If you’ve been in the ecommerce space for a little while, you’re most likely familiar with the term “affiliate marketing.” But many people aren’t quite sure what it actually is or how the process works. In its simplest terms, affiliate marketing is a performance-based marketing model that rewards affiliate partners for driving a desired action. These actions can include site visits, completion of a lead form and/or converted sales. This form of marketing can be an incredibly beneficial, low-risk way to promote your products.
Benefits of Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is performance-base
The main advantage of having an affiliate program is that it is entirely performance-based. Because affiliates are only paid a commission once the desired action has taken place, they’re more motivated to drive the conversion you’re looking for. This mitigates any efforts that drive traffic with little to no value to your company while also ensuring that you get what you pay for.
It helps broaden your audience
Affiliates can be found in every market and product category that exists today. Whether you’re looking to break into the retail industry or for something more niche like handcrafted vintage toys, there will always be relevant websites to align with. The great news is that many of these affiliates will already have an established visitor base. These partnerships grant the opportunity to expand out into new markets that you might not otherwise have had the bandwidth to explore or to further saturate your existing target markets, giving your brand a much stronger online presence. Think of these partners as an extension of your current marketing or sales team.
Affiliates can boost your reputation
By partnering with trusted bloggers and reputable websites, you can further the reputation of your brand and its products. These partners will champion your products and, in our opinion, will further solidify consumer confidence in your product or service. While in the research phase of a purchase, consumers are more likely to trust a 3rd party’s opinion over content produced directly from the site selling this product. Consumers also have a certain level of trust in websites they frequent for product recommendations.
It's cost effective
For many of the reasons listed above, affiliate marketing can be extremely cost effective. If you’re only paying commissions when the desired conversion occurs, you’re not throwing away ad dollars on placements that have no proven value. Furthermore, recruiting affiliates in new markets is an easy way to branch out into that market without the overhead cost of creating an entire marketing campaign, mitigating the need to sink money into an unproven market for testing.
Affiliates can rapidly scale your traffic (and sales)
In conjunction with your other marketing efforts, recruiting affiliates to your program will allow you to scale traffic faster. The more sites that link to your pages, the more opportunities you’ll have to convert those users into paid customers. Also, although affiliate links won't have a direct impact on your search engine rankings, it will have a 'halo effect' in terms of more people searching for your products and navigating to your pages - which IS great for your rankings. In addition to a higher level of referral traffic, you can almost always expect a boost to your direct and organic traffic as well.
