Maximizing Sales with eCommerce Affiliate Marketing: Interview with Affiliate Nerd Out Host

eCommerce businesses are on a constant lookout for new ways to boost conversion rates. As a tool that generates up to 16% of all eCommerce orders in North America, affiliate marketing is a worthy candidate to help on this mission.

Today, we’re sharing key insights and thoughts from the recent podcast episode with Dustin Howes, the host of the “Affiliate Nerd Out” podcast, the creator of online courses on affiliate management, and an excellent specialist in the field.

During the discussion, Dustin and Yuliya Belenkova, the CEO at Tapfiliate, covered several topics that help eCommerce brands launch and scale their affiliate marketing programs, including the current state of the industry, some of the best ways to find and motivate your affiliate networks, automation secrets, and more.

Let’s go!

The evolution of the affiliate marketing industry

Back in the day, coupon sites were a big part of affiliate marketing. There were, unfortunately, many instances of fraudulent activity on such websites, for example, cookie stuffing and false clicks. However, many of them did a great job and helped companies move forward and build brand awareness.

As social media began to grow into what it is today, many turned to influencer marketing, where social media stars would direct traffic to the website by sharing their first-hand experiences with the products or services.

At first, the worlds of influences and affiliate marketing weren’t associated in any kind of way, despite being closely related. Slowly, both brands and influencers themselves started to see value in working together, and a new version of affiliate marketing was born.

Backed by rapid technology development, affiliate marketing grew into a $17 billion industry.

How does affiliate marketing work in the eCommerce space?

eCommerce platforms are places where consumers purchase products. Affiliate and influencer marketing is what drives customers to those platforms.

For instance, we have a popular YouTube vlogger who talks about a new vacuum cleaner in their videos. This vlogger leaves an affiliate link in the description, viewers click on it, and proceed to making a purchase on the eCommerce website. As a result, the YouTube star gets recognition for this conversion and is awarded a commission.

Tip: The way companies work with influencers these days is mostly through a CPA model where the partner is getting a reward for the traffic they bring in. Even 7-10 years ago things were different. Influencers used to get a flat fee for talking about the product, and that was it. Today, their compensation for the partnership is linked directly to how much traction they create for the brand.

The best way to find the right affiliate partners

Identifying the best partners who would genuinely support your brand and focus not only on the affiliate commission but also growing and evolving together over the years is not that easy.

Today, affiliates have more options than ever, as 81% of brands globally are estimated to have affiliate partner programs. The demand for great publishers is ever-rising. As a result, the best of the best partners can be picky and work only with companies they truly align with. This means that eCommerce Affiliate Programs need to stand out and work twice as hard to find and attract content creators.

Here is the checklist of things to do to make that happen.

#1 Competitive analysis

You don’t want to copy what everyone else is doing, but you also don’t want to be completely unaware of what’s going on on the market.

Your potential affiliates will be comparing your offering with everyone else’s, and it needs to grab their attention.

Google your key competition, see what their affiliate programs look like (and if they even have them), join these programs to understand the commission rates and other reward structures, and look up affiliate sites as well. Analyze what’s attracting your target audience to those programs.

Once you have all the data on eCommerce affiliate programs collected, answer the two questions:

1. Can you beat the financial offers from others and still be profitable?
2. What can you offer besides a high commission rate to incentivize publishers to join your program over somebody else’s?

#2 Create a partner persona

When affiliate marketers are finished with competitors, the next big task is to create a partner persona which is essentially the same as an ICP – ideal customer profile.

• Who would be the perfect fit for your program?
• Who is going to be the most effective in helping you reach your goals?
• What are the titles of those people?
• What is their motivation?
• How do we get ahold of them?

Your goal at this step is to get a clear picture of who this partner is before you go out and start promoting your online business and the affiliate program.

#3 Get their attention

It makes little sense to launch a partner program if nobody’s going to know you have one, right?

Once you know what competition is doing, and you’ve tailored your commission rates, non-monetary rewards, and other bits of the program; and once you understand who your perfect partner is, it’s time to get yourself out there and recruit the best affiliates.

Great way to do it is by reaching them via multiple channels:

• Social media posts and DMs
• Email newsletters and campaigns
• Affiliate landing page on the website
• Offline events

Pro tip: Don’t try to reach too many people with generic messages

Talk to successful affiliate partners and ask them how many incoming messages and calls they receive every day.

They’re most likely tell you that they’re constantly bombarded with offers to join affiliate networks, get sent affiliate links to work with, and are pitched high commission rates and online revenue.

