Ecom Access

When the economy slows down, marketing becomes an even more important investment. After all, with consumer dollars in circulation, capturing every dollar you can not only adds to your profitability, but to your competitive edge. Of course, with fewer consumer dollars in circulation, controlling your marketing expenditures and maximizing ROI is also more important than ever.

The performance-based model of affiliate marketing, then, makes it a particularly opportune online acquisition strategy. Because you pay only for results, you remain in complete control of your online marketing spend.

Well, recently, I attended the Bet Markets conference in Vienna where I delivered a session on leveraging affiliate marketing to gain both control over your online marketing spend and added intelligence into what strategies are working best. Although the presentation is geared specifically toward online sportsbook operators, the message is something that I would share with all kinds of ecommerce merchants.

In my presentation, I explained not only how an affiliate program can be particularly valuable during a recession, but what merchants should know about the affiliate marketplace if they want to get the most out of this acquisition channel. Specifically, I went over:

1. understanding and managing the merchant-affiliate relationship,
2. determining where affiliate marketing fits into your overall acquisition strategy,
3. and how to choose and affiliate software that can help you best manage your program according to you business model.

This is the Powerpoint from my presentation. It’s also available for download here; simply click through and you’ll find a download button on the landing page.

Tags: affiliate program, affiliate software, bet markets vienna, marketing budget, recession, relationships management