WHAT CAN A PROFESSIONAL AFFILIATE MARKETING PROGRAM DO FOR YOU?
At Gold Promotion we love performance based marketing, and incentivized sales & marketing programs as a whole. This is why we are such huge advocates for affiliate marketing programs, where advertisers pay only for the performance of their publishers. Publishers may be website operators, bloggers, or social media influencers; but you can think of them as your team of commission-only online sales reps. Affiliate marketing can be a great way to generate new customers, by leveraging outside audiences that are already in the market for your product or service, but may not be aware of your company or brand. It is also a great way to leverage promotional marketing, with trackable promo codes and coupons that can be made available for affiliates & influencers. A properly managed affiliate program can provide a fantastic return on investment by tapping into previously untapped sources for inbound traffic & customers; all with minimal up-front costs and performance based payouts.
WHICH INDUSTRIES ARE BEST SUITED FOR AN AFFILIATE MARKETING PROGRAM?
Affiliate programs can be a great source of revenue, both for online retail and ecommerce businesses as well as online and offline businesses looking to generate leads on a cost-per-action or pay-per-lead basis. Affiliate marketing programs can be found across a wide range of verticals, with some more prevalent than others. Some of the industries leveraging performance based affiliate programs are fashion, beauty, fitness, health, financials services, insurance, automotive, solar, software, electronics, home services, legal services, among many others. Affiliate marketing is now a standard in digital marketing, and a powerful way to increase inbound traffic & sales semi-passively.
ELEMENTS OF A SUCESSFUL AFFILIATE MARKETING PROGRAM
Define Your Target Audience
Who is your perfect customer and where do they spend their time online? It is important to understand your customers’ online behavior in order to properly asses the size of the audience and how they can be reached.
Understand the Costs
Determine the cost to setup an effective affiliate marketing program, and detail the ongoing costs such as the cost of the affiliate network or technology platform, landing pages & creative, and ongoing program management.
Networks & Affiliate Management Software
With so many affiliate networks, from the market giants like Rakuten, CJ, Amazon, and Ebay to smaller more specialized networks such as those that focus on a specific market, it is essential that you select the appropriate network or technology to drive your affiliate program.
Establish Commission & Affiliate Policy
Develop a cost model to determine the affiliate commission structure and cost of goods sold. This should be attractive to potential affiliate partners, while maintaining a healthy margin for your business. Outline an affiliate policy to protect yourself from unscrupulous affiliate activity.
Develop Offers & Creative
Create compelling offers for both consumers and affiliate partners, along with landing pages, banner ads, videos, or other collateral that is needed to drive the program. Quality content & creative both attracts new affiliate partners and enables your affiliate team to generate leads and sales.
Affiliate Outreach
After understanding the target audience and how they can be reached, lists must be developed for webmasters, bloggers, social media influencers, and other authorities in your industry. Execute an outreach strategy to reach your best partner prospects and create buzz about the program.
Relationship Management
Keeping existing affiliates happy, active, and giving them guidance on effective promotional strategies is instrumental to program success. It is important to understand your publisher accounts and foster those relationships through regular contact, education, support, and sales enablement.
Analytics & Attribution
Use data analytics with multi-channel attribution modeling in order to understand the true value of every partner and campaign. Advanced tracking allows you to intelligently credit each conversion and control promotional codes, ensuring proper attribution and maintaining program integrity.
Reporting & Optimization
Rely on reports to measure the KPI’s that are specific to your business and campaigns. Reporting tools help measure things like sales volume, sales by affiliate, traffic volume, activity index, activation, as well as outreach metrics and figures on affiliate recruitment efforts.
AFFILIATE MARKETING SERVICES
We partner with top brands and consumer businesses to launch, manage and improve affiliate marketing programs. Our multi-channel marketing approach is designed to leverage affiliate marketing for additional revenue, but not at the expense of other channels such as social, organic search and pay-per-click advertising. We ensure that a company’s affiliate program is integrated into its overall marketing strategy and focused on quality growth, profitability, transparency and sustainability.
Affiliate Program Management – Outsourced affiliate program management with a low program to manager ratio that allows our affiliate team to provide superior service to both clients and affiliates.
Affiliate Program Audits – Comprehensive program review focused on both assessing the quality of the current affiliate base and revenue, and setting the stage for driving the program to create more value.
Affiliate Program Launches – Custom development of all aspects of program strategy including network choice, commissions, cookie duration, terms and conditions, creative, staffing, reporting, and more.
Affiliate Program Re-Launches – Shut-down of existing underperforming affiliate program, adjustment of program strategy and parameters, and re-launch of a new program.
WHAT TO EXPECT FROM THE GOLD PROMOTION
The Gold Promotion team has years of experience in the affiliate marketing space, as both an affiliate publisher and with affiliate program management. In fact, we are still active publishers, with affiliate sites in a wide variety of markets driving both CPA leads (pay-per-lead) as well as ecommerce sales.
We love direct response & performance based marketing because it is measurable. This is why each of our client engagements begins with a thorough audit to determine both the current state of the program, if on exists, and to develop a data-backed strategy and plan for the future. Affiliate marketing audit goals include:
- Understand the business & goals
- Profile the current affiliate program
- Identify inefficiencies in the affiliate program
- Profile publisher accounts for quality metrics
- Look for revenue cannibalization & non-incremental revenue
- Provide new sources of high-quality affiliate revenue
- Determine effective strategy & roadmap for growth
Allow our team of seasoned outsourced affiliate program management professionals to handle the nurturing & growth of the affiliate segment. Rest easy knowing you have a trust-worthy partner to help grow your business.
