Did you know that 81% of brands worldwide have affiliate programs?
You might be thinking – cool! I will just go ahead and add an affiliate program to my business, right? But it’s not as straightforward as it seems.
Running a good affiliate marketing strategy necessitates a significant amount of effort. Fortunately, several strategies are available to help you get started. In this post, we’ve compiled a list of affiliate marketing methods to assist you in exploring and maximizing this marketing approach.
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Recommendations, or “word of mouth,” have historically helped companies grow their brand and build a loyal customer base. This form of marketing exists in today’s online environment as well, but under a different name: Affiliate Marketing.
Affiliate marketing is a simple, cost-effective strategy to increase sales and grow your business.
To develop the ideal affiliate marketing strategy for your business, you must first understand what affiliate marketing is, how it works, and how you can approach affiliate marketing in new ways to improve your business and track results.
Affiliate marketing is a type of advertising that uses referrals to sell items or services. The affiliate marketing process involves three parties.
- User: a possible consumer who comes across an affiliate link while browsing a blog, website, or social media profile.
- An affiliate: is a blog or social media profile that contains a link and is compensated when a user purchases through an affiliate link on their site.
- Meanwhile, the merchant delivers the service or product referred to by the affiliate link and pays the affiliate when a transaction occurs.
When a business pays for advertising, they often pay for a piece of content or an ad in advance, and the ad is intended to drive visitors to the business.
You pay for performance in affiliate marketing, which means you don’t pay your affiliate until their affiliate link performs. In most cases, you pay per sale. You can, however, choose to pay depending on leads or clicks.
Simplify Your Marketing Technology
Affiliate marketing works by using the affiliate’s and the user’s pre-existing trust. Whether you sell to businesses (B2B) or consumers (B2C), trusted referrals remain the most beneficial form of promotion.
Affiliate marketing allows you to access a wide range of potential clients with a single affiliate link. These are customers that have never personally heard of your brand but are now aware of who you are and what you provide.
Users have a strong tendency to trust the accounts they follow. As a result, your company is perceived as trustworthy and confirmed when the affiliate recommends your link. If you are linked with an ambassador or influencer with whom the user already has a relationship, the user is more likely to choose your brand over an unaffiliated company.
Users who click on the affiliate link are taken to the product page on your company’s website. The user can then buy the product, browse for additional services, join your company’s newsletter or mailing list, or read the content you provide.
Affiliate marketing is a great tool since it leads to the direct sale of the item in the affiliate link and pulls customers to your site so they may look around.
Crafting an Affiliate Marketing Strategy
An effective affiliate marketing approach is required to enjoy the benefits.
To create an “ideal strategy,” you must first understand the current status of affiliate marketing and its principles, such as who you want to collaborate with, how you want to acquire leads, and how to test the efficiency of your affiliate plan.
Consider the following suggestions as you develop your affiliate marketing strategy:
Choose Affiliates Carefully
Your affiliates are the most important component of your affiliate program’s success, so choose them properly. A good affiliate is dependable, trustworthy, and reputable; they are an authority in their field and consistently promote your links.
Choose an associate with a customer base that is likely to be interested in your product. They should also have a significant and loyal following, whether it’s YouTube subscribers, Instagram followers, or blog visitors.
Attract Sales With Coupons, Promotions, and Deals
Just having affiliate links to your site is good, but… On the other hand, links related to coupons, promotions, and bargains for new clients – are much better. To strengthen the affiliate relationship, collaborate with ambassadors and blogs to offer customized promo codes for their links.
If a potential consumer hears through a social media influencer that they can get 15% off your product with a discount code, they are more inclined to check out what you have to offer.
Customers are drawn to your site through deals and coupons, where they will look at other products or services.
Recruiting Niche Influencers
Find and hire niche influencers as affiliates. A successful niche influencer possesses authority and power in their industry, implying that they have great sway over their niche-specific audience.
Influencer tools such as Upfluence and Captiv8 can assist you in quickly identifying influencers in your niche or area of interest.
Working with that influencer might lead to your company becoming the authority for the service or product you supply if your product properly meets their audience’s needs. There is a niche influencer for almost any topic imaginable, so look for top influencers you know would be interested in your product.
Build an Affiliate Network
Create a diverse affiliate network by utilizing several methods to generate leads and sales.
Publishers wishing to monetize their content or work directly with influencers on social media platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and Twitch can turn to affiliate networks like Dotdash or Sovrn Commerce.
Collaborate with bloggers whose sites receive a lot of traffic and have a large following. Collaborate with a variety of bloggers and influencers, including those who evaluate things for content.
Consider collaborating with podcasts that have a large audience.
Collaborate with people who conduct webinars, podcasts, ebooks, and other courses where listeners are more likely to trust your brand if the host promotes it.
Create an affiliate network of renowned, authentic affiliates who bring in unique leads and believe in your brand.
Test Your Affiliate’s Success
Once you have launched your affiliate program, you need to evaluate the effectiveness of the various affiliates, links, and media you are using.
Use user-friendly affiliate tracking software to determine which aspects of your approach are working and which need tweaking.
