Affiliate marketing is huge. With billions spent every year, it’s a ROI beast that marketers pour dollars into. Since the early days of online shopping, brands have been tapping into affiliate partners to drive traffic and e-commerce sales.

Last year alone, U.S. shoppers spent $334 billion shopping online and 16% of those sales came from Affiliates. In 2017, U.S. retailers spent $5.3 billion on affiliate marketing, and that figure is expected to balloon to 6.8 billion by 2020.

Amazing as that sounds, those figures only account for online sales – with a much bigger pie left out there for retailers: in-store sales. Shoppers spent $2.9 trillion in stores last year – without any affiliate marketing.

So why aren’t marketers applying their affiliate strategies to drive in-store sales?

This is symptomatic of a larger issue that plagues many brands: a refusal to look at their issues holistically. Too many retailers still silo e-commerce and brick-and-mortar efforts – dictated by separate P&L ownership. Why should one party spend their marketing budget to fund the top line of the other, even though they work for the same company? Crazy, right?

Click here to read more from Jonathan in MarTech Advisor…

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Jonathan Treiber is the CEO & Co-founder of RevTrax

Learn how to leverage first-party purchase data to close the path-to-purchase loop by tying specific offline customer purchase data to all online marketing channels and tactics — download the First-Party Purchase Data White Paper and drive meaningful growth.