With the endless options available for virtually every product and service available today, people need to feel like they’re choosing the best option — whether they’re picking car parts, sunglasses, or where to spend their vacation. Because of this, affiliate marketing for e-commerce is something every merchant’s website should be incorporating into its marketing strategy.
Affiliate marketing provides people with social proof, a social phenomenon where people seek validation from other consumers — when choosing a product or service. Before making a purchase, around 95% of consumers read online reviews, and approximately 70% of millennials have stated they are influenced by a peer’s recommendation when considering a purchase.
Over 40% of Amazon’s annual sales are due to some form of affiliate marketing. A whopping 81% of all brands and advertisers rely on affiliate marketing for a portion of their sales. These are only some of the many statistics that will prove how vital affiliate marketing is to digital commerce.
Need more convincing? Below are ten reasons why every e-commerce website needs to be paired with an affiliate program.
1. Cost-Effectiveness, Because You Only Pay for Affiliate Marketing After a Sale.
Traditional marketing requires a business to pay for marketing services — whatever form they may take — regardless of whether or not the marketing campaign results in sales.
Businesses only pay affiliates when something is sold, generally a small percentage of the product or service’s price paid by the consumer. The market and competition dictate this percentage. Most e-commerce affiliate software includes tools for searching for the commission rates among your business’s direct competitors.
2. Enjoying a Strong ROI.
As a result of the strong tracking metrics in affiliate marketing software, it has been determined that approximately 16% of all e-commerce orders are generated through some form of affiliate marketing. Perhaps even more important for brands to recognize is that customers tend to spend more money when an affiliate recommends the product or service.
3. Tracking Metrics, Which Can Be Used to Optimize Marketing That Converts to Sales.
Affiliate software for e-commerce includes performance metrics to track data like impressions, clicks, revenue, costs, and more — every time customer goes to your website and makes a purchase. By tracking your affiliate program’s performance, you can see what’s working and what isn’t and make decisions based on this data.
4. Scaling Your Business Easily.
One of the most significant benefits of affiliate marketing for e-commerce is quickly and effectively scaling up your business’s reach and more consistently reaching a wider internet audience. When you add affiliates and influencers, you add their followers to your audience, drastically increasing your business’s reach in a small amount of time with limited cost.
5. Growing Brand Awareness and Social Proof.
Many consumers have brand loyalty, and many others will subconsciously buy a brand they’ve heard of over one they haven’t when shopping for something — even if the price for the unknown brand is lower. Affiliate marketing allows both small and large companies to grow their brand awareness and reach an audience to which they may have had limited or no access.
6. Boosting SEO Benefits.
One of the main features present in SEO content is the inclusion of numerous links and backlinks to increase search engine rankings. Simply speaking, the better your e-commerce site’s SEO, the more people that will find your website and purchase something.
Affiliate marketing can significantly boost SEO through the numerous backlinks an affiliate will include in blog posts, social media posts, video descriptions, and more dependent on the affiliate’s preferred methods for communicating with their followers.
7. Setting up Additional Income Streams.
An e-commerce retailer shouldn’t be relying on just one revenue stream resulting from marketing campaigns. If something happens and that revenue stream dries up, a business without diversified marketing strategies and revenue streams can find itself in dire straits in a matter of weeks or days.
By choosing various affiliate marketers to join your brand’s affiliate program, you ensure the audience receiving your marketing is a wide and diverse one, resulting in more sales.
8. Spending Just a Little Bit Less Than What’ Needed for Other Forms of Marketing.
Because affiliate marketing for e-commerce is contingent on the chosen affiliates providing your brand with customers, you won’t have as much out-of-pocket start-up costs as you would with traditional advertising or pay-per-click advertising.
You’ll have to pay for your affiliate marketing software. But beyond that, the majority of affiliate marketing costs are only incurred when a consumer buys something via the unique link provided by the affiliate in their blog or social media post.
9. Focusing on Your Target Audience
Choosing the right affiliates to join your program ensures that the brand awareness the affiliate provides is targeted towards your desired audience. With affiliate marketing, you’d send some of your best and most popular products to the affiliate or influencer who would spread the message to their followers, resulting in more sales of your products.
Other forms of advertisement may be effectively “wasted” on the wrong audience — people that aren’t actively looking for or interested in your products or services. By hand-picking the affiliates for your brand, you’re choosing who you think will send customers in the right direction — to your website.
10. Saving Time on Marketing.
Marketing programs take time, energy, and skilled marketers. For many businesses, expending precious resources on an extensive marketing program may not be feasible.
By developing an affiliate marketing program, a company can put marketing into the affiliates’ hands, freeing up more time to spend on business operations and development. And the best part of that is you’ll only pay affiliates when a sale is made.
Ready to Run an Affiliate Program?
Developing effective marketing programs can be a daunting process, especially for smaller businesses without the resources for an expensive marketing program. Affiliate marketing for e-commerce is a practical approach to growing your brand awareness and sales. Every e-commerce site in 2021 should have or be developing an affiliate program.
LeadDyno provides everything you need to launch and grow your affiliate marketing program. We offer a 30-day free trial for companies to sample our affiliate software.
