The present age is the world of E-commerce. With the rise of big E-commerce giants like Amazon, Walmart, Target etc., all the newbie E-commerce stores have a tough time marketing their products and selling them online. The major source of traffic for all these E-commerce giants is Search Engine. They dominate these search engine results either by organically or through paid advertising.
Their dominance in search engines has brought tough times for new E-commerce stores to sustain. Even if they are willing to grow, what will support them to grow?
Their only way to sustain is to do affiliate marketing.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Consider, you have an E-commerce store. When you do affiliate marketing, bloggers/digital marketers will join your network as an affiliate. After becoming an affiliate, these marketers will start promoting your store products with their unique affiliate link.
Through these unique affiliate link, these affiliates will refer people to visit your store and purchase products. When these visitors successfully purchase a product, you must offer the affiliate with a small commission. That’s how affiliate marketing works.
Don’t confuse affiliate marketing with Referral Marketing:
When I explained affiliate marketing, you might have remembered something similar. It was referral marketing. In fact, affiliate marketing and referral marketing are almost similar.
Even in referral marketing, you offer some bonus, discounts, money or something to appreciate the customer who referred someone to your store and made them purchase.
But, the minute difference is that referral marketing can be done by a loyal subscriber, a loyal fan of your business, who is interested to speak about your business at any place, at any point of time. On the other hand, affiliate marketing is completely money-minded. There is no relation between the affiliate and the merchant apart from driving sales and getting their commissions paid.
Why Affiliate Marketing for E-commerce store?
As I mentioned above, Affiliate Marketing is the lifeline available for small E-commerce stores to try out to drive more sales, before quitting their online business.
But, in this article, I would like to share with you 6 important reasons why your E-commerce store should do Affiliate Marketing?
1) Most Profitable for Digital Products:
If your E-commerce store is selling digital products, then the affiliate marketing is most profitable for you.
You might have come across E-commerce stores selling digital products offering 75% commission to the affiliates. This means that the merchant gets only 25% of the product.
In that case, a lot of people misunderstand that the merchant is spending so much of money on the affiliate. But the