How to Use Affiliate Marketing to Level Up Your Ecommerce Strategy Leverage affiliate marketing as an ecommerce merchant, vendor or advertiser looking to increase your conversions and sales.
By Gala Grigoreva Edited by Amanda Breen
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Ecommerce continues to gain relevance as people find it more convenient to shop online, especially when 2020's pandemic hit. Now, the ecommerce vertical is 2021-ready. But the initial obstacle remains: How to position a given product before the precise audience?
To remove this barrier and grow customer reach, you need to know a thing or two about affiliate marketing and advertising networks for ecommerce players.
How ecommerce players can leverage affiliate marketing
Imagine there's a digital shop selling children's bikes, and it's about to launch an international seasonal sale campaign. The store has a variety of options: The owner can place paid search ads, approach a multinational agency for sales conversion or hire an international marketing team.
What works most, however, is localized and personalized promotion. And this is where a partnership between ecommerce players and affiliate marketers becomes profitable. See, thanks to the influence they have on their viewers, affiliates are the pros of campaign optimization and local targeting.
How does it work? A blogger or website owner (an affiliate) recommends a merchant's goods and gets paid each time a user buys goods via this recommendation. Purchase is the only action that is paid.
Related: 8 Things I Wish I'd Known Before Starting Affiliate Marketing
Advantages of using affiliate marketing in ecommerce
If you're wondering why merchants should take advantage of this style of online marketing, here are some of the perks:
- Generates the right leads to your website.
- Helps you keep track, control and measure your marketing success.
- Gives you serious value for your money since it's performance-based.
- Widens your brand awareness and business reputation.
- Drives repeat sales.
How to promote an ecommerce offer
With the aid of a fitting associate offer and promotion strategy, you can maximize leads and sales from your advert.
Whether yours is a small store or a business empire, to get the most out of your ecommerce affiliate programs, here's what to keep in mind.
1. Come up with an ecommerce offer
Before you start looking for affiliates, you should decide what you are going to promote and what results you expect. This will be your offer. So what exactly is an offer? It's an arrangement provided by an advertiser to attract individual marketers. It may detail things like your brand or business, the commission rate, shipping information, product descriptions, landing page, creatives or images related to the product.
2. Direct the right products to the right people
One of the most common mistakes to avoid is shoving the whole ecommerce website down the throat of potential clients. Your efforts, instead, should be directed toward meeting their demands. Identify the right products that meet the needs of each set of audiences.
Users are quick to disregard unspecific ads and campaigns that are irrelevant to their current needs. This is why online advertising needs to be targeted with pinpoint accuracy.
3. Be time and location sensitive
Time and location are two critical factors in ecommerce. As you plug into a partner program, give consideration to time and location when developing your campaign.
Pay attention to differences in time zones. When are prospects most likely to see your ads? These ads should be shown only to those within the geographical reach of your distribution services.
4. Prepare your landing page
First off, your home page shouldn't be your landing page, mainly because a majority of viewers won't pay attention for long, as we all get distracted easily these days. Remember that the ultimate goal is to convert as many leads as possible to sales.
You want to focus on the main headline (make it grabby and punchy), social proof, CTA (call-to-action), eye-catching media content (images, videos, etc.) and compelling copy (containing benefits and product features). Timers, containers, lots of white space — these are the little details that make your landing pages even more effective.
Related: 3 Tips to Get Started with Affiliate Marketing
5. Provide your affiliate marketers with visuals
The more attention it grabs, the better. The higher the quality, the better. Visual content often works better than words. Or combine the two masterfully, and you have an affiliate offer that marketers are dying to promote.
Affiliate marketing in ecommerce calls for high-res images visualizing the products, their descriptions, their benefits and sometimes social proof. That's why you should always create and share high-quality visuals with your publishers.
6. Think of how to track your affiliate offer
To find exactly how affiliate marketing impacts your ecommerce site, you need to have a distinct idea of how many people click on your ads or links, how many of those clicks turn into prospects and how many of those turn into conversions. Tools such as Google Analytics or traffic trackers can provide you with the needed analysis to measure the success of your affiliate campaign.
7. Choose a promotion strategy (or let affiliate network experts do it for you)
Another vital aspect is choosing a suitable promotion strategy for your offers (that's if you're working with publishers directly). If you're going with an advertising network like Google, you provide all necessary information about your offer, and affiliate marketing experts decide how to best promote it. The same is fair for affiliate networks.
Creating the best affiliate offers starts with the right products. Identify which segment of people would be drawn to your products and services. Draw patterns from their online behavior, target them where they can be found and tailor your ad to their biases.
Related: This Is Why Teenagers Are the Affiliate-Marketing Experts
This covers working with pubs they are in constant contact with. When you understand the target market, you can create a highly productive affiliate marketing campaign in a collaboration that results in increased leads, conversions and sales.
