Why an affiliate program is essential for your online store

Do you want to drive sales in your online store? Ensuring that you have eyeballs on your brand is essential for your long-term success.

Enter affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is when you get different websites and content creators to promote your products to their own audience. In the industry, those websites and content creators are called affiliates.

If the affiliate successfully refers someone to your store (i.e, someone buys something via their referral link or by using a coupon code you’ve given them) then you reward the affiliate that referred them with a commission on the sale.

In order to track these sales effectively, it’s a wise move to use affiliate tracking software so you can see which affiliates are driving revenue. Links are automatically generated and it’s easy to assign coupon codes.

The benefits of affiliate marketing

There are several benefits to affiliate marketing – increasing revenue is probably the most important when it comes to getting results and growing your business. However, it’s more than only that – you pay for performance, get a higher return on ad spend (ROAS), you can get in front of new audiences, increase your conversion rate, raise brand awareness, and increase your order value.

Pay for performance:

With many traditional marketing channels, you are required to pay without any performance required. Take paid search for example. With that you often pay per click, but that doesn’t mean someone will go on to purchase something. However, with affiliate api marketing you only pay if an affiliate refers someone who purchases from your store. So if an affiliate isn’t performing, they won’t earn any commission and you won’t be out of pocket. This is one of the biggest benefits to having an affiliate program.

Targeted and unique promotions:

When marketing your brand, sometimes you are limited with the options. Take a paid ad on Facebook – there are many rules about what you can and can’t do to promote your brand. Affiliate marketing has far more options when it comes to promoting your brand. There are so many different affiliate types who provide their audiences with different content types. Blog posts, banners, testimonials, social media posts, and video are just some of the ways you can work with affiliates to promote your products.

Increase your conversion rate:

You might have already seen the statistics around word-of-mouth marketing, but here are a few to get you interested. 90% of people would trust a brand recommendation, even from a stranger. And word of mouth is more effective than paid ads. And that’s exactly what affiliate marketing is, word of mouth marketing. When people see your brand being recommended on a website, they will be more ready to buy than someone who comes to your site via other channels.

Increasing revenue:

Because people are more ready to buy from a word of mouth recommendation, this can help to increase your revenue. Working with websites and other content creators who are recommending your brand to others will increase your revenue because you are getting your brand out to their audience, and there is no limit to how many affiliates you can work with.

Get in front of new audiences:

As a brand, finding more of the people who might be interested in buying from you is essential. Working with different website types and content creators will help you to get in front of new audiences as they already have them built-in. For example, working with a comparison website, or a cashback website could attract new buyers who wouldn’t have previously come across your brand before in a more traditional setting.

Raise brand awareness:

Brand awareness is key to having a successful brand. If nobody knows about you, nobody can buy from you. You can have the best website in the world, but if nobody knows about it, then generating revenue will be difficult.

Whether you’re a small to medium-sized business or a large online store, you can use affiliate marketing to gain brand awareness.

If you work with different websites and content creators and they are promoting you to their own built-in audiences, people will start to know who you are and recognize your brand.

Increase your order value:

If you work strategically, you can easily increase your average order value using affiliate marketing. If you know that on average, people spend $50 each time they purchase on your site, you can work with affiliates to bring this total up using coupons or special promotional campaigns. For example, with a coupon you could issue one to your affiliates that is for a $5 discount off of a $60 spend. A promotional offer might be free shipping on spends over $60. Then, you push your average order value up.

You are in control:

You get to choose who you work with to promote your brand. If you only want to work with influencers, that’s possible. If you want to work with a mix of different affiliate types, then that’s ok too. You can even work with your own happy customers as well! The world is your oyster.

Get started today

These benefits can all help you to grow your brand quickly remember, you only pay for performance, and an affiliate program will help to drive  more revenue and increase your conversion rates.

Now you know why it’s essential to have an affiliate program and what the benefits are, how do you get started? Choosing the right affiliate tracking software to make it easy for you to spend time on other things is the first step. Having a turnkey affiliate tracking solution will help you to automate affiliate links and track your real revenue from your affiliates. Once you have that, it’s time to get set up and recruit affiliates to promote your brand.