Driving targeted traffic is the life blood of any business. Traffic is not created equal, it has always been a devil’s bargain. If it is cheap it is not targeted, and when it is targeted it blows the budget. However, Affiliate marketing has proven to be one of the most cost effective targeted marketing strategies.
Affiliate marketing has grown to become a mainstream growth hacking strategy especially among Fintech platforms. It started with PayPal, then PiggyVest grew to over 1 million users in short span by urging users to bring in their friends at a #1,000 commission. The e-commerce marketplace, Jumia, played the same card to scale out their customers and vendors with attractive commissions and a grand prize of a trip to China.
The rest of this article will explore the world of Affiliate marketing, the reasons for its sporadic adoption, the recipes for running successful campaigns, as well as tracking progress and performance of affiliates.
What is Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a reward-based system that encourages partners (could be remote sales team, digital evangelists, or even existing customers) to promote your products in exchange for a commission, free products, or access to exclusive features of your products.
The reward usually ranges from one or more depending on the business case. For example, Kim Kardashian’s shapewear brand Skims offers affiliates within 8-10 % of each sale while Spanx gives a maximum of 8% .
For most ecommerce businesses, here’s how it runs: a customer, advocate, or industry marketer signs up for your affiliate program and sends visitors to your store through their special referral link, and any sales that you make as a result of their promotion earns the marketer a percentage reward for sales made through those links.
Typically, the end goal is a sale. Although, some programs reward for leads, free-trial users, a simple clickthrough action, app or file downloads. Varying rewards depends on the context of the business and its marketing KPIs.
Today, over 80% of brands have used affiliate marketing to promote their products as reported by Forrest. No doubt, affiliate marketing is everywhere and here’s why.
Why is Affiliate marketing so popular right now?
Scale quickly with remote sales team
Running a scalable in-house sales team for small businesses has always been an expensive affair, it’s a rough ride for a small brand to own, maintain, motivate, and grow their sales team day by day!
Affiliate marketing allows you to connect and reach as many people as possible who will be selling or promoting your product with a pay per conversion basis.
Unlike in-house sales teams that in no time form unions, demand allowances, paid leave and all other courtesy imposed welfare packages that ruin the margin.
Affiliate marketing is now the most system effective way of running a scalable sales force for modern businesses.
Low cost of start-up
There are tons of ways to generate traffic for a business. The problem with most strategies is that they require heavy down investment before any result.
For example, in Influencer marketing, most influencers demand at least 50% payment of their hefty bill before the campaign rolls out. This is clearly a luxury for most small businesses.
All affiliate marketing demands is for you to scout for affiliates en masse, select and vet them, and provide them with headstart product knowledge, marketing materials, and insights on where to look for customers.
This marketing model is easy to manage and does not interrupt your cash flow, unlike other marketing models such as PPC advertising that requires you to pay for every click leading to your website. Affiliate marketing ensures that you only part ways with your money when goals are reached.
The SEO is incredible
There’s a ton of organic traffic you can get from search engines if you do affiliate marketing properly.
Today, SEO is all about link building, and winning with SEO in today's crowded market requires a lot of resources to build and maintain. Affiliate Marketing takes off the hassle by 15%.
With thousands of back-links from all your affiliates, and guided keywords in their promotional materials, you can get so much visibility on search engines when people search for your related keywords.
What use is a marketing campaign without a juicy ROI?
In the end, what matters the most is the ‘return on investment’. It is important for businesses to be mindful of the ROI before embarking on any marketing campaigns. Affiliate marketing return on investment triumphs majority of other marketing strategies.
One major reason for this is because your target audience will hear of your product or service from affiliates that are within their spheres of influence. In short, you’re channeling your marketing efforts through a person who has direct access and influence over a highly targeted audience that is receptive to what you have to offer.
Setting Up Your Affiliate Program
Recruiting Affiliates
Running a successful affiliate program that drives more sales for your product or service always demands an active recruitment strategy. So, how can you recruit those top affiliates who drive more than 90% of your total affiliate sales?
Remember it’s product marketing
Make sure that your offer stands out from the competing offers. You must have a product that is worth promoting. Remember it’s not just marketing, it’s product marketing.
Optimize your affiliate sign up page
For an affiliate landing page, the goal is to get as many as possible affiliates to sign up. Keep your design simple.
This way, it’s easier for your visitors to focus on your CTA (call to action) . You want to minimize distractions and cut off loopholes that allow them to abandon your page.
Promote vacancy across platforms
One mistake most brands make is not promote their affiliate programmes hard enough like other vacancies. Run ad campaigns about your affiliate programme as job opening and watch out for the turn out.
Consider micro-Influencers:
Influencers are opinion leaders whose words are respected within their communities. Ensure to find out who these people are in your niche and approach them.
When micro influencers are your affiliates, the chance of conversion is higher.
Payment
Design an attractive commission package. Cash is the most appealing reward. Some ecommerce brands get away with giving free products and store credit.
The affiliate may get paid in various ways:
a. Pay per sale.
This is the gold standard of affiliate marketing reward systems. In this kind of affiliate program, the merchant pays the affiliate a percentage of the sale price of the product after the consumer purchases the product as a result of the affiliate’s promotional efforts. In this case, the affiliate must get the buyer to purchase the product before they are compensated.
b. Pay per lead.
