What is Ecommerce Affiliate Marketing?
Ecommerce Affiliate Marketing is injecting the online element into traditional marketing. Ecommerce affiliate marketing is when an affiliate promotes another company's products, services, or other offerings through their channels and then earns a commission.
Ecommerce Affiliate marketing has taken the world by storm, where affiliates pull customers into their company websites to buy online gadgets, clothing, books, etc.
Affiliates drum up exciting online offers of their products to nudge audiences to purchase the products and effect a sale. These offers slay the audiences and make them enter the coupon codes of the discounted items to result in a conversion or lead generation activity. Purchasing an item through this method is similar to making an offline purchase at a store and entering a code at the checkout counter.
On a time-to-time basis, these affiliates float product-specific links or display banner ads on their online websites. Upon seeing these ads and links with embedded codes, the customer clicks on them. Advertisers pay affiliates commissions based on this transaction.
Is there a Business Mileage You Get from Leveraging Affiliate Marketing in Ecommerce Business?
Yes…In Lots !!!
Here are the advantages that one would get through leveraging Affiliate Marketing in Ecommerce:
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Cost-Effective:- The main advantage of joining an Affiliate Marketing program in an Ecommerce business is that it does not require much up-front investment. This program comes with no hidden or other maintenance costs apart from an initial outlay concerning its setup. Affiliates only get paid a commission when they generate sales. The influx of customers to your websites and their subsequent purchases result in earning commissions by the affiliates. Since the other company or individual will handle the advertising costs, you do not have to bear them as a merchant.
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High Return on Investment:- The turnover for your business is directly proportional to the effort that goes into promoting your products. As an evangelist, your products must be top-shelf, so the more you tout them, the more it will affect sales.
As per the statistics, Affiliate marketing generated $71 billion in Ecommerce revenue in the United States in 2021. The sweeten the offer, the more revenue and commissions are paid to affiliates.
Hence, it is a win-win situation for everyone. The advertisers benefit from additional sales in a secure and budget-friendly way, the affiliates get paid for every sale they generate, and customers can make informed decisions related to purchases based on the content produced by affiliates for the sale of their items.
Also, by increasing Average Order Value (AOV), online Ecommerce businesses can increase their ROI and ROAS for all their advertising and marketing efforts. Businesses can milk out more revenue for every purchase when their AOV is high.
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Scalable, Trackable, and Time-Saving :- The induction of affiliate marketing in Ecommerce business makes it scalable in the extent of its reach. For example: While promoting a health and fitness niche, you may include personal development and self-help blog articles and products. It will expand your horizons. You may also need to share new products, creatives, and weekly newsletters with your customers promptly. Hiring the right affiliates and sharing best practices with them will go a long way in promoting your brand. The brand book and media kit can be distributed to new affiliates so they know how to position the brand.
The whole process of Affiliate Marketing in Ecommerce business is trackable with Key Performance Indicator metrics. You can measure the clicks, conversions, the cost per conversion, the average order value, etc. Dashboards visualize your whole activity on a single-page layout. Based on this visualization, you can customize different attributes, group and ungroup specific datasets, and curate data from the side-by-side comparison of reports into a tabular or graphical format.
Customers may need not commute significant distances to their favorite stores. Affiliate Marketing in the Ecommerce business allows interested customers to virtually visit their favorite store, nail down the best products and make a purchase. Customers can compare products on the fly and buy their desired ones.
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Have Better Control of the Overall Process:- From defining the program's terms and conditions to paying affiliate commissions and deciding which products to promote, the advertisers have a say in the overall process. As an advertiser of Affiliate Marketing, you have a free hand to terminate the Ecommerce program at any stage of its run.
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Laser-Targeted Traffic resulting in Better Access and Reach:- As an Affiliate, you can divert your attention towards a targeted audience of Ecommerce businesses who have shown immense interest in your products. In this way, your potential customers become your buyers, and this can be a step to pack in more customers.
The more you zero in your focus on an audience that aligns with your niche, the more you can increase the brand's appeal and catapult your business in no time.
