Affiliate marketing for eCommerce sites is becoming a game-changing tactic that allows businesses to reap profit while spending less budget on advertising. It’s a great way to drive traffic to your site and generate revenue through commissions on sales generated by your own customers. In this article, you will learn the most effective ways to apply affiliate marketing and achieve roaring success.
Affiliate marketing – Definition and terms explained
Before moving further, you should have a solid understanding of the subject. Here are the popular terms used in affiliate marketing:
- Affiliate marketing: An advertising model in which businesses promote their products and services to users by collaborating with one or many affiliates.
- Business (or Advertiser): A company that collaborates with affiliates to promote their products and boost revenues.
- Affiliate (or Publisher): A person or a subsidiary group who accepts to promote companies’ products by engaging with users via online activities. These affiliates will get a commission from companies every time users click on the provided links or when leads are generated (depending on the collaboration agreement.)
- Commission: The amount of money, usually counted as a fixed percentage, that an affiliate receives after completing their mission.
- Landing page: A business webpage that offers a specific product or serves any purpose to exchange for customers’ information.
How does affiliate marketing work?
Business owners
First, you need to join an affiliate network. By partnering with influencers or celebrities, you can advertise your products or services to a larger audience scale.
If the affiliate ensures the KPI you demand, it’s your turn to pay for them based on their performance.
Affiliates
After joining an affiliate network, you will receive many specific contextual links, which bring users to landing pages once they click on them. Your job is to ensure a particular number of users click on these links.
By creating engaging content and interactive activities to draw users’ attention via different online platforms, the more you reach, the more clicks you’ll earn. Besides, enhancing visitors’ engagement with your web content is key to maximizing a site’s return on investment (ROI). By tailoring your approach with various engaging tactics, you can create content that will keep users coming back for more.
The ultimate guide to starting affiliate marketing for eCommerce sites
1. Choose certain categories
Before working with any affiliate, you should sort out some product categories you want to promote.
So how to do that? You can conduct thorough market research on customers’ interests and behaviors to determine your target market and customers’ desired products. For a simple start, you may track your website data and find out the most and the least sought-after products.
Remember, choosing the right products to promote is very important if you want to succeed in affiliate marketing.
2. Join a trustworthy affiliate program
There are many types of affiliate networks that serve specific purposes of the industry. You should consider your business niche and scale to choose a suitable network.
After entering a network, you need to communicate clearly the following information for affiliates to follow:
- Products,
- KPIs,
- Commission offers.
In case you don’t wish to join an affiliate program, you can collaborate with some micro-influencers on social media and gradually partner with more famous ones.
3. Deal with your affiliate partner
Based on your overall marketing plan, you can manage and track the affiliate program by doing these things every quarter:
- Provide affiliates with promotion materials, like text links, emails, forms, banners, etc.
- Negotiate with them about how to advertise your products. For example, creating posts, blogs, videos, or writing custom content, etc.
- Send them the latest update about affiliate offers if there are any,
- Review promotional activities and give feedback to affiliates.
Besides, to ensure things go as your plan, you should provide rewards or bonuses for affiliates who have excellent performance.
Keeping track of the process will also help you adapt quickly or come up with better solutions to sudden problems.
5 awesome tips for eCommerce sites to optimize affiliate marketing
1. Select suitable affiliates
When choosing affiliates, you need to consider a variety of factors to find the best ones for your campaign. Here are some of the most important criteria for your references:
- Traffic quality: Make sure that your affiliates are sending high-quality and relevant traffic. You can ask for their traffic analysis to analyze and review beforehand.
- Accurate targeting: Make sure that your affiliates target the right geographies, demographic groups, and the right stage on the customer journey with effective keywords and landing pages.
- Payment accuracy: Register your affiliate account with PayPal so that you can easily track payments and ensure that all transactions proceed smoothly.
- Fraud prevention measures: Make sure that your affiliates are using anti-fraud measures like 2FA (two-factor authentication) to protect both of you from fraud.
Collaborating with appropriate publishers helps market your products or services to more and more people. When someone you trust recommends something great and relevant, you may give it a try later – this is a powerful influence.
2. Use coupons, deals, and promotions
One of the most effective affiliate marketing strategies for increasing sales is to use coupons and deals. The fact is, everyone loves coupons and discounts. Many frequently look for discounts and promo codes on various coupon websites before purchasing any product.
Coupons work best in highly competitive markets such as food, beauty, travel, or electronics. However, you must manage them carefully, as a significant discount offer may eat into your profit.
3. Concentrate on the power of niche influencers
Many brands prefer to collaborate with many social influencers and bloggers in their respective niches. Because influencers have more genuine interactions with their followers, they can effectively persuade their audience to trust your brand and use your products or services.
Compared to coupon sites, influencers may not send you a lot of traffic. However, the audience they send is more targeted and more likely to be interested in your products.
4. Create your own affiliate network
Instead of using various affiliate networks, you can create your own. Recruiting your first affiliates can be difficult but your effort will be paid off in the long run. Consider the following tips to build your network:
- Choose a platform to start creating your network,
- Set up an affiliate program that is easy to follow and understand,
- Make it easy for affiliates to find and join your affiliate program,
- Create effective ads to promote your affiliate program.
Expanding your affiliate network is a lot easier. Provide all necessary information to your potential affiliates, such as what to do, how it works, and the commission you’ll pay.
In addition, encourage your affiliates to recruit more sub-affiliates. You can pay them a small percentage of the sales generated by their sub-affiliates. Remember to reward your devoted affiliates. Analyze the lifetime value of the customers they bring to your brand and track their performance.
5. Optimize your product pages
Many brands invest in affiliate marketing strategies, expecting them to drive conversions. But that might not be enough to boost sales.
Affiliate marketing can help you attract customers to your product pages. However, you need to optimize your selling pages with attractive designs, photos, and other information to persuade and convert customers.
Frequently asked questions
1. Which business can use affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a great way for businesses of all sizes to generate revenue from online sales. It involves promoting other people’s products or services and earning a commission (or percentage) on the sale generated. There are many different affiliate marketing programs available, so it is important to choose the one that best fits your business goals and objectives.
Some of the most popular affiliate marketing programs include Amazon Associates, ClickBank Affiliates, and eBay Partnerships.
2. How much does affiliate marketing cost?
Affiliate marketing can be a very cost-effective way to promote your products or services. The marketing cost depends on how many products are sold. It is usually done at a low cost, and you can get started with no hassle. Most business owners pay their affiliate somewhere between 7% to 25% for each product sold.
3. Affiliate marketing vs. CPA: What is the difference?
Affiliate marketing and CPA (cost per action) advertising are two different ways to earn money from your website.
With affiliate marketing, you pay someone else to do the work – in this case, promoting your products or services on their own site. The publishers then receive a commission for any sales that they generate.
With CPA marketing, your business has to pay the affiliate when users have interactions such as clicking on a link, downloading a trial, or confirming an email. This can be more expensive than affiliate marketing because it requires a significant upfront fee. However, if you want to scale up quickly, CPA advertising can be an ideal route for you.
Wrapping up
The level of competition is exceptionally high in the eCommerce world, so businesses must always stay ahead of the trend and be prepared to adapt to new marketing tactics to thrive.
With these simple and easy-to-follow guides, we hope that you can achieve your business goals in a short amount of time. For more helpful information like this, you can go to Tigren and check out their blog. Having considerable expertise in the eCommerce field, Tigren team is coming up with numerous insightful facts and guidance for those who want to thrive in the bustling eCommerce industry.
