How Affiliate Marketing Helps You to Boost Your E-commerce Sales?
Savvy online sellers use affiliate marketing to establish market share, build customer trust and, yes, boost E-commerce sales. Find out how.
Do you run an eCommerce store, but haven’t stepped into affiliate marketing yet?
Are you wondering what in the Hell affiliate marketing is?
The idea behind affiliate marketing is that you promote other people’s products, often through an affiliate network, earning a commission if people actually end up buying thanks to your marketing. ~Neil Patel
Savvy eCommerce entrepreneurs use it to amass their own portion of market share and to ensure customer loyalty.
You’ve probably heard of many popular affiliate marketing channels already; some of the more prominent affiliate marketing tools for ecommerce include Amazon, Avantlink, Clickbank, Impact Radius, Rakuten, and ShareASale.
Some 40% of US retailers have cited affiliate programs as their leading customer acquisition channel.
Further research indicated consumers that made their first purchase with a brand through an affiliate in 2016 resulted in a 21% higher average order value and 58% higher average customer revenue. These new customers came in at a rate 7% higher than other channels and began showing their value within the first year with a 19% higher rate of orders.
The prevalence of affiliate marketing by business organizations today all point to the fact that it really works especially when E-commerce is involved. Billions of dollars are paid out by organizations for affiliate marketing all because it is a really effective marketing strategy that can boost sales and profit margin of any business entity.
Do you have an E-commerce website, and you’ve been scouring ways to improve sales?
Here are 7 ways affiliate marketing can help boost your E-Commerce sales.
1. Affiliates Help to Represent Your Brand:
It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, you have competitors producing similar products and targeting a similar audience.
This is exactly why affiliate marketing is so important to you as a seller. Think of affiliate marketers as brand ambassadors reaching out to projecting a good image for your organization.
For a business to be profitable, it must first be perceived as reliable by their prospective clients and this perception by the public does not come naturally, it has to be achieved through a rigorous marketing drive. Every business needs credible representatives to do the hard work of letting others know that your product is better than your competitors.
2. Helps to Build Strong Relation With Customers:
Every business needs customers because they are the source of life of the business.
Affiliate marketers are helpful in bridging the gap between seller and buyer and ensure both party maintain a cordial relationship which would be beneficial to both parties.
Affiliate marketers are instrumental in convincing prospective customers to make the necessary investment in purchasing your product or service. The reason affiliates work so well is because good ones often provide useful content that helps your target demographic. By offering good solutions to your audience, they are also seen as far less salesy than your company simply offering it’s product.
3. Greater Exposure to Your Products and Services:
In the business world, there is a principle that states that the consumer is king. To that end knowing where and how to reach your customers is kind of a big deal.
Affiliates can help put your products closer to the buyer and thereby ensure increased sales and profitability. It’s not just about ‘greater exposure’ — it’s about greater exposure to the right people.
Say for example you were the brand manufacturer of a cool camping product. Well, you probably wouldn’t want your affiliate marketers’ website to be geared towards children’s apparel. However; having your products under Amazons’ camping category could be pretty powerful.
4. Affiliate Marketing can be Extremely Cost Effective:
Affiliate marketing is the process of you choosing and working with other people and businesses that market your products and send traffic to your site. You pay those people or businesses, called affiliates, a commission on each conversion. It’s a great marketing tactic for small businesses because you only pay commissions for sales after they occur. The affiliate themselves stands to be motivated by the commission to be earned that they put in more effort into marketing the product to earn more.
5. Helps to Gain Customer’s Trust:
Human beings are skeptical and emotional.
The average person is more likely to make a purchase based on information perceived to be non-biased ie: from someone other than an employee of your business. Through the interpersonal communication that ensues between the marketer and buyer prior to purchase, trust can be built and this can have a lasting effect on the sales of the product. The buyer himself might become an unofficial marketer of the product due to their interaction with the affiliate marketer.
6. Multiple Paths to Conversion:
Affiliate marketing is a strategy that opens many leads for sales generation.
For instance, through the activities of affiliate marketers working for a business entity, more people can be reached with a product or advised to check out the product website perhaps to check out the features of the product or similar products on offer by the company. The more leads the company can gather through the activities of their affiliate marketers then the more conversion that they are likely going to generate as well.
You can set up different strategies around these paths, for example;
- Registrations, Email Sign-Ups, Giveaway entries
- Sales, Orders, Subscriptions
- Conversion Rate
- New vs Returning customer
- Average Order Value
- Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
7. Provide Speedy Results:
The fastest way to market any product or service is through affiliate marketing. The good thing is that it can be done online through social media and it can be done offline through such means as door to door marketing, road show/exhibition etc. Hence, affiliate marketing has maintained its status as an efficient way to generate speedy results for any product. If you want to test a new product to gauge its performance, affiliate marketing is a good option and if you also want to boost the sales of an existing product, affiliate marketing is also the answer.
There is so much potential in affiliate marketing for any business. For more great information on how it can be applied to your business; you can check https://www.onbiz.com/affiliate-website/.
