Affiliate marketing networks are often the forgotten part of a digital marketing strategy
Monday, November 2nd, 2009With all the headlines about how incredible Pay per click advertising is and the general hysteria that happens when the phrase Social media is uttered it’s easy to focus too much on individual tactics and lose sight of your overall digital marketing strategy.
The first part of the interactive Mix is about driving traffic. Some might call it eye balls but it is about building an audience of people who may not have been aware of you but are open to the kind of offer that you have. Affiliates can provide a readymade audience for you but are often overlooked by agencies and clients alike.
Basically speaking an affiliate is a site which provides content to build an audience. It can be content that is produced by the affiliate themselves or by third parties. The content builds the audience and the weight of the audience is what makes partnering with an affiliate appealing. Rather than just selling advertising on the site though, the affiliate promotes products on behalf of partners and is rewarded in the form of commission for success. Success could be defined in terms of traffic produced for partners but is more often than not defined in terms of actual sales that the affiliate creates from the audience.
Affiliates therefore include a series of product forms on their page which enable their audience to make purchases. Another popular affiliate technique is to link directly to a completed shopping basket which therefore allows the customer to quickly pay for their items on the partners site after making the decision to purchase on the affiliate site.
What makes affiliates more appealing than display advertising for many partners is that affiliates are only rewarded when the defined success KPI has been achieved. It therefore provides low risk to the partner and makes the choice of partner for the affiliate key, as they do not want to fill their site with partners whose offer is not of interest to their audience.
Some affiliates decide to keep the commission they earn from their partners but others give a portion of it back to their customers in the form of cashback. Sites such as Rpoints, CashBackKings, GreasyPalm, Quidco Quidco and TopCashBack operate their sites as member sites where the content they provide is made of from their partners. As each sale is made the commission is split between the two so that members earn cashback on each purchase. This promotes loyalty amongst the audience members to the affiliate and also provides a deal hungry audience for the partner to place their deal in front of.
Which type of affiliate is right for which client obviously hinges on the unique offer of each client and how it relates to the audience of the particular affiliate. Demographic profiling and geographic location all play a part in the decision but the key to any affiliate relationship is that if the partner doesn’t do well out of it, then neither does the affiliate.
