How to Scale Smarter with Affiliate Marketing

These days, businesses, especially small to midsize companies, are under constant pressure to grow and compete without ballooning their budgets or headcounts. That’s where affiliate marketing comes in: a performance-based strategy that offers high-impact results with minimal upfront investment. When done right, it can drive sustainable customer acquisition, reduce costs, and create a loyal network of brand advocates. 

We sat down with Emily Mathison, General Manager of LeadDyno. She breaks down how businesses can use affiliate programs to scale smarter and how platforms like LeadDyno can fill a huge need. You'll also hear how one company, Lodgify, transformed its growth strategy by leveraging the platform to drive revenue, reduce acquisition costs, and expand its reach — all with a lean team.

Table of Contents

• Why scaling smarter matters more than ever
• Affiliate marketing: A flexible, scalable growth channel built on trust
• How LeadDyno powers performance-based growth and supports lean teams
• Customer spotlight: Lodgify

Why scaling smarter matters more than ever

As marketing budgets shrink and customer acquisition costs (CAC) rise, companies are under increasing pressure to do more with fewer resources. In this environment, traditional growth strategies like paid ads and outbound sales are becoming harder to scale sustainably.

This is reflected in the world's projected digital advertising spend reaching $513 billion USD this year, up 10.7% (from $470 billion) in 2024 and 6.5% in 2023. The thing is that inflation is a significant factor in this spending growth, meaning the real year-over-year increase for 2024 is only 2.5% after adjusting for rising costs.

So, the need for leaner, performance-driven marketing strategies has never been more critical. One of the most effective solutions gaining traction among small and medium-sized businesses is affiliate marketing—a highly scalable, cost-effective channel that aligns perfectly with today’s demand for smarter, data-driven growth.

The reality: shrinking budgets, rising CAC, and overloaded teams

"Businesses are trying to do more with less — to generate increasing revenue, but with fewer resources,” says Mathison. She notes that in times of economic uncertainty, marketing budgets are often the first to be cut.

As these teams look for smarter places to allocate their spend, affiliate marketing presents a high-return, low-risk solution as a way to scale without increasing headcount or overburdening busy team members. LeadDyno, for example, helps businesses launch and streamline their affiliate marketing programs by automating tracking, payouts, and reporting, making it an attractive growth solution for lean teams with even leaner time and budgets. 

Traditional growth channels: Harder to sustainably scale, personalize & track

While traditional marketing strategies like outbound sales and paid ads are still viable, they require heavy resource investment to scale effectively. With rising competition and increasing CAC, scaling through these methods has become more challenging.

With outbound sales, the challenge is that saturation across many markets makes personalized outreach more difficult, and it becomes harder to achieve returns on cold outreach without careful monitoring. "You have to make sure your messaging is tailored and personalized because for most markets, cold outreach is oversaturated," Mathison adds.

She explains that with paid ads, figuring out what works best for the business in terms of messaging, ad types, and knowing where to reach users is important. But as marketing budgets become tighter, it’s crucial to track every dollar spent. There’s less room for trial and error, making it even harder to scale sustainably.

That tracking and analysis can be tough, though. With more restrictions on third-party cookies and users taking extra measures to protect their privacy, growth marketers are increasingly challenged with attribution. However, affiliate marketing is a natural solution for this because it leverages other tracking methods.

For example, LeadDyno’s platform uses first-party cookies, server-side tracking (via integrating with e-commerce platforms), or cookieless tracking with REST API. Discount codes are another surefire way to ensure accurate attribution. The LeadDyno team believes in this so much that internally, they leverage first-party data to justify their marketing investments, as well as deliver tailored onboarding experiences for customers and improve retention.

The shift toward leaner, performance-based strategies

Rather than paying for impressions or leads that may not convert, businesses are focusing on performance-based channels, like affiliate marketing, that allow them to pay only for actual results — whether that’s visitors, leads, or sales.

