Mumbai: Haptik, one of the world’s largest conversational AI platforms today announced its alliance with vCommission, leading Global affiliate network, to implement Conversational AI solutions in performance marketing. While Haptik will work with publishers in integrating chatbots on their digital properties, vCommission will work closely with marketeers to offer performance based advertising options which is non-intrusive ad experiences within these properties.
With affiliate marketing set to grow in leaps and bounds in times to come, the association is the most opportune. The industry is expected to grow at a CAGR of 27% and be worth USD 835 million by 2025, as per the industry reports, resulting in a staggering 8X growth when compared with the current valuation of USD 96 million.
Conversational AI is expected to usher the sector in its next stage of disruption and growth. In the past, most of a marketer’s attention has been devoted to engaging with audience across screens via taps, clicks, likes, comments, and shares. However, chatbots are moving the metrics of engagement by turning the attention towards conversations. As industry pundits are often heard saying, marketing as a discipline is headed towards ‘interactions’. Thus, every kind of user engagement must appear as a conversation, a feat easily available with the adoption of chatbots in the domain.
In order to simulate an interactive experience with the help of conversational AI, one requires experienced storytellers to help chatbots humanize the conversations. In this domain, Haptik has an experience of building over 100 chatbots, processing more than a billion conversations across multiple industry verticals including e-commerce, banking, insurance, telecom, hospitality, healthcare and automotive.. This experience has come in handy when the promise of technology is a reality and the market is ripe for adoption.
“Chatbots are the future and we are glad to bring about this new media in the affiliate marketing space, by partnering with Haptik. Their expertise in the domain will help vCommission bring innovation in otherwise cliched engagement & lead generation space. Having personally witnessed their complete stack of tech brilliance, we also look forward to creating awareness about Haptik’s chatbots amongst our sprawling network of associates and brand partners,” said Parul Bhargava (Co-Founder & CEO, vCommission).
Commenting on the association, Mr Aakrit Vaish, Co-Founder and CEO, Haptik said, “Leading the space of conversational AI, we have been looking for the right opportunity to diversify our reach and touch upon the performance marketing space. By associating with vCommission, we believe that the time is ripe for us to introduce chatbots for marketeers. With our domain expertise, we will be able to humanize the experience and further help the brand partners of vCommission to successfully reach and engage with their audience, despite the bottlenecks arising out of ad-blocks and frauds.”
Elaborating on the same, Pratyush Kukreja – Business Head, Monetisation, Haptik said, “Evolving with the rapid pace of technology, AI and tech-focused advertisement is the way ahead for marketers. In keeping with this vision, we associated with vCommission for homegrown brands to optimize their web and mobile marketing game. Through this association, we hope to extend our diverse marketing oriented tech solutions to vCommission’s affiliates and bring conversational AI for marketers to the fore.”
Chatbots also aim to resolve the challenges daunting the rise of affiliate marketing in India. These challenges include ad-blocking, which causes significant revenue loss to the performance marketing industry. Furthermore, the industry also suffers at the hands of its own fair share of frauds. For instance, using stolen data for lead generation or stolen credit card details to generate sales. Typosquatting or URLs hijacking domains that sound similar to a company’s name or products and thus picking up referrals from redirects, or cloning the affiliate’s site to steal traffic are other unfair hacks and frauds. Fraudsters may also buy Google AdWords on which the company or the product is ranking high or cookie-stuff all visitors to a website and benefit from unrelated sales. Lastly, scammers may also get people to download adware or spyware that automatically insert the affiliate code.
Since chat bots orchestrate a 2-way interaction, thus the user engagement with chatbots is organic, minimising the risk of fraud and completely by-passing ad blockage.