A generic message screams that you didn’t put any effort into it. If you’re planning to nurture a sustainable and long-term partner network and you want to work with top talent and people who make a difference, then you need to customize every message you send to a new partner.

Yes, it takes time, and yes, you’ll still be ignored a lot. But if you want to make it right from the start and not lose your chances with the best of the best, then you need to invest time and effort in it.

Create a wish list

One strategy to target the best of the best is creating a wish list.

It should be a rather small list of the best affiliate partners who you really want to join your program, whether because they’re great at boosting conversion rates or their association with your brand is going to elevate your positioning.

Have this list in front of you at all times, and aim to reach a few people from that list every week. You can continue gently poking them every once in a while until they either give you a hard No or sign up for your affiliate marketing campaign.

Your goal here should be not to push them too hard, so they block you, but not let them forget about you either.

Also, when you’re working on your eCommerce affiliate marketing strategy and planning the outreach, factor in the responses that you will be getting from partners. Handling their replies and taking the next steps is also important and time-consuming, so you need to plan for those activities when estimating workload.

#4 Focus on the long-term strategy

Avoid unrealistic onboarding goals, as you’ll likely be disappointed and demotivated.

Affiliate marketing is not a quick fix for your eCommerce business. Surely, sometimes a single product review by a popular social media influencer can make a world of the difference. In most cases though, expect plan to see the results of your affiliate marketing efforts.

Working with affiliate partners and building social proof via online publishers takes time, and that’s okay. As weeks and months of your work go by, you’ll start getting new sales with virtually no involvement on your end. But to get to this point, you need to do a fair share of work.

How to motivate affiliate partners to sell more

Partnering with top affiliates is not enough for your program to grow sustainably. In order to achieve that, your partners need to be actively selling your products and services to potential customers in their audiences.

Engagement with publishers can be tough, especially at first when you haven’t given them any rewards yet. After the first few sales and commission payouts, your relationships with affiliates will start to develop faster, and you can hope for more active promotion on their end.

There is a fine line in those first weeks between not begging or chasing them too much at the risk of irritating them but also not leaving them so you won’t miss out on deals and sales.

Here is what you can do to accelerate the process and motivate partners to be more active.

Create incentive bonuses

For example, give $50 or $100 bonus for any first sale your partner brings, even if it’s only a $20 conversion.

The goal here is to get the ball rolling and to give the partner a taste of what it feels like to get a commission from working with you. You might end up in the negative at that point if the bonus is higher than your earnings, but again, the primary goal is to “activate” the partner and start actively working with them. It might be worth losing a little now to gain a lot later.

Contests

Make it a contest among your partners to add a bit of friendly competition and inspire more participation. For instance, offer $200 to someone who creates the best piece of content in a given month.

You can limit this contest to affiliates with zero sales yet, or make it a network-wide event.

Also, make sure you are transparent about the evaluation criteria. Even if “the best content” will be chosen by the affiliate marketer and it’s going to be a subjective evaluation, you need to let your partners know, so there is no negativity when results are announced.

The beauty of contests is that they help you achieve several things all at once:

• Spiking partners’ interest
• Getting a lot of unique quality content for your brand in a short period of time
• Have sales coming through for part of the content
• After it’s over, a portion of the partners will continue promoting you

Tip: On top of giving out a financial bonus, you can also support partners with best content in different ways, such as backlinking them or allocating extra budget to help promote their content. This will help your partner get more eyeballs on their brand and website, and it will facilitate your relationship.

Why most eCommerce companies fail at affiliate marketing

The biggest issue that eCommerce businesses deal with when it comes to affiliate marketing is not giving it enough time.

Dustin shares that, based on the experiences of many companies he has worked with, it can easily take up to six months before the program starts to make a profit.

Unlike Facebook Ads or Google Ads that show immediate result if you set them up right, affiliate marketing takes time to nurture and grow.

Another drawback of eCommerce affiliate marketing is that it puts too much hope into new affiliate marketing tools.

Surely, powerful affiliate tracking software is going to help you get ahead, for example, by allowing you to automate tracking, allocation, and payouts. However, no amount of features and cool technology will replace the hard work. Affiliate income will only grow if the business is ready to invest its time and other resources into building a healthy and sustainable system for affiliate publishers.