Affiliate marketing’s pay-for-performance model makes it a natural fit for lean teams that need to justify every marketing dollar spent. “With affiliate marketing, you pay for the result — there’s no upfront cost with wildly unpredictable results," Mathison highlights.

Affiliate marketing: A flexible, scalable growth channel built on trust

Affiliate marketing’s performance-based model, built on the credibility of personal referrals, offers a significant advantage over traditional advertising. Affiliates use their own networks to drive sales, leveraging trust and relationships to influence purchasing decisions.

Word of mouth is found to be the main driver behind about 20-50% of all purchasing decisions. And with nearly 50% of consumers trusting online reviews as much as those recommendations from friends and family, that's strong evidence of just how much personal referrals influence buyer behaviour.

You can extend this to recommendations from other parties, including affiliates, since about 49% of consumers make regular purchases because of posts from influencers, a group that's quickly gaining trust overall. That means even more opportunities for companies to tap into.

Affiliate marketing is also highly flexible. Businesses can adjust commission structures to fit the unique needs of different types of affiliates, whether they’re bloggers, influencers, or customer advocates.

“You can try something, and if it’s not motivating the right behaviour or delivering the results you’re looking for, you can adjust. Create a different commission plan, work with a different type of affiliate,” Mathison explains. This flexibility makes affiliate marketing particularly well-suited to lean teams that need to scale their programs while maintaining control.

For SaaS and ecommerce, a quick & easy solution offering affiliates recurring earnings

SaaS and e-commerce businesses in particular have found affiliate marketing to be an ideal solution for scaling without additional overhead.

Platforms like LeadDyno integrate seamlessly with popular e-commerce tools, making it easy to get an affiliate program up and running with minimal effort. As well, commission structures built around SaaS recurring revenue models are more attractive to prospective affiliates than one-time commissions, since there's a longer-term, repetitive earning opportunity.

For customers, it's all about ease of setup and use.

How LeadDyno powers performance-based growth and supports lean teams

LeadDyno is specifically designed to help businesses launch and manage their affiliate programs with minimal effort and overhead. Key features include automated commission calculations, affiliate and follow-up emails, real-time visitor and sales tracking and reporting, semi-automated payouts, and the ability to customize branded affiliate dashboards.

These things help businesses focus on growth, rather than managing complex systems, to achieve more with fewer resources. Affiliate managers are empowered to track performance, engage and motivate affiliates with targeted email campaigns, and automate the entire process to save time and reduce manual labor.

Mathison's team knows the key to their customers' success lies in simplifying and automating as much as possible to save time. So, the platform handles the bulk of the work, allowing lean teams to focus on scaling rather than getting bogged down by manual processes. This setup reduces the need for dedicated affiliate managers, allowing businesses to scale their programs without hiring additional staff.

Seamless integration and automation

One thing that stands out about LeadDyno is its ability to integrate seamlessly with over 25 other platforms, including Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Stripe, and PayPal, making it a natural fit within businesses’ existing tech stacks.

This allows businesses to easily connect their website and begin tracking affiliate performance instantly — a simple way to scale the program without needing additional technical complexity or more team members.

Extra support, onboarding, and managed services to ensure success

LeadDyno doesn’t just provide the tools to manage an affiliate program; it also offers personalized support to ensure businesses succeed. New customers receive 1:1 demos, guided onboarding, and strategy calls, making it easier to get up and running.

In addition, they offer a managed service offering as an add-on. This is ideal for anyone running a growing program who can't dedicate the time it truly needs to scale properly. 

Customers can sign up for more dedicated support from a LeadDyno specialist, who will help them navigate aspects of affiliate management they may be unfamiliar with. The team also applies best practices to the program's setup and communications. This includes everything from configuring or scheduling automated affiliate emails and aligning the affiliate website with the brand's identity to conducting fraud checks and collecting insights from LeadDyno reports.

Customer spotlight: Lodgify

Lodgify is a vacation rental management tool designed to help rental property owners and managers independently manage and market their businesses online. The SaaS platform simplifies vacation rental management with its automation tools that help users handle bookings, streamline operations, and grow their rental businesses. 

