvious: we could only work with SOFTSWISS-powered online casinos. It prevented us from growing our customer base and providing services to other iGaming brands.
In addition to that, there was a bunch of purely technical issues. For instance, to promote a certain online casino affiliates had to register as players. Many affiliates resisted registering as players, many simply couldn’t because of the various country restrictions (but affiliates aren’t players, are they?). This wasn’t particularly inciting a trustworthy relationship with partners. It was imperative that we separate an affiliate profile from a player profile as well as introduce an independent registration and verification procedure for affiliates.
Eventually, we decided to separate the two products, and we never regretted this. Look at us, the Affilka customer base grew to over 100 online casino and sportsbook brands within 3 years, with even more to come. We intend to double these numbers a year from now.”
Affiverse: How do you think Affilka can develop and innovate over the coming years?
Anastasia: “Well, the focus on research and development never wanes. We’re constantly exploring new ways to improve our platform capabilities. We do have a couple of great ideas in the works but it’s probably too soon to unveil them just now. Stay tuned!
This year, however, we’ll stick to the course of sustainable development, and we’ll place great emphasis on application performance and system reliability. As our customer base is rapidly growing, it’s important that we do not lose touch with our operators and attend to all of their needs. We don’t want to innovate for the sake of innovation alone. Innovation becomes possible thanks to the joint effort of our team and our clients. Our operator feedback is a never-ending well of novel ideas.”
Affiverse: Does the brand have any plans for expansion across new markets or with new products?
Anastasia: “One of the objectives is to grow our presence in such regions as Africa and Latin America. These regions will require certain adaptations from the iGaming operators willing to tap into these markets, as well as from us, their software provider. We’ll need new payment systems integrations for the affiliates, new reward plans, and new incentives for players.
In the upcoming months, we’ll be releasing our Poker Module, so Affilka will provide its services not only to online casinos and sportsbooks but also to online poker rooms. In addition to that, we have a couple of experimental features up our sleeves that may become total game changers within the industry.”
