This article shows what affiliate marketing is, its benefits, and steps to implement the strategy.
The alternative to PPC campaigns (Google Adwords or Content Delivery Network) that appear increasingly expensive. As they work through auctions, affiliate marketing seduces advertisers more and more thanks to its revenue-sharing model (CPA) and volume Awesome incremental sales it brings. The affiliate marketing represents between 8% and 12% of online marketing investment in mature markets. Unfortunately, in Latin America, he still knows many challenges, mainly due to the lack of secure affiliation networks and the lack of education of digital marketing professionals on the subject.
What is affiliate marketing?
Affiliate Marketing is a digital marketing strategy based on the achievement of results. Affiliates we can refer to Companies/websites which are responsible for marketing merchants (stores or advertisers) by publishing their different ads or promotions. Although, members work on commission and get that when the visitor enters their website and make some activities like (click on a banner, register, buy, etc.).
Affiliate marketing has three players:
- The customer makes a purchase (or any type of action defined as an objective) on the Advertiser’s website.
- The affiliate promotes the Advertiser through his website, newsletters, his twitter account, Facebook, his YouTube channel, etc.
- The Advertiser provides the affiliate with the necessary promotional tools and pays it per click (CPC) or, more commonly, for referred sales (CPA).
Advantages of applying affiliate marketing
It reaches more people and quality.
This strategy achieves greater reach because where it is impossible to reach with other procedures, it arrived through the marketing of influencers.
An important detail is that not only are more people reached, but users reached who may have a real interest in the product. It is because affiliates choose to promote on their pages or blog products that respond to the needs of their readers, to get more sales, and be able to charge more commissions.
- The investment is almost nil.
It is one of the ways that a brand has to promote its product without spending a lot of money and without investing time or effort. It is possible because the affiliate does the advertising work, and the amount that paid to him is very little within the large accounts of the company.
- Little risk and many benefits
Another advantage follows from this advantage: the risk is null, and the benefits are many. The worst that can happen is that no affiliate can sell the product with zero spendings of money, time, and effort. Have only lost a small percentage of them to be able to pay the affiliates. It should be in the long run; the clients obtained by the members can repeat the purchase directly in the company, saving you the commission.
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Fidelity Achieved
Affiliates generally promote products they know and have tried. That way, you gain the trust of the users and manage to make more sales and invoice more commissions.
For the law dissertation help company, this way of proceeding from the affiliates is a benefit because many of the clients they get become followers of the brand only because an individual blogger has recommended them.
Sales then increase, and the company adds among its ranks what is known as “brand ambassadors.” In other words, overly delighted customers with the product that they promote to all their friends, family, and acquaintances.
Steps to implement an affiliate marketing strategy:
1. Choose your affiliate network from the affiliate marketing strategy
Unless you are an eBay or Amazon type internet giant, you will have to hire an affiliate network as an intermediary. To choose the system that corresponds to you, you will have to consider the following points:
- The visibility offered (quantity and quality of affiliates enrolled in the order.
- Tracking and reporting tools and options
- Cost of the additional fee charged by the network (override fee)
- Minimum Sales Required
2. Define your model and payment terms of the affiliate marketing strategy
- Payment model:
The CPA (cost per action) is the safest if you start in affiliate marketing. You will only have to pay the affiliate if a valid sale made.
- Tracking duration:
It is the time during which the sale attributed to the member that the customer refers. The reason for this tracking is that a customer can decide 30 or 60 days later to make a purchase. We recommend a minimum of 30 days.
- Locking period:
It is the period from which a sale is considered irreversible and will charge by the affiliate. It is important to correctly define the locking period to avoid paying the affiliate after-sales cancelled by the customer. They will not exceed 50 days.
- Define incentives:
Remember that an affiliate/advertiser relationship has nothing to do with a seller/customer relationship. Membership is a revenue-sharing model. If the affiliate wins, the Advertiser also and vice versa.
They have to be attractive (for example: increase the CPA by 40% from 30 sales). They define achievable goals, but the affiliates will flee.
3. Prepare your advertising inventory of the affiliate marketing strategy
You have to provide affiliates with promotional content for your program to be efficient.
Prepare a list of banners and links. They are straightforward to place for members who are not technical experts.
For more results and to work with more advanced members (such as price comparators), you have to make your product catalogue available. It can be through data feeds or API / web services. It is better to have both options.
4. Create your affiliate marketing strategy
So, you has to list here everything that is NOT allowed to do with your affiliate program. You have to protect yourself here against bad affiliates, who are going to take advantage of your application to generate commissions without increasing your sales.
- Prohibit the use of your trademarks (including spelling errors) in the domain name or AdWords campaigns.
- Prohibit the use of pop-under
- Prohibit content sites that will harm your brand image (violence, racism, pornography.).