The team at Lodgify faced some specific challenges, and here's how LeadDyno helped them.

The problem: Growing efficiently with a small team

Like many small businesses, Lodgify couldn't easily or readily grow efficiently without expanding its team. Previously, they managed an affiliate program manually, assigning UTM links to specific profiles and offering discounts or credits instead of direct payments. 

While the system technically worked, it wasn’t scalable and lacked the effectiveness of a complete, automated affiliate program. Additionally, the team relied heavily on organic and paid channels, like PPC (pay-per-click), to acquire new customers, but these methods were becoming increasingly costly and less effective. Sometimes, acquiring a single user could cost as much as 1,000 euros.

As well, running an affiliate program manually consumed a significant amount of time, which prevented Lodgify from meaningfully scaling the program. The complexity of tracking earnings, managing commissions, and troubleshooting technical issues made the manual process inefficient and cumbersome.

All told, the team needed more sustainable, cost-effective growth strategies — and fast. So, they explored affiliate marketing software that could automate their processes and drive scalable growth without requiring additional resources. Eventually, Lodgify turned to LeadDyno to solve its challenges.

The solution: LeadDyno’s automated affiliate program

Lodgify has seen transformative results with LeadDyno. The platform has provided several key tools that help automate essential affiliate management tasks, allowing the team to focus on growing the program without getting bogged down in manual processes.

As Anabel Morgal, Lodgify's Growth Manager, put it, “Without a platform like LeadDyno, tracking, managing, and paying affiliates at this scale would be nearly impossible.”

Features that helped

Automated onboarding has been a standout feature for Lodgify. New affiliates automatically receive a series of welcome emails, complete with branded toolkits and relevant marketing materials. This streamlined onboarding process saves Lodgify hours of manual communication.

Customized commission plans allow Lodgify to create tiered reward structures that incentivize affiliates to reach higher sales levels. This flexibility helps increase affiliate engagement without requiring manual updates from the management team.

Affiliate payment handling and integrations with PayPal allow Lodgify to process bulk payouts to over 1,000 affiliates within minutes, ensuring secure and reliable payments.

Responsive customer support helped Lodgify's team as they scaled their affiliate program. The company valued the personalized support they received, which kept things running smoothly.

Impact: Scalable revenue & customer acquisition with automation, flexibility & the same lean team

With LeadDyno’s help, Lodgify scaled its affiliate marketing efforts significantly. The company’s CAC dropped by 90%, from about $1,000 per client to under $100 per client. This reduction allowed Lodgify to achieve more sustainable, long-term growth with lower financial risk.

• From 2022 to 2023, Lodgify saw a massive 2,400% increase in web sales from affiliate activity.
  
• In 2024, its affiliate-driven growth jumped by 110% year-over-year, and Lodgify’s top-performing affiliates earned an average of €13,500 ($14,600) in commissions.
  
• Today, almost 20% of Lodgify’s new revenue comes from affiliate marketing, with over 1,300 affiliates and more onboarded monthly.

LeadDyno’s automated tools and integrations have enabled Lodgify to scale its affiliate program without increasing headcount. “If we had to manage everything manually, it would be incredibly time-consuming. LeadDyno automates many processes … This means we don’t have to manually communicate with each affiliate,” Morgal added.

With LeadDyno’s automation, Lodgify can track conversions, pay affiliates, and manage campaigns with minimal manual effort. The automation and customization options have helped them save time and focus on driving growth, all while keeping costs low.

Lodgify has also benefited from LeadDyno’s affiliate dashboards, which allow them to tailor each to specific categories or affiliate groups, ensuring that they can adapt their messaging and content based on the unique needs of different influencers and partners. This level of flexibility makes it easier for Lodgify to build stronger relationships with affiliates across various industries and locations.

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Whether you’re a SaaS company, e-commerce store, or small business trying to do more with less, affiliate marketing can help. And LeadDyno makes it easier to tap into the power that affiliate marketing offers, so you can achieve growth with minimal investment. Learn more or sign up today.