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

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The role of automation in boosting eCommerce affiliate performance

Automation is a powerful tool that frees up a lot of time for eCommerce affiliate marketers. By automating certain tasks, the team can not only save time for other tasks, but also avoid errors and mistakes, and get the data for current strategy analysis, trend spotting, and future campaigns planning.

However, you shouldn’t strive to overautomate the relationship bit of the workflow. The key benefit of affiliate marketing is that you get to work with amazing people who help promote your brand.

Offloading communications with them to a machine is a bad move in the long term. Yes, we’re living in a society that relies on technology, automation, AI, etc a lot. Yet, you shouldn’t underestimate the importance of the personal touch.

Your partners know when they’re dealing with a chatbot or receive automated email campaigns. They’re not inherently bad, but they shouldn’t be the only things publishers hear from you, especially not in the early stages.

Tip from Dustin’s experience

Use automation in communication with affiliates but be smart about it. For example, Dustin creates a sequence of five emails to a potential partner in hopes of recruiting them. All emails are hand-crafted, but then the sequence of them being sent is automated. This means that a prospect will be getting personalized messages, but Dustin won’t have to sit and manually send them every few days.

This frees up a lot of brain space and energy, as you don’t have to remember all the emails and all the recipients that need to be aligned every day.

How to measure the results of the affiliate marketing performance

When it comes to evaluating and measuring the success of affiliate marketing, Dustin likes to take a novel approach.

The key question to be asked at this stage is “What did I do to make a friend?”.

What did I do to make a friend?

What kind of favor did you do for a potential partner or a new friend in the industry. What did you do to build rapport, help them out, and lay a solid ground for your future partnership, – all that should be the priority.

In terms of traditional KPIs and metrics, such as sales, those things will come later, and you shouldn’t focus on them too much as an affiliate marketer.

The selling and converting will come, if there is potential. So the primary goal is to find the potential and make sure you’ve locked it in somehow, for example, through being able to assist the partner in some way early on.

Your KPIs need to make sense to you

There is a lot of advice online about what metrics you should be using to master your affiliate marketing. You can also get a lot of advice from peers and even competition in the industry.

There’s nothing wrong with looking into best practices and adopting some of the things other people are doing.

At the same time, you need to fit those KPIs into your reality and not vice versa. As long as the metrics you’re using work for you, it’s not important what anyone else is doing or thinking.

How to pick the best software for eCommerce affiliate marketing

How do you decide on the solution when there is such a wide range of affiliate products? Easy! Follow our step-by-step guide to make the best choice.

Step 1: Define the criteria

Start your evaluation process by defining the list of must-haves. With the range of products available on the market right now, it’s easy to get carried away and fall for shiny features you don’t really need.

Focus on what’s important to you, for example, custom commissions, and don’t let the rest distract you.

The final list of required functionality will depend on your target market and business goals, but here is a list of important tools to have for any eCommerce business:

• Several affiliate commissions to make sure you can cater to various affiliate groups, such as lifetime, recurring, flat-fee, percentage-based, and product (SKU-specific).
• Detailed real-time reporting so the marketing team or the business owner can check on the progress at any point.
• Tracking functionality that includes tracking links in real-time.
• Integrations with third parties to create a seamless workflow. Tapfiliate, for example, offers 30+ key integrations with its affiliate platform. These include Shopify, WordPress, and also REST API to connect to any solution of your choice.
• Automation overall to ease the workload on the marketing team. This includes commission allocation, affiliate approval, payouts, dispute handling, and refunds.
• Anti-fraud measures that help you track and block fraudulent conversions, but also tools that let you filter out the affiliates who don’t align with your values and positioning. For example, with Tapfiliate, clients get to approve who joins the program.
• Referral program support. Referral programs reward your existing clients for referring new leads to you. Even if you’re not looking to launch it at the moment, you might want to do it in the future, and it’s better to get a solution that supports both referral and affiliate campaigns from the start.

Step 2: Compare the offerings

Check out individual vendor’s and independent review sites to see what functionality is available across the board. Plus, make sure to check what clients are saying about the tools you’re considering.

Step 3: Compare the prices

We all need to keep our affiliate marketing spend under control, but as you look through the costs of licenses, try to prioritize the value you’ll be getting, and not the price per se. Cheaper solutions tend to have more limitations and paid-for add-ons of crucial functionality.

Step 4: Test the solutions

Don’t skip testing! That’s your best way to verify if the tool is right for you or not. Watching demos and webinars is not the same.

Most affiliate tracking software has free trial periods, so make sure you use them. Test for a couple of hours if you can’t allocate more time, but make sure you run them.

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