The simplest way to sell more products is to scale up your marketing budget. The bigger the marketing budget, the easier it is to sell more products.
But you know what. That’s not realistic for most people!
So today I'm going to take you through how to sell a lot more products without having a big marketing budget using affiliate marketing, or simply put, commission-based partnerships.
Affiliate marketing has the potential to drive sales and generate increased revenue, with no upfront cost. Once there is a sale, you simply pay the commission that was agreed upon.
That’s why many small business owners are leveraging this commission-based partnership tactic over other sales tactics.
So far so good?
If you are still not sure if affiliate marketing is something worth learning about for your business, take a look at these quick statistics before you decide to read on or to head out.
81% of brands use affiliate marketing to capture customers’ attention, engage with existing customers, and generate more sales.
79% of marketers leverage affiliate marketing to drive conversions and increase purchases.
83% of them use it to increase brand awareness, and 79% of them use it to engage existing customers.
Before I dive into the steps to affiliate marketing success, let’s take a look at the affiliate marketing definition.
How to define affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing sounds fancy, but it's actually quite simple: a person or a business promotes a product in exchange for a commission.
See you have a business, and you want to acquire more sales (hey, who wouldn’t) you can use affiliate marketing as a way for other people to do the marketing of your products for you.
Many successful brands work with a lot of affiliates to increase their sales. But not all of them use the same techniques to increase the visibility and demand for their products.
In fact, there are several different affiliate marketing strategies and channels you can leverage.
But before we get into them, these are the two main ways you can go about implementing an affiliate strategy:
Through individuals: You publish and promote your affiliate marketing programs on your website and/or social media channels and you let applicants submit their applications to become your affiliate/s.
Through businesses: You reach out to businesses and/or sites that have a similar audience to you to ask them to become your affiliate.
The way you work with either of them (also known as affiliates) is pretty much the same, and I will go into the nitty-gritty details below. But the key to operating a successful affiliate program is to offer your affiliates a desirable reward for their sales effort.
What to pay affiliates?
Before you can decide on what you like to reward your affiliates with, you need to look at the cost of your products. The goal with affiliate marketing is to ensure you are always making a profit, but on the other hand, if the commission is too low you might not get any affiliates to sign with you at all.
There's no true answer to how much you should pay, but you need to find the sweet spot where you and your affiliate both gain to win.
Affiliate marketing how it works and how to start.
1. Choosing and filtering for the right affiliates.
To find the right affiliate for your business you should have some requirements put in place. To set it up, take a look at and draw inspiration from other business sites on how they do it.
Here's an example of how Whistles does it on their website.
If you want to influence consumers' buying decisions, you should choose to work with someone who has an engaged audience that trusts them. This can be anyone from a small blogger with a small number of followers on their Instagram, to that great lad in town that everyone knows.
If you are a small business owner, just starting up with affiliate marketing, you don't want to get tangled up in social media followers. Instead, explore additional ways potential affiliates have the ability to influence their network to come and buy products at your store.
For example: A great affiliate candidate for a small clothing business could be a popular kid at school. He doesn't necessarily have followers on his social media, but he is a person that his peers look up to in terms of style and opinions. With just word of mouth marketing, he has the power to influence their purchasing decisions.
To check whether or not the affiliate applicant is suitable for your business ask yourself:
Does this candidate have a good relationship with his/her audience.
Would his/her audience/network be interested in your products or brand.
Choose your affiliates wisely to gain maximum conversions with minimum effort.
2. Create attractive coupons, deals, and promotions for your affiliates to use.
Now that you´ve filtered and found your affiliate/s you need to support them with content that can help them make the sale. Leveraging coupons and deals is one of the best affiliate marketing strategies to boost sales. That’s because many consumers love the savings power of coupons. They often search for discount vouchers on various coupon and deals sites before shopping for any product.
3. Build a solid affiliate network.
Instead of tapping into various affiliate networks, build your own. It can be really difficult to recruit your first few affiliates. But expanding your affiliate network is comparatively easier.
Provide your potential affiliates with all of the necessary information such as what to do, how it works, and the commission you’ll pay. Collect all the information that they need to onboard easily. Share a folder that includes high-quality images of your products, product copy, prices and your store logo.
You should also encourage your affiliates to recruit more sub-affiliates. You can offer them a small commission of the sales that their sub-affiliates drive.
4. Use multiple channels for your affiliate strategy.
Instead of focusing on just Instagram influencers, or local lads in your town, you can also explore additional sources like:
Product review blogs: A review-focused blog can help you promote your products effectively. They are more likely to drive customers who are really interested in making a purchase.
Email marketing: Affiliates with a huge list of email subscribers in your niche can help you drive more conversions.
YouTube videos: Getting your products featured by a popular YouTuber can help you drive instant sales. After all, 40% of millennials admit that their favourite YouTubers understand them better than their friends.
Using multiple platforms can help you drive the best results from your affiliate marketing strategies. This can also help you analyze the platform where your audience is most engaged on.
5. Make sure your website is fully optimized!
Affiliate marketing can help you to drive interested consumers to your product pages, but you need to make sure that when people land on your website:
Your site is fast to load on both mobile and desktop. (you can run a free speed test using Pingdom).
You provide the information that the customers need to be able to make the decision to buy the product they want.
