Did you know a well-executed affiliate marketing program can help boost sales revenue by 30%? Here are five reasons why you need to consider setting up a program for your company.
Did you know that affiliate marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways of driving sales and boosting your company’s conversions? That’s why over 81% of brands have made efforts to adopt an affiliate network in order to reap the vast rewards that these programs can yield.
What is affiliate marketing?
In short, affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing where a company rewards an affiliate for carrying out a pre-determined task for the business. The task usually involves driving traffic to a website or landing page where the affiliate will be paid upon each successful conversion.
In most cases, the publisher (affiliate) promotes a product or service using a unique link that sends traffic to the retailer’s website. Any subsequent sale will then be tallied towards the affiliate’s commission. In general, the commissions are settled either as a percentage fee for each sale or as a flat fee that has been agreed upon beforehand. With that said, here are five reasons why you need to consider an affiliate program for your business.
1 – Boost sales
It’s reported that a well-crafted affiliate marketing program can help boost revenue by a staggering 30%, which is an incredible statistic when you consider how simple and easy they are to set up.
The main reason these programs are so effective is that they massively extend your reach and expand your potential audience into new territories. Suppose your current marketing efforts are limited to your blog and social media channels. In that case, you are leaving a ton of money on the table as there are plenty of paying customers out there that may be totally unaware of your product or service.
You can see a great example of just how successful these methods are by taking a look at digital marketing expert Jesse Willms, who sold over $500m worth of products primarily through the use of affiliate marketing methods and PPC campaigns.
2 – Increased brand awareness
Not only will affiliates drive more sales to your company, but they will also help to increase your brand awareness. The more people you have promoting your message and your products, the more exposure your brand will receive.
Even if these customers don’t convert at first, they may sign up for your newsletter, which means you can market to them at a later date and potentially receive more sales that way. As you know, consumers prefer to buy from brands that they are already aware of – so the more affiliates you have spreading awareness around your brand, the better.
3 – Low risk
Now here’s the best part of the whole affiliate marketing industry for business owners. You only pay for successful sales. In other words, you pay for performance. If the affiliates don’t drive any sales, you don’t have to pay them. It’s as simple as that.
This motivates the affiliate marketers to go out and find as many customers as possible as they are mutually incentivized to bring business to your company and boost your sales.
Think about it, when you hire a sales/marketing team, you still have to pay them even if they don’t bring in any revenue. This can lead to a big headache later down the line and usually results in a lack of productivity. However, with affiliate marketers, that isn’t the case. This drastically reduces your financial risk and improves your cash flow, allowing you to focus on other aspects of your business and reinvest the cash into other departments.
4 – You get to control everything
Some people worry about affiliate marketing as they feel as though they are surrendering control of their business to external forces; however, that is a misconception. The truth is, you get to control almost every aspect of the deal, and the affiliates are pretty much at the mercy of your decisions when it comes to changes in your policies. You get to control things such as:
- The affiliates you work with and the ones you turn away
- The commission’s structure and how much you’re going to pay for each sale
- The type of marketing channels they are permitted to use
- Terms and conditions that state what an affiliate can and cannot do when mentioning your company
- The cap for how much an affiliate can earn using your program
5 – The SEO value
An effective affiliate marketing program has many benefits, but one of the most underreported is the potential boost it can bring in terms of SEO and organic traffic. Affiliate marketers can go a long way towards improving your overall SEO as they provide numerous backlinks to your site via their blogs, social media pages, websites, landing pages, and advertisements.
In general, inbound links are seen as a huge ranking factor in Google’s ranking algorithm (as long as they aren’t spammy); this is especially true when working with affiliates or influencers who post links on higher-ranked and more reputable sites.
