Your digital partnership success formula for 2025 is all about affiliate marketing

Marketing’s best kept secret, says Joelle Mullin of Awin UK, is affiliate marketing, a channel that’s outperforming the rest by 50%. But how can leading brands use it to overtake competitors, increase performance, and bolster return-on-ad-spend?

Quick quiz. Which marketing channel drove £20.9 billion in revenue through 356m sales in 2023? You might be surprised to learn the answer. The affiliate channel.

Affiliate marketing has become the secret sauce in any enterprise brand's marketing strategy. From Currys to Boots, the biggest brands in the business are turning to affiliate marketing to drive sales. They’re overtaking competitors, increasing performance year-on-year, gaining market share, maintaining a strong channel return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) and cultivating powerful digital partnerships.

As we reflect on 2024, Awin undertook a simple but vital research project: to understand the characteristics of the year’s most successful Enterprise brands.

What did we find? All enterprise brands running successful affiliate programs with Awin had several attributes in common. We don’t think this was a coincidence. In fact, we think we’ve uncovered the formula for digital partnership success.

5 key strategies for digital growth in 2025

1. Small data tweaks can result in big performance peaks. So over-share with your marketing agencies and partners; the more insight you can give them around journey, customer and softer conversion metrics, the more effectively they can understand your business and optimize performance to suit your goals. Investment decisions backed by data drive real incremental value.

2. Don’t work harder (or wait longer) than you need to. Outsource technology needs to partners who can empower you to fast-track innovation, maximize reach, and bypass internal hurdles such as technical roadblocks. This is a risk-free approach to testing without big time or cost investments that will keep you one step ahead of the competition. Through Awin, brands connect with technology partners via the MasterTag. 

   “The Awin MasterTag is a vital part of our tech stack, it that allows us to quickly and efficiently understand our current performance and also allows to do complex testing to further optimise our activity and to test new partnerships,” says David Evans, senior paid marketing manager at Currys.

3. Build win-win partnerships. There are no quick wins in marketing, but there are no-brainers. Big-win success takes time. Successful brands cultivate relationships that last, creating partnerships built on open communication that fuel growth over time. These win-win partner relationships go much deeper than sales targets, achieving goals based on the real strategic objectives of the brand. You can discover more about these partnerships on the Awin-win podcast.
4. Remove budget barriers and be risk-ready. The brands that saw the biggest return on investment worked from a flexible pot that allowed testing up front. What works is entirely different from one brand to another. Managing budget from the top with fluidity allows you to ‘strike when the iron is hot’ in a particular campaign or channel and ensure nothing is left on the table. Assign budget to testing up front to really figure out what does (and doesn’t) work for your brand. When economic pressure is high, brands with a ‘fail fast’ mentality are more likely to secure long-term success.
5. Secure C-suite buy-in. Alignment starts at the top, so keep senior stakeholders informed and invested. Share your strategy with them, show them how affiliate activity will align to each marketing channel and partner, then tie this in with broader business goals. Senior buy-in on a channel level removes barriers and enables growth, unlocking the next level of long-term success. When big brands begin their affiliate journey with us, we want to hear about the brand’s business goals so we can build a strategy that aligns.

As Ollie Shayer, omni-media director at Boots, put it: “For me having a strategic focus on the affiliate channel is essential as it represents a key driver for growth with a range of unique opportunities, not just a single path to success. This channel allows us to tap into diverse partnerships that bring true value, reaching our customer at key moment to drive action”.

Following these five strategies, our 18 most-successful brands are growing an average of +10% YoY. This becomes even more impressive when you consider the tough market conditions that continued throughout 2024. Barclays reports an overall annual modest consumer spending growth of 1% across both essential (1.6%) and non-essential (0.7%) categories.

The research: The 'S-U-C-C-E-S-S' formula, a blueprint from 2024's most successful brands

Through in-depth qualitative research and analysis carried out by the service departments managing the day-to-day relationships with our Enterprise brands, we identified the essential traits of Awin’s most successful brands. These 18 brands had been working with Awin for 10 years, across all sectors including telecoms, finance, retail, and travel. Their sales growth YoY was double the total growth we saw from the 2570+ remaining brands on our network. With these insights, we’ve formed the 'S-U-C-C-E-S-S' characteristics: a winning formula to ensure success in the affiliate landscape.

S – Seamless solutions with MasterTag

U – Utilise data with conversion analytics

C – Complete attribution to measure true incremental value

C – Continuous flexibility with fluid budgets

E – Executive buy-in for long-term success

S – Skills & expertise in industry knowledge

S – Staying power with strategic partnerships

If you’re ready to add affiliate marketing to your 2025 strategy, we’d love to hear from you. Whatever your marketing challenge, there’s an affiliate for that.

Joelle Mullin is Partnership Development Directors at Awin UK.