Testing, fine-tuning, and ensuring that your messaging motivates buyers to act accordingly while being ROI-positive are all part of eCommerce marketing.
Affiliate marketing is one of the more underutilized digital marketing channels available to you if you’re starting an e-commerce firm. Eighty-one percent of companies use affiliate marketing programs, so whether you’re just putting your toe in the water or you’re ready to go in head first and maximize your eCommerce earnings, this guide is for you.
But first, let’s review the foundations of affiliate marketing before moving on to the meat of the article, which is how to choose the finest affiliate marketing platform for your eCommerce business. We’ll also talk about how affiliate marketing aids in the expansion of e-commerce companies.
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Using other companies, bloggers, or brands to advertise your items on their websites is known as affiliate marketing. When a visitor they refer to an online store makes a purchase, these affiliates receive a commission.
Benefits Of Affiliate Marketing
With affiliate marketing, you can spread your message to the largest online audience while also expanding your reach more quickly and consistently. Additionally, your e-commerce company only compensates affiliates when a transaction is made.
When you work with powerful affiliates to advertise your items on their websites and social media accounts, you can take advantage of their sizable audiences.
Other Benefits of affiliate marketing include:
In addition to more exposure and brand recognition:
- Strong ROI
- Enhanced Credibility
- Advanced Social Proof
- Increases CLTV
- Improve Brand Recognition and Awareness
Tips To Find The Perfect Affiliate Platform
Do competitor research.
Make a list of your competitors and find their affiliate programs. You can create a spreadsheet to keep track of their affiliate network of choice, commission structures, incentives or bonuses, cost-per-action and cost-per-lead. You can even join their partner program to see what kind of emails, incentives and bonuses they’re offering their affiliates.
For instance, if your competitor pays a recurring commission of 10% per sale and you see his or her business on prominent review websites, try matching the commission and target those sites.
If you have a limited budget, you can experiment with affiliates in different verticals, find affiliates that your competition does not have a relationship with or maximize ROI with a few select affiliate partners.
Know objectives and KPIs.
To help determine the type of affiliates in your program and your commission payouts, you’ll need to determine your objectives, whether it be to increase site traffic, increase revenue, increase average order value or achieve high conversion rates year-over-year. Then, think of metrics to evaluate your progress toward achieving your goals.
Some common KPIs include:
- Click traffic.
- Gross orders.
- Net orders.
- Commission.
- Top affiliates and their share of total sales.
- Performance from each category of affiliate – This includes the percentage of sales from coupon and loyalty affiliates, review sites, WordPress blogs, etc.
- Total affiliates.
- Percentage of active affiliates.
- Percentage of productive affiliates.
- ARPU (average revenue per order).
- EPC (earnings per 100 clicks).
Defined commission strategy.
The best affiliate marketing programs often have a well-defined commission structure and are able to pay out high commissions to their affiliates.
In order to calculate your budget and build out your commission strategy, you’ll first need to figure out your cost per acquisition (CPA), which is the cost of acquiring a new customer.
Coupling this data with your average order value (AOV), you can create a commission strategy in your affiliate program that takes into account cost per acquisition, conversion rates, cost of goods sold (COGS) and gross margin in order to come up with a percentage you can afford to spend.
After all that, there are some final factors you need to consider when calculating commissions, including customer retention.
Know customer retention rate.
Your customer retention strategy will play an important factor in the commission rates you can offer.
With a high retention rate, you can afford to spend more on your affiliate program, because the customers you gain will come back to purchase more. In contrast, a low retention rate means that you need to constantly acquire more customers to stay profitable in the long run.
Analytics
Analytics is an integral part of any affiliate program. Advertisers use analytics data to see what worked and what didn’t work and optimize future campaigns accordingly.
Try Trackier’s Performance Marketing Software To Book A Free Trial At Ease!
Customization
For some, customization may not seem like an important benefit. However, there’s a huge difference in the long run.
Typically, customization consists of three levels: branding and incorporating company design, configuring the system for specific operational processes, and the ability to introduce new modules.
The best option would be a platform that allows all three levels of customization and that the platform meets your needs in the long term.
Tech Support
Technical support plays a huge role in any business and not all affiliate tools have the right level of support for your brand. Proper tech support can save you a lot of time deciding how to handle certain setup issues.
Advertising campaigns don’t have a steady eight-hour work schedule and can often be running in the evening hours so you need support to be available 24/7 to handle issues and bugs that may come up.
Integration with Third-Party Services
You’ll probably need other services for your operational workflow. Check out the existing integrations your chosen platform offers. Pay attention to the most popular ones, such as fraud prevention, billing services, CRM, BI tools, and more.
Flexible and Functional API
If you want to integrate with a specific service or tool that’s not yet connected to the platform, the integration will depend on the API terms. If the platform offers a feature-rich API, making any future integrations won’t be a problem.
Bottomline
Now that you know a bit more about some of the top affiliate programs for beginners, take some time to explore them for yourself. Discovering the best affiliate program and brand for your niche may take time, but it will be worth it. Just be sure to do your homework and avoid any potential scams.
Besides, if you have any questions or queries, feel free to contact us. We would be happy to help
