Your Guide to eCommerce Growth with Affiliate Marketing

eCommerce is a highly competitive field. The fight for potential customers is brutal, as everyone looks for ways to boost their conversion rates and revenues, constantly spending generous marketing budgets on promotion.

Growing in such hostile environments can be tricky. Affiliate marketing programs offer a budget-friendly alternative to reaching your sales targets and maintaining a decent return on investment.

In today’s article we will share the key insights, tips, and tricks, shared during our recent webinar focused on eCommerce growth with affiliate marketing.

The role of affiliate marketing in eCommerce sales

There are many benefits of affiliate marketing that eCommerce businesses could utilize.

• Expanding reach and visibility through social media influencers and professional affiliates.
• Driving marketing costs down as affiliate marketing operates on a performance-based model, meaning that partners get paid only for conversions, and not the number of eyeballs they reached.
• Social proof you get from partners you work with is something that is very hard to achieve through traditional advertising channels. If you vet your publishers and pay attention to who gets to share your affiliate links, your brand will be associated with those trusted affiliates. Those partner followers, in turn, will be more inclined to try out your products as they’ll be recommended by someone they have faith in.
• Explosive scalability. Rapid scalability is something that is very hard to achieve and is usually prohibitively expensive. If you’re only targeting your existing clients and their look-alikes, you’ll have trouble securing the aggressive growth that you might need to hit your targets. Something unique that affiliate partnerships unlock is quick access to new target audiences and people you possibly do not even consider as potential customers. Your affiliate network does all the heavy lifting of content planning, creation, and posting, whereas you simply need to track and payout affiliate commissions and fulfill incoming orders.

Boosting eCommerce sales with affiliate software: Tapfiliate example

Using the right software will help you bring all affiliate marketing strategies to life easier and faster. Besides automation that saves time of your team, the technology offers a range of features that eCommerce can utilize to their advantage.

White Label affiliate portal

The affiliate portal is the central spot for marketers to manage and make ad-hoc changes to their affiliate programs.

If you want to build trust with publishers and strengthen your brand, you can customize the portal with the White Label feature.

The default portal will show you Tapfiliate’s logo, but with White Label, you can personalize it by adding the following:

• Your own logo
• Preferred colors
• Your domain
• Sender name
• Sender email

Default email newsletters go out from the software vendor’s email domain, which may not be an issue for you but can confuse your partners.

Content creators and other affiliates are constantly bombarded with offers to join partner networks and get passive income by working with different brands. Imagine them registering with your eCommerce brand and then getting notifications from someone else. The less confusion partners have, the more successful your affiliate campaigns will be.

Tip: The White Label functionality can be turned on and off, so it’s up to you whether to use it in your affiliate program.

Signup page

Potential affiliates can be registered with your eCommerce affiliate marketing campaigns in two different ways:

• You add them manually through the system
• They sign up directly via a landing page

The signup page can be White Labeled, too, to support your branding and help you boost new registrations.

Among the customizable options are:

• Link to the company website
• Language
• Welcome message
• Showing or hiding the commission structure
• Terms and Conditions
• Color scheme for interface elements (e.g.б descriptions and buttons)

There are also turn-on/off options to allow search engines to index the signup pages.

Play with the setting depending on your strategy and vision. If you want the program to be more exclusive, turn the indexation off. If you’re looking to have a larger number of affiliate partners, then this can be your helper in getting to the desired number. Recruiting and maintaining affiliates can be tough sometimes, so every little helps.

Tracking influencers using coupons

eCommerce businesses can build affiliate relationships with different types of partners. Affiliates can be:

• Website owners
• Bloggers
• Social media influencers
• Coupon websites
• Cashback websites

In terms of affiliate tracking, affiliate links and coupons are the two instruments used to monitor and evaluate partner performance, and to calculate payouts for the conversions they bring in. You can assign a unique coupon to the partner and use it for tracking, nothing else, such as an affiliate link is required.

Coupons vs affiliate links

Some companies only generate affiliate links to publishers and miss out on coupons’ potential.

There can be situations where a coupon is preferred and more convenient than an affiliate link. Not all types of partners, for example, coupon sites, will be able to thrive with links.

Social media influencers may also prefer coupons as you can add them to the visual post you’re making and it looks nice and neat, and easy to remember in the description.

Customers may not go back to the partner’s post to search the affiliate link, but they’ll remember the coupon name and activate it during checkout. As a result, you’ll get the referred lead, and the affiliate will not miss out on the rightfully deserved commission.