With laser-targeted traffic, you can build a foothold and start targeting more and more untapped segments of the market.
A mobile-friendly website, social media marketing tactics, a secure payment system, and rolling out advertisements for flagship products owned by your company will enthuse your Ecommerce prospects to convert into customers.
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Creates an effective Social Proofing:- Social Proofing of Affiliate Marketing business leads to adding flourishes to your Ecommerce brand when an Ecommerce audience will follow the footsteps of the other buyers and make purchases. As a psychological and social phenomenon, social proof is one of the ways to convince a doubtful customer to make a purchase. Client Testimonials, Online Product Reviews, and Industry Certifications underpin the importance of the brand, increase the trust factor and boost brand credibility value. The rave reviews of existing customers draw in new and untapped customers. The role of influencers is substantial in reviving customer confidence and increasing brand reputation. When influencers recommend your brand, it enhances your credibility almost in a flash.
Tips and Tricks on Starting with Affiliate Marketing in Ecommerce
1. Establish a fair and well-panned-out commission structure
Establishing a fair rate structure will help you fruitfully budget time and expenses. A flat commission rate across all product categories will incentivize your affiliates and give them the much-needed impetus for churning out sales. You must balance between too complex and too simple a commission structure or too high and too low a commission rate. You may need to research to thread together the different pieces of information and get a handle on the right kind of commission structure that should appease your affiliate's demands.
Too high a commission rate can knock off the revenue from your sales, and too low can irk your affiliates. Too complex commission levels will bewilder them and complicate the situation.
You may benefit from paying a higher commission rate on rare occasions. It is a vital aspect for offsetting the initial cost of your business with the customer lifetime value (CLV). Ecommerce commission rates typically range from 5% to 15%, depending on the product type, price, and competition. It will retain your Affiliate Marketing affiliates and keep their morale high. When calculating the final rate, a high average order rate should arrive based on the number of products they sell.
The commissions are akin to an investment in the future of your business. Instead of a single set commission rate, opt for a flexi-tier system to allocate different commission rates to various product categories. Using an attribution-based commission structure of affiliate marketing in Ecommerce businesses will package the existing model and derive benefits from it.
2. Pick those affiliates who align with your product or niche
You need to handpick the right kind of affiliate that matches your niche and complete the recipe for affiliate marketing sales. If you are propagating a gluten-free, organic, and vegan product, then look for those affiliates who are “nutritionists” or “fitness freaks”.
Affiliate Marketing networks will help to grease the wheels of your Ecommerce business by pointing you to the right affiliates. It may include influencers via blogs, video content, Instagram, or Facebook platforms. They have their proprietary tracking systems to evaluate the affiliate's performance.
If you are using a well-established affiliate network then with the use of built-in search functionality, you can get your hands on the right affiliate. A simple search for the word “dal tadka” can produce scores of affiliates in a jiffy that are into the cooking profession and have made “dal- tadka” or posted its recipe and are relevant to that search item.
You may also benefit from sending mass mailers to entrepreneurs in the same niche. In a tie-up with them, you would end up scoring the affiliates. If you need to offer the affiliates a high commission, give it a go. To hire them, send them samples of your work products so they can demystify the nature of your business.
In your hunt for the right affiliate, you must factor in the below-mentioned considerations:
- Analyze the traffic the affiliate is currently targeting and accordingly get it together.
- Ensure that your affiliate has a clearly defined landing page and targets the right mix of people. They must align with your niche and desires.
- Your affiliate must be well aware of preventive measures for insulating against fraud.
3. Optimize your landing page to increase conversions
Landing Pages of Ecommerce websites are standalone web pages created exclusively for an affiliate marketing or advertising campaign. It is the page where a visitor lands after they click an ad, banner, or link with the sole aim of a Call to Action. They should give themselves a facelift periodically to better serve their customers.
Enhancing their UX and UI design with the necessary features will accomplish this. Both design and functionality must be in place to arm the user with the required knowledge. It will eventually persuade them to convert. A seamless process must exist between the sign-up and sign-in pages to the final checkout and log-out.
