If you have been involved in e-commerce for some time, you are most likely familiar with the term “affiliate marketing.” But many people are not quite sure what it really is or how the process works.
Simply put, affiliate marketing is a performance-based marketing model that rewards partners for managing the desired action. These actions may include visiting the site, filling out an interest form and / or converting sales. This form of marketing can be an incredibly profitable low-risk way to promote your products.
To help you understand the real benefits of affiliate marketing, we have created a list of the 5 best benefits of affiliate marketing:
1. Affiliate Marketing Based on Productivity
The main advantage of an affiliate program is that it is completely performance-based. Because affiliates only pay a fee after the desired action has occurred, they are more motivated to manage the conversion you are looking for. This reduces any effort that drives traffic with virtually no value to your company, and also ensures that you get what you pay for.
2. It helps expand your audience.
Affiliates can be found in every market and product category that exists today. Regardless of whether you want to break into the retail industry or work for something more niche, such as antique handmade toys, there will always be relevant websites for approval.
The good news is that many of these branches will already have an established visitor base. These partnerships provide an opportunity to enter new markets, giving your brand a much stronger online presence. Think of these partners as expanding your current marketing or sales team.
3. Partners can enhance your reputation.
By working with reliable bloggers and reputable websites, you can improve the reputation of your brand and its products. These partners will uphold your products and, in our opinion, will further strengthen consumer confidence. While consumers are more likely to trust third-party opinions about content produced directly from a site selling this product at the purchase research stage. Consumers also have a certain level of trust in websites that they often use to recommend products.
4. It is cost effective
For many of the reasons listed above, affiliate marketing can be extremely cost effective. If you pay commissions only when the desired conversion occurs, you don’t throw out advertising funds on placements that have no proven value. In addition, attracting affiliates to new markets is an easy way to enter this market without the overhead of creating an entire marketing campaign, mitigating the need to invest in an unproven market for testing.
5. Affiliates can quickly scale your traffic (and sales)
In combination with other marketing efforts, attracting partners to your program will allow you to scale traffic faster. The more sites link to your pages, the more opportunities you will have to convert these users into paid clients.In addition, although affiliate links will not directly affect your search engine rankings, they will have a “halo effect” in terms of more people searching for your products and going to your pages, which is great for your ranking. In addition to a higher level of referral traffic, you can almost always expect an increase in your direct and organic traffic.
Affiliate marketing can be a very effective low-risk investment to help expand your small business marketing efforts. For the reasons listed here, affiliate marketing is almost always worth the investment and can lead your online store to new heights.