Ecom Access

As a merchant, deploying an affiliate marketing strategy can be a very profitable part of your marketing campaigns. What’s important to remember is that affiliate programs should make up just one part of your big picture in relation to marketing. Your business model and your brand are still the top priorities.

An affiliate program should be tailored so that it serves the needs of your business model, and not the other way around. A good benchmark is to achieve 30-40% of your online revenue from affiliate programs. If you start going beyond this benchmark, then you’re on the verge of taking on more of an affiliate role, and less of a merchant one.

Given that, you might then ask yourself what your retail philosophy is and then establish your priorities. It is good to have a clear idea of why you chose affiliate marketing and what kind of affiliates you are looking for as partners. Depending on how you answer these questions, chances are your philosophy
of affiliate marketing fits into one of three general categories.

Big Spender
Some merchants seek quick results, and are not afraid to put out the expenditure to get those results. They generally work with ‘super affiliates’ in an effort to maximize results quickly and create some buzz around their affiliate program. You’ll often find these merchants at industry conferences, and sponsoring parties at these events to educate affiliates about their program.
They often spend significant amounts of money to get the top-performing affiliates into their affiliate programs, and do so by offering high commissions, gifts and plenty of other incentives.
These programs can deliver results quickly. They also make it costly to maintain relationships, and your program may end up relying on just a few choice affiliates.

Relationship Focus
For brands that are looking for more of a longtail approach, building relationships is key to this strategy. Ensuring that affiliates have the right tools and all of the resources they need to effectively promote your products helps them to become better affiliates, which, in turn, increases your brand awareness and your profit margins.

These kinds of programs concentrate on reaching out to affiliates to give them support and guidance, as well as providing them with marketing tools, like banners and widgets.

A measured approach is sometimes used, in which trial periods can be utilized to evaluate an affiliate’sperformance. Once top performers are pinpointed, they are rewarded with better commissions. To do this, you will requirean advanced affiliate marketing software solution to track these metrics, and obtaining this type of software will also help to maintain the faith that affiliates have in the program.
Although your results may be somewhat gradual, creating relationships with your affiliates will help to provide better stability and a wider base of loyal affiliates.

Necessary Evil
Some merchants see affiliate marketing as a necessary evil. Their competitors are doing it, and it’s really just another sales tactic. When it is seen this way, little to no relationship is made with affiliates and they generally end up being viewed as freelance salespeople.

As a result of this, these programs have simpler commission structures that apply to all affiliates, with very little support and basic affiliate tracking software. While they require very little overhead, this approach makes it difficult to build a presence in the community, and especially difficult to attract super affiliates.

The Bottom Line
Affiliate marketing is a cost effective way to drive online sales. There are so many products and services available for sale on the Internet it can be difficult to make your mark in this marketplace. Shape your business model with this in mind and, consequently, your etail philosophy.

Your affiliate program should be shaped with that philosophy in mind. Without matching these two aspects of your business model, you’ll constantly be struggling to make one match the other, and may end up getting frustrated by the entire process. So, before attempting to establish the direction of your affiliate program, make sure to closely examine those original four points I brought up earlier:

* What is your retail philosophy?
* What are your priorities?
* Why did you choose affiliate marketing?
* What kind of affiliates are you looking to partner with?

Armed with the answers to these questions, you’ll be ready to create an affiliate marketing strategy that’s just right for your business.

Tags: affiliate marketing software, affiliate marketing strategies, etail

-->