A more complex system, pay per lead affiliate programs compensates the affiliate based on potential customers (leads) generation. The affiliate must persuade the consumer to visit the merchant’s website and complete the desired action — whether it’s filling out a contact form, signing up for a trial of a product, subscribing to a newsletter, or downloading software or files.
c. Pay per click.
This program focuses on incentivizing affiliates to redirect consumers from their blogs, Youtube channel, and social media platforms to your landing page. The affiliate is rewarded based on the number of click throughs they generate. This can prove useful for brand awareness campaigns.
Affiliates Training programme
This goes a long way, it can make or mar your affiliate campaign. You need to fashion out a guide for your affiliates.
The legendary Wolves of Whatsapp of FutureX Digital republished as Chat Heroes, a manual for their affiliate team called Marvians, is an exemplar reference in this regard.
Not only does a good training programme have massive effects on revenue growth, it also informs a strong corporate culture among the affiliates.
Promotional Resources
Create graphical designs, high-quality images, testimonials, and other documents to showcase your product in the best light possible. Make it a ritual when onboarding new affiliates who sign ups.
Ensure your promotion is co-ordinated. As much as you want autonomy for your affiliates, remember no one can tell your story like you. It's important you set the tune for your brand narratives.
Coordinated Promotions
Outline the promotional process for your affiliates. The following are various ways to go about this.
Tagging the brand when they are promoting your products, adding links to their bio, Instagram Stories and IGTV.
Ensure to include a strong CTA to encourage their audience to click through. Most content creators could promote 1XBET due to the promise of a 200% bonus on all first deposits.
Affiliate Network
Affiliate networks like Clickbank, share a sale, Go aff pro etc gives you access to millions of established affiliates. They are low-barrier entries for businesses and can help you build an affiliate marketing program easily. Plus, they often offer training resources to become an affiliate marketing pro in no time.
However, the majority of them, especially Clickbank, do not support locations such as Nigeria. With Kitcart, however, you have a robust affiliate system built into your website and a functional portal for all affiliates to keep track of their earnings.
Tracking progress
Here are the key affiliate metrics to pay attention to:
- Return on Investment
- Adspend
- Total affiliate sales
- Sales per affiliate
- Average order size ( compared to sales not attributed to affiliate marketing)
- Total payout
- Payout-to-sales ratios
- Gross margin
- Total number of affiliates
- Number of new affiliates
- Affiliates churn rate
The affiliate management softwares explored above are perfect to keep track of your affiliate campaigns. With features including onboarding, affiliate tracking, and analytics, you can find and manage affiliates quickly and easily from your website dashboard if you have a store powered by kitcart.
What Makes an Affiliate Marketing Campaign Successful
- Robust Incentives
Money is not everything in life but it ranks high with oxygen. Those were the words of Sales Legend Zig Ziglar. Making your incentives attractive goes a long way in getting affiliates committed to topping your performance charts.
When the reward is juicy, affiliates are generally motivated to make sales. Affiliates start seeing your affiliate programme as a career rather than a side hustle.
You can take clues from highly rewarding affiliate programmes like KitCart Evangelists that pays up to 40% in commission.
- Training Programme
The company reported over 4000% surge in revenue within two quarters from launching its manual for the affiliate team.
Have an affiliate tier system based on performance, where affiliates are grouped into teams, where they have superiors such as Sales Leaders, Sales Veteran, etc.
- Greater purpose
Money is great, but not enough. A higher purpose is not about economic exchanges. It reflects something more aspirational. It explains how the people involved with an organization are making a difference.
When affiliates are connected with a sense of higher purpose, it inspires them to bring more energy and creativity to their jobs. When they feel that their contributions, such as hitting targets, have meaning beyond the numbers, they become more committed and engaged. They take even more risks, learn faster, and raise their game.
- Community
To run a successful affiliate campaign, it needs to be more than just a side piece or a company, you need to build a movement, a culture that invokes a cult-like following among affiliates for the brand.
Make your affiliates the advocates with freebies like branded T-shirts and all sorts of souvenirs . They represent the brand everywhere they go. Their friends and family in no time begin to covet all your brand offers.
Russel Brunson's Clickfunnels definitely cracked this code with their strong funnel hacker community. In September 2021, over 5,000 funnel hackers attended the live event.
- Awards
As humans, we are significantly motivated by acknowledgement of our work and the feeling of accomplishment. This is not to say that money isn't a factor; rather, it’s not the only factor, and it doesn’t always produce the same degree of enthusiasm for commitments and performance that recognition can.
A badge, plaque or even a public recognition can go a long way to determine the affiliates your brand retains.
- Choice of Affiliate marketing software
The platform you use to power your affiliate marketing program also determines the success of your affiliate campaign.
Some affiliate systems such as clickbank have a limited number of regions supported. Such systems may not be the best if you have aggressive expansion in mind.
Affiliate marketing software that doesn’t allow you to customize your program enough will ruin your efforts.
Choose a flexible system where you can determine features such as the timeline of your affiliates cookie sessions. The longer the cookie sessions, the more affiliates believe they are protected.
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Profitability
Some call it return on investment, whatever you label it. In the end, the biggest litmus test for a successful affiliate marketing campaign is profit. Numbers don’t lie. Pay attention to the numbers.
Takeaways
I know some of you skipped to the bottom of the article. For a quick recap: Affiliate marketing is a growing industry that shows no signs of stopping.
Whether you run a small or big online business, launching an affiliate program is now easier than ever thanks to platforms such as KitCart Affiliate System.
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