Setting up extra commissions to achieve eCommerce growth with affiliate marketing

Some affiliate marketers stick to a single commission type that works best for their partnership model. There is nothing inherently bad about it, but such strategy may hinder your growth.

The most common commission types for eCommerce to use:

1. One-time

2. Recurring

3. Lifetime

4. SKU-based

Utilizing a combination of commissions and creating bonus commissions and rewards for your top partners allows you to mix and match affiliate strategies and keep all your publishers happy.

Besides satisfying different partner groups, commission types can serve you in achieving short-term or long-term business needs. For example, if you have too much stock of a particular product and you can’t afford to run an aggressive discount campaign for it, you can recruit affiliates to help. Naturally, partners will need extra motivation which will come in the form of SKU-based commission rates.

Everyone selling the particular item will be getting extra revenues from conversions, and you will get rid of extra stock while maintaining your margins and profitability. A perfect win-win!

Product synchronization: How to use market feeds

Market feeds are perfect instruments for working with comparison website types of affiliate partners.

The product feed is an XML file that contains information about all your products, and it’s updated in real-time.

Tip: If your product becomes out-of-stock, it won’t be visible in the file.

This XML file contains a wide range of product-related data, including the product ID, description, image, availability, pricing, brand, color, product type, and other information.

This XML file can be exported and added as a marketing asset on your affiliate portal, allowing access to it for all interested affiliates.

Tip: The product feed is not something all affiliates will need or want access to, so you can select a number of partners who will be able to view it.

Metadata

You can use metadata to improve affiliate results.

Exposed meta data can be used by affiliates who want to analyze their performance and results to work out strategies to tailored their promotion methods and perform even better.

Choosing the best affiliate software to facilitate eCommerce growth

Affiliate marketing industry relies heavily on technology, but not all affiliate tracking solutions are the same. Here are the key aspects to pay attention toin order to select the right tool among the wealth of affiliate products.

#1 Feature set

First of all, look at the set of functionality that you’ll require. Create a list of must-haves and good-to-haves.

Tip: When you look at the affiliate program solutions out there, make sure you only focus on what really matters for your business. Don’t go after the flashy tools that others are using or promoting.

Here are the features that the majority of affiliate marketers have to have:

• Dashboards and reports to keep track of everything that’s going on in real-time.
• Automated tracking and attributions to save your team’s time and nervous system.
• Automated onboarding to streamline partner recruitment.
• Flexible commissions to ensure you can cater to different types of campaigns, affiliates, and product launches.
• Integrations with third-party solutions to create a seamless workflow with the rest of your marketing infrastructure.
• In-platform chat to be able to reach out to affiliates directly with mass notifications or custom messages and build rapport.

Never used Tapfiliate to track affiliate marketing performance? Try all the features:

👉 get a 14-day free trial here

#2 Company

As you go through the selection process, look at the vendors you’re considering too.

We’re not talking about things like market shares and revenues, but rather what type of clients they deal with (the size and industries), how long they’ve been on the market for and what people are saying on review sites.

Affiliate management solution is a serious investment, even if the license cost is not high. Your entire affiliate program will be locked in there, so you need to have a reliable software that performs well and a company that’s focused on improving it over time.

#3 Technical support

Any decent technology solution has some form of technical support. When choosing products for your business, check the formats of technical assistance that are available to you.

For example, some vendors only offer email support, others do live chats. There is also an issue of prioritising your case that can be regulated by a priority queue.

Tapfiliate, by the way, has all those options, plus a dedicated partner manager for selected pricing plans.

#4 How-to content

Good vendors these days provide lots of materials and content for their prospects and existing clients to go through.

• Company blog
• Customer portal
• User guides
• E-books
• Videos

While not all of it may be necessary, it signals to clients that the company is interested in their success and wants to educate or share knowledge with them.

Even the simplest solutions can be confusing at first, so you might want to browse the user guide on your own to see what functionality is available and what are the best ways to configure it.

#5 Testing

You have to do testing to make informed decisions on the solutions you’re evaluating.

Don’t rely solely on marketing materials and demos you see. Even an hour or two of testing will give you a far more accurate experience of what working with the solution will feel like.

Watch the full webinar on YouTube

Enjoyed the summary blog post? Please watch the full webinar on YouTube and sign up not to miss all the upcoming podcast episodes, webinars, and other videos where we invite experts to share valuable insights about all things eCommerce and affiliates.

Want to check out what Tapfiliate can do for you? Get a 14-day free trial here