Starting an affiliate program is a great way to boost conversions and brand reach. However, it’s often difficult to take your affiliate business to the next level once it’s launched. Luckily, there are plenty of strategies you can use to improve your affiliate marketing program and increase sales.
In this post, we’ll introduce affiliate marketing and go over some of its benefits. Then, we’ll provide a list of tools and tips that you can use to enhance your affiliate program. Let’s get to work!
An Introduction to Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is when influencers, celebrities or marketers partner with businesses to promote products or services using unique links. Whenever a customer makes a purchase using an affiliate URL, that marketer gets a commission from that sale.
This can happen on a wide variety of platforms. You’ll often find affiliate links in blog posts and on social media channels such as TikTok, YouTube and Instagram:
Adding an affiliate program to your business plan can be an integral part of your overall marketing strategy. That’s because this model is low risk, and benefits both businesses and influencers alike.
Moreover, it can help your product reach a larger audience. Other advantages of affiliate marketing include:
- Builds recognition for your brand
- High return on investment (ROI)
- Low start-up costs
- Increases traffic to your website
It should come as no surprise that this model has exploded in recent years. According to Statista, affiliate marketing spending in the U.S. hovers around $8.2 billion as of 2022. This means that there is a large profit potential for your e-commerce business.
5 Tips for Enhancing Your Affiliate Program
Now that you know what affiliate marketing is and how you can benefit from it, let’s look at a few tools and tips you can use to enhance your program.
1. Create an Optimal Affiliate Program Page
Your website’s affiliate page is important because this is where potential partners learn about your program. It serves as a gateway between you and your future partners, and acts as a promotional tool to draw potential affiliates to your business.
The Green Kid Crafts website offers a good example of what an affiliate program page might look like:
This informative page includes a short description of the program and a call-to-action (CTA) button. Other vital elements you may want to include are:
- The details of your affiliate commission rate
- An explanation of how your program works
- Terms and conditions
- An embedded affiliate application form or a link to it
Providing these elements will help potential partners decide if they want to join. Then, they’ll be able to easily apply.
To create an embedded application form on your website, you can try using a plugin such as Gravity Forms:
This popular tool will allow you to create an affiliate signup form with custom fields. It’s ideal for beginners as you’ll be able to use a straightforward visual editor.
2. Recruit the Right Affiliates
Choosing the right affiliates is one of the most important steps when creating your program. These are the people that will help you grow your business, so they must be chosen wisely.
Ideally, you’ll want to work with affiliates who share your target audience. If they have a large following already, that’s great. Still, you won’t want to discredit the power of micro-influencers.
To help you decide if a potential affiliate is right for your program, it’s helpful to ask yourself a few questions. These might include:
- What products is this person already promoting?
- Has this affiliate worked in your industry before?
- Are they familiar with your target demographic?
- Will they damage or enhance your online reputation?
Considering these types of questions can help you create a vetting process in order to select only the most qualified people. However, recruiting affiliates can be time consuming.
If you’re pressed for time, you might consider working with an affiliate marketing agency. For instance, Grovia can help you recruit affiliates, influencers, and channel partners using its Partner Recruitment Platform:
There are other recruiting agencies that you can work with that are industry specific. That way, you’ll be able to enroll experienced partners within your niche.
3. Provide Adequate Incentives
If you run an e-commerce business, it’s smart to have money-saving strategies that help boost your bottom line. However, it’s also important to know when spending more is an investment. This is especially true when it comes to providing an advantageous incentive for your partners.
Affiliates won’t perform well if they don’t feel they’re being adequately compensated. This is why it’s important to set a commission rate that motivates partners to sell your product or service.
Fortunately, it’s possible to do so without compromising your net profits. You can choose your own compensation rate, but industry average falls between 5 and 30 percent of a sale.
Another strategy you can employ is offering higher rates for well-performing affiliates. At the end of the day, if your partners feel like they’re being fairly (and sometimes generously) compensated, you’ll likely see a higher ROI in the long run.
4. Communicate with Partners Often
Your relationship with your affiliates is crucial for your program’s success. Ultimately, communicating often with partners will be beneficial to both parties.
When you do, you’ll be able to have peace of mind knowing that your expectations are clear. Meanwhile, your affiliates will be better equipped to promote your products or services.
To optimize communication, consider setting up an affiliate manager to supervise your partners. If this doesn’t appeal to you, or you don’t have the funds to hire an extra team member, sending a regular newsletter is an excellent alternative.
This can help keep your partners in-the-know regarding any essential updates or new information about your product or service. Using an email marketing tool such as MailChimp can help you create a specific mailing list for your affiliate partners:
This will allow you to easily create email newsletter templates and set up a recurring message system. What’s more, this tool integrates seamlessly with most popular e-commerce plugins.
5. Test Your Landing Pages
A landing page is a single, standalone page that you can use specifically for your affiliate products. You can set it up so that visitors who click on affiliate links land on this page and hopefully make a purchase from there.
Your landing pages are crucial when it comes to getting conversions, so you’ll want to optimize every aspect of them. You can do so with A/B testing. Using this method you compare two different versions of your landing page against each other to see which one performs better.
You can use A/B testing to experiment and determine the various elements of a page. You are then able see which elements support better conversion rates and adjust your page accordingly.
To perform A/B testing for your affiliate landing pages, consider using a solution like Optimizely:
With this tool, you can set up control and variation versions, then use the resulting data to optimize your page. If you allow affiliates to use their own landing pages, you can also share your own testing insights with them (perhaps in your affiliate newsletter).
Conclusion
Taking your affiliate marketing program to the next level can be a challenge. By implementing best practices such as optimizing your affiliate program page and recruiting the right affiliates, you’ll be able to improve your conversion rates and grow your e-commerce business.
Do you have any questions about enhancing your affiliate marketing program? Let us know in the comments section below!
Image credit: Pexels.