4. Make the most out of customers by offering them seasonal discounts
To get conversions from your customer on a long-term basis, you need to captivate them with seasonal discounts and freebies on certain occasions. Using affiliate marketing tactics of offering Diwali discounts at the time of Diwali or Valentine's day discounts on Valentine Day, or dishing out swag bags to customers on their special days like their Birthdays or Anniversaries will help in building credibility factor for the Ecommerce business and establishes a bonhomie relationship with the customers.
Make sure to research and draw up the plan for those special days in advance on which your product is in demand. Then come up with eye-catchy content by fleshing out all the discount-related details to result in a conversion. Say if your brand deals with chocolates, teddy bears, and other fancy items, then Valentine's Day is the right time for you to advance sales based on these products.
An eye-catching content headline may be like this: No more waiting in the wings, buy this chocolate now to make the most out of Valentine Bonanza !!!
5. Do a drill-down exercise on your competitor’s business strategy
Do extensive research on Google by keying multiple phrases to learn about the list of competitors’ activities. Jotting down their activities in one place will make a good sense of the affiliate programs used by them, the commission levels they are offering to their affiliates, what are their operational costs like cost per lead and cost per action as well as that should expound about the landing pages used by them. If possible, get firsthand knowledge of their programs by enrolling in their affiliate marketing programs and drill down to see what kind of emails, bonuses, and incentives they offer their affiliates. It will help you to conceptualize the affiliate marketing activities to be used by you in your Ecommerce offerings and will also make things work out for you.
6. Opt for Email Automation
To make the best possible use of email automation, you need to define your goals as to what you want out of your audience.
- Are you trying to accelerate your sales?
- Do you want more people to turn up for your events?
- Are you zeroing in on increasing brand awareness?
- Are you seeking answers for how to increase your website hits?
- Do you wish to remain the primary choice for your audience?
- Don’t you want your readers to get engaged with your content like emails, brochures, ebooks, and whitepapers regularly?
- Don’t you wish to cut to the bone the cart abandonments and retarget those outgoing customers?
The answer to this bevy of questions is Email Automation.
Email Automation will send the right message at the right time to the right audience. If you schedule these emails in the backend, they will automatically send at the opportune time within the subscriber's email list, increasing click-through rates. In short, automation makes an auto-responder email trigger into the subscriber's inbox based on predetermined criteria.
This criterion could be segmenting the subscribers based on age, gender, and location to target specific customers. You may also segment unresponsive leads and users who have dipped out of your affiliate program with cart abandonments to retarget them to grow your Ecommerce business.
You should develop a buyer persona and tailor your content to reach your target audience. Email automation tools can make the difference between losing out on potential profits and closing leads quicker than one can think of.
You can use Affiliate Marketing to offer an incentive for users signing up for your email list. — such as 15% off a first purchase or free shipping — is a valuable way to grow your subscriber list and boost your Ecommerce business.
Cart Abandonment in Ecommerce boils down to price concerns and shipping charges. Hence, one can resurrect those lost customers by sending an automated follow-up reminder to their inbox and encouraging them to return from where they left by providing them the options to complete the purchase or additionally luring them with incentives.
It optimizes your sales funnel, and using email automation for retargeting abandoned carts saves time, increases conversions, and improves the customer experience. Using remarketing pixels on your website will enable you to track isolated visitors and create custom audiences.
In today’s time, to take your email marketing to a whole new dimension and enjoy the commercial success that you deserve, that is possible by leveraging the striking features of email automation.
7. Measure the Performance of your Campaign using KPIs
KPIs are the reliable measures of Affiliate Marketing that gauge the progress and effectiveness of your Ecommerce campaign. You may choose some software to keep tabs on your affiliate program, from how far they are faring to locating any hiccups and tracking your affiliate’s performance.
For example, these KPIs can delineate the top-performing URLs, best-performing campaigns, and top affiliates. Some key KPIs are:- Conversion, Clicks, Gross Orders, Net Orders, Earnings per click, Affiliate Share, etc.
8. Decide on the Payment Methods for your Affiliate Program
By cherry-picking the payment methods out of the large slot, you can make your affiliate marketing programs put to good use for an Ecommerce business. These are namely
- PPC (pay per click): If the visitors do not buy something or scroll through your site and abandon the same, the commission is paid based on the number of clicks on affiliate links.
- PPL(Pay Per Lead): You pay your affiliates for generating leads, which equates to making up the user's mind to take desired actions. It could be subscribing to a newsletter or registering for a free trial.
- PPS (pay per sale): In this method, affiliates earn a commission only when a customer buys something.
9. Correspond with Your Affiliates on the Reg
Have thriving discussions with your affiliates, and engage in healthy correspondence with them about upcoming product launches, product promotions, changes to marketing campaigns, and other professional matters. It will incite them to double down on their commitments and exceed their goals.
Offer18 As a StandAlone Platform to Fulfill your Ecommerce Affiliate Marketing Needs
Offer18 goes out of the way to provide a seamless, transparent, and fool-proof affiliate marketing management platform for the proliferation of your Ecommerce business. With this platform, you're surefire to generate mammoth sales and revenue.
By gaining access to real-time transactional data such as order details, and valuable insights to the fore, affiliate marketing adds value to existing Ecommerce businesses. With Offer18’s affiliate marketing practices in Ecommerce business, one can view every level of campaign performance and can measure those with actionable metrics and standard reports. These reports give visibility into the campaign performance and harness the granular level data.
With Offer18’s dynamic payouts feature, businesses can create multiple rules to optimize their payouts and increase profits. One can now be in a better position to tailor revenue and payouts depending on many distinct data points and other parameters. You might also be able to establish different payouts for enabling conversions from different geos, device types, sources, and more. With the ability to assign priorities to a set of rules, you can ensure that your Ecommerce affiliate marketing program runs smoothly and efficiently. Additionally, the dynamic payouts feature allows you to make real-time changes in the existing system. You can tailor your payout to reflect this change.
With Shopify's Integration with Offer18’s affiliate marketing platform, you can ramp up sales on Shopify. With Woo-Commerce Integration with Offer18’s affiliate marketing platform, you can track every order and sale. The integration enables you to create an online store similar to the existing one. Brands can make a mark with their Ecommerce campaigns using Offer18's affiliate marketing platform. It provides an all-in-one commerce platform to automate your Ecommerce operations and streamline Ecommerce marketing activities.
With Big-Commerce Integration with Offer18’s affiliate marketing platform, merchants can create, innovate and grow their businesses. Offer18 assists you in achieving the sales goal with the Big-Commerce platform.
Conclusion
Do you want to scale your business by tapping into an affiliate program for your Ecommerce website? What better than an affiliate tracking software like Offer18 to help you do that? Affiliate Marketing practices in Ecommerce platforms raise your scalability, and regional boundaries will no longer constrain you. Your online store will be accessible to your clients at any date and time of the year, and you will have more chances to attract clients. Online stores are easier to maintain and less expensive because there is no storage fee. There are a lot of benefits to introducing affiliate marketing into the Ecommerce business, so considering this fact, why is there no genuine reason to be a part of Ecommerce Affiliate Marketing?
Now you know why affiliate marketing is a great strategy to increase your Ecommerce sales. Give it a try! Once you get the hang of it, you will be able to reap the benefits of it.
First, prepare an Ecommerce affiliate program strategy based on your business goals. Then reach out to other similar websites and foster positive relationships. By doing so, you'll participate in a mutually beneficial affiliate marketing tactic and scale your Ecommerce revenue to new heights.
A successful affiliate marketing strategy includes selecting the right affiliates, tracking their conversions, and using affiliate networks and free tools. You can even set up your Ecommerce affiliate program by hiring top-quality affiliates who will sell your products. So, does it now make sense for you to engage your brand in Ecommerce Affiliate Marketing?
It is, we are sure!
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