You will be able to track conversions, clicks, and other statistics to determine which affiliates are beneficial and which are not.
This will allow you to:
- Change the keywords in your link.
- Change the program’s terms.
- Increase your commission rates.
- Work with the affiliate to figure out how to market the affiliate links.
- Make any other changes that will help you maximize your ROI (return on investment)
- Create an affiliate marketing scheme.
Optimize Your Website and Product Pages
Although hosting an optimized website isn’t directly related to affiliate marketing, it is a necessary step in the process. Poor design, content, and user interface are all major reasons why users abandon websites.
If a user hits your affiliate link and is redirected to a poorly designed webpage, they may abandon your offer without ever looking at it.
It is critical to maintaining a website that makes purchasing your product or service simple and where new clients can easily browse your products and content.
How to Measure Success?
Measure the success of your affiliate marketing initiatives to determine what is and isn’t working. Pay attention to the top three performance marketing KPIs:
1 – Total Revenue by Affiliate
This zooms out to a longer-term view of your marketing program’s effectiveness. Maintain an up-to-date spreadsheet with information on the revenue collected by each affiliate partner.
It is beneficial to develop a visual graph of this data to clarify and rapidly highlight the trouble areas.
2 – eEPC
The eEPC calculates how well each of your affiliates performs per 100 clicks.
To compute this number, divide the dollar amount of net commissions earned by the total number of clicks and multiply by 100. The eEPC identifies which of your affiliates is the most effective and adds the greatest value.
Create an eEPC threshold that reflects your objectives and desired revenue figures, and stop working with affiliates that do not fulfill this requirement.
3 – AOV
AOV, or Average Order Value, assists you in evaluating client behavior and the efficiency of your affiliates. It is advantageous if you sell a variety of things at various price points.
This ratio tells you how effectively affiliate marketing works for a given partner and allows you to assist them in tweaking their strategies to sell specific products that have fallen behind.
To calculate: simply divide the revenue by the number of orders and you will get the average order value. Knowing your average order value (and your typical conversion %) will allow you to plan your advertising budget accordingly.
Ready to Start Your Own Affiliate Program?
Here are a few things to consider when preparing to launch your affiliate marketing program. Also, when developing your affiliate marketing campaign, there are a few other elements to consider.
These include deciding whether or not to use SaaS companies to help you keep track of all your numbers, establishing your marketing program policies and incentives, adhering to the legal aspects of affiliate marketing, and deciding whether to use SaaS companies to help you keep track of all your numbers.
Incentives and Policies
Develop policies to guide your program and decide how to incentivize affiliates before launching an affiliate marketing program.
Your program policy is effectively a contract between your firm and the affiliate that establishes the expectations and requirements.
Include details such as the conversion, sale, lead, or click thresholds you anticipate the affiliate to achieve, the time range in which they must perform successfully, and any unique regulations for marketing your affiliate links.
Creating affiliate rewards is another critical item to consider when beginning a program. Some influencers advertise in exchange for services or goods, but most affiliates anticipate a reward based on performance.
To guarantee that you pay adequately while not losing money by overpaying your affiliate marketers, sit down and assess your affiliate program’s ROI (return on investment).
Determine how much you will profit from your links compared to how much you will pay an affiliate, and then decide what is best for your business.
Legal Aspects of Affiliate Marketing
To run a successful affiliate marketing business, your affiliates must follow the Federal Trade Commission’s “dot com disclosures.”
They are not difficult to follow; nonetheless, all your affiliates must be aware of and adhere to federal requirements.
Affiliates are required to state that they are compensated for the products they sell and the links they give. The disclosure must be made in a “clear and conspicuous” manner.
This obligatory disclaimer is simple to insert at the beginning or end of a blog or social media post.
This keeps their audience members from believing that affiliates are recommending a product freely while they are being compensated. Many affiliates, however, opt to use the things they promote and make this clear in their videos and posts.
Many merchants use SaaS vendors (such as Scaleo) to keep track of affiliate marketing data.
Affiliate marketing data SaaS companies can track the eEPC, AOV, total revenue, and other critical figures linked to tracking the effectiveness of your affiliate program.
For example, if your eCommerce store is hosted on Shopify, it is simple to integrate an affiliate marketing software with the Shopify store.
You don’t have to conduct any calculations by hand or export data to a separate table, and you can obtain your affiliate marketing statistics with a single click.
As you expand your business and affiliate network, SaaS tools are essential to an effective affiliate marketing strategy.
Conclusion: Start Your Own Affiliate Program
Starting an affiliate program is an excellent method to improve sales, raise brand awareness, and generate leads for your company with no extra marketing costs.
Develop your affiliate marketing strategy and launch your affiliate program using software platforms. You’ll be generating leads and increasing revenue in no time with user-friendly affiliate program software such as Scaleo.
Ensure your affiliate marketing platform allows you to analyze and manage affiliate data and develop your referral network using simple apps and plug-ins that track sales and automate commissions.
The software should perform the calculations for you, and visualize data, allowing you to concentrate on other aspects of your content creators and manufacturers’ business.
Ready to add an affiliate program to your business? Contact our team or start an instant free trial!
Last Updated on September 26, 2022
