What is an Affiliate Program?
It’s a simple relationship between two websites: an advertiser and a publisher.
An advertiser (you as the ecommerce store owner) has products you want to sell, and a publisher (affiliate) promotes these products on their own site and earns a commission on every sale.
The ecommerce store owner works with other websites who publish content and review products. Ecommerce merchants can leverage a website’s influence, traffic, and expertise to generate sales for their business, and only pay after the sale is complete.
They can earn a commission from on direct sales, but can also earn commissions based on a number of other actions taken on the website, based on their agreement.
Examples of Affiliate Program Payouts:
- 1. Direct Sales. Earn a commission from traffic that drives a sale.
- 2. Leads. Earn commissions on actions like email sign-ups, social media follows, form submissions, content downloads, etc.
- 3. Clicks. An advertiser looking to generate a large amount of traffic might pay an affiliate on a cost-per-click basis.
What are the Benefits of Affiliate Marketing?
Here are some of the key benefits you’ll receive if you get started with affiliate marketing.
1. Everything is trackable.
You can view data on impressions, clicks, leads, and sales all in simple affiliate dashboards
2. Affiliate marketing has a strong return on investment.
One main benefit of affiliate marketing is that it is all performance-based, and you set the rules.
3. Affiliate marketing has the ability to scale.
In unison with your other digital marketing efforts, recruiting affiliates into your program will allow you to scale traffic faster.
4. It provides third-party validation and social proof.
By partnering with trusted influencers and high authority websites, you can improve your reputation and build consumer confidence.
5. You can focus on selling specific, high-value products.
When creating affiliate offers, online store owners can have affiliates promote all of their products, or just a select few. It’s a good idea to have affiliates promote your high-value products with strong profit margins. Plus, if you have a low turnover rate on certain products, you can use inventory management strategies to promote your excess inventory, improving your sell-through rate.
Examples of Software to Manage an Ecommerce Affiliate Program
With a wide variety of businesses who work directly with affiliates, most businesses opt for software to easily manage and onboard affiliate marketers to their program.
Here are some examples of highly-recommended affiliate software options.
1. LeadDyno.
Once you’ve signed up, LeadDyno sets you up with your own Affiliate Website right away.
You can then receive traffic from affiliates and get your own hosted and customizable page where you can track customers, leads, visitors and AdWords campaign.
The best part?
Once you recruit new affiliates to join your network, they get access to their own unique affiliate dashboard.
This will contain all of the information they’ll need to promote your business.
LeadDyno offers a 30-day free trial along with setup plans from their team.
Their paid pricing options start at $49 per month for the starter package.
They also have a Biz Builder ($59 per month) and Accelerator ($79 per month).
2. Affiliatly.
The Affiliatly app can help you set up a fully functional affiliate program, where you can manage your affiliate partners.
You can use it to choose how affiliates earn money, manage affiliate earning percentages, pay affiliates quickly, view stats, and upload promotional materials (i.e. banners) that affiliates can use to market your business, among many other tasks.
They offer plans based on the number of affiliates you have.
These include Starter ($16 per month and up to 50 affiliates), Advanced ($24 per month and up to 200 affiliates), Professional ($39 per month and up to 500 affiliates), Pro 1000 ($59 per month and up to 1000 affiliates), Pro 2500 ( $79 per month and up to 2500 affiliates), Pro Unlimited ($129 per month and unlimited affiliates).
All of their plans have a 30-day free trial.
3. Refersion.
Refersion is a powerful affiliate marketing platform that you can launch in minutes.
Whether you want to connect with bloggers, influencers, or other websites, Refersion will help you recruit, track, and pay your affiliates in one easy-to-use platform.
They also have a setup guide that will help you get started with zero technical knowledge required.
They offer a free 14-day trial to test the benefits of their paid plans.
4. Impact Radius.
Impact is a well known and powerful affiliate marketing platform that enables global brands and agencies to work with media partners in a scalable way.
It features a fully-integrated suite of affiliate tracking and tag management options, media attribution, email marketing, and powerful analytics.
It can also track cross-channel marketing efforts and data insights to drive revenue growth.
They are a more expensive option but offer best-in-class features and support for a growing affiliate program.
5. Affise.
Affise is an excellent performance marketing platform that lets you manage, track, and optimize affiliate marketing campaigns in real-time.
They feature a custom UI, lots of third-party integrations, and over 50 reports to compare and breakdown data.
They operate in a lot of different verticals, including ecommerce, mobile, gaming, gambling, dating, nutra, crypto, finance, and more.
If you’re ready to get started, they have an onboarding team that can walk you through the whole process.
Executive Summary
Affiliate marketing can be one of the most cost-effective and scalable ways to make money for your ecommerce website.
You’ll be able to leverage the abilities of other website and influencers in your niche to promote your products, only paying them once they deliver results.
You’ll be able to grow quickly without investing a lot of money upfront.
Finally, you will generate more sales while being viewed as a trusted store on reputable third-party sites.
It’s a win-win-win.
To get started today, learn what your competitors are doing and develop a strategy based on your business goals.
Next, get familiar with the numbers behind your business, like customer retention rates and lifetime value, so you earn money out of the gate.
Finally, reach out to and recruit new affiliate partners, building real relationships with other website owners in a mutually beneficial way.
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