Your products can be viewed in high-quality product photos, including detail shots.
Your product descriptions are engaging.
You have customer reviews (if you have) on-site to build trust.
6. Make sure you have your tracking in place before you start.
There two main ways to track the performance and incoming sales from an affiliate:
Through a unique URL (also known as a UTM). For this, you would want to use a free tool that can help you generate a UTM link. I recommend using UTM Base. This tool allows you to generate a tag at the end of your product link, where you can set the tag to be the name of the affiliate.
Or through a coupon with a unique code designed for the affiliate.
Both will enable you to see how your customers are finding you. Just make sure you connect your website with Google Analytics (a free tool by Google that analyses the performance of the traffic coming to your website)
Don’t worry. This might sound complicated, but it's actually not. And there's plenty of easy and quick tutorials online on how to set this up. For example, to link your website with Google Analytics, simple type "how to link my Google analytics with my website (inserting the name of your website design platform after)"
So like with any marketing effort, you need to be patient. It will take time to find and nurture a relationship with a pool of affiliate partners that can truly help boost sales. However, if prospects land on your website or enter your shop without having made a purchase, it's because they couldn't find the exact garment they wanted. Which means all your marketing effort goes to waste.
If a customer likes your products, but not the colour, or likes the colour, but not the style, then there's nothing even a successful affiliate strategy can help you with. So why not skip the guessing game, where you stock garments you bet your customer would want and instead let your customer tell you what they like.
If your answer is yes, that is every Menswear store owner's dream, but keep dreaming - maybe not! Check out RJ MTM to see how some companies are revolutionising the Menswear Apparel industry for small store owners.
Their goal is to switch from pushing set styles and fixed sizes to customers, to customers having control over exactly what they buy from your store.
With RJ MTM's simple to use in-store and on-the-go system, clothing shop owners and their sales staff can easily offer customers the option to adjust garment designs, colours, fabric weights, sizing and much more.
Cheers,
READ MORE
FAQs on affiliate marketing
By Shane Barker.
Q1. What is an affiliate marketing strategy?
A. Affiliate marketing is the process of hiring affiliates to promote your business and giving them a commission on every sale that they are responsible for. There are many ways in which you can use affiliate marketing and these are called affiliate marketing strategies.
An affiliate marketing strategy can also refer to the type of payment model that you choose for your affiliates. Some common types of affiliate payment strategies are pay-per-click, pay-per-lead, and pay-per-sale.
Q2. Which affiliate marketing strategy is the most effective?
A. The most commonly used and easiest affiliate marketing strategy is pay-per-click. Affiliates are paid a small commission on every click that they get on their promotional links. However, such leads may or may not convert, so that is a potential drawback.
You can, however, use deals and offers to convert such leads into customers. You can also ask your affiliates to promote the offers and bring in leads with purchase intent.
Q3. What are the advantages of affiliate marketing?
A. Affiliate marketing gives your affiliates an incentive to promote your business and makes them your brand advocates. The more people who promote your brand, the better your chances of getting new customers. So, the main advantage of affiliate marketing is that it can help you win more leads and improve your brand awareness.
Q4. Do affiliate marketing strategies work?
A. Yes, affiliate marketing strategies are known to work and many marketers use them to promote their business.
Q5. How can I create an affiliate marketing strategy?
A. To create an affiliate marketing strategy, you must first design and launch a good affiliate program. For this, you will need to determine a good payment model that you would like to follow to pay your affiliates. The key is to make the affiliate program lucrative enough for people to want to join, without it draining your budget.
So, an ideal affiliate marketing strategy would be one that is mutually beneficial for all parties.
Q6. Is affiliate marketing using paid media a good strategy?
A. It is only beneficial if the benefit derived from paid advertising is more than the cost. So, this is actually best determined on a case-by-case basis. However, affiliate marketing is a good technique in itself without the need to integrate it with paid advertising.
Q7. How can I maximize my affiliate marketing?
A. You can maximize the results of your affiliate marketing by providing your affiliates with lucrative deals and offers that they can promote. This will ensure that you not only get more clicks or leads but also gain more customers.
Q8. How do I become an affiliate marketer for beginners?
A. You should first select the field or niche in which you have some influence and then look for businesses in your niche that have affiliate programs. Then, you can compare the different programs and choose the most lucrative ones to join.
You can then use your website, social media, and other platforms to promote your affiliate brands and start earning from those referrals.
Q9. Can you get rich with affiliate marketing?
A. If you do it well and manage to get enough clicks/leads/sales then you can get rich with affiliate marketing. For many influencers, affiliate marketing is a full-time job that is enough to sustain them.
Q10. Where can I promote affiliate links?
A. Social media platforms and blogs are two of the best places to promote affiliate links. You can create engaging social media content and promote your affiliate links there. You can also choose to create blog posts on a topic in which you can add your affiliate links.
Ready to Generate More Sales?
There’s no doubt that affiliate marketing can help you attract customers and convince them to buy from you.
In fact, 38% of marketers consider affiliate marketing as one of the top customer acquisition methods.
But you need to realize that it can’t happen overnight. You need to choose the right affiliates, channels, and affiliate marketing strategies to boost conversions.
Have you ever used affiliate marketing for your business? Which strategy do you find to be the most effective? Please share with us in the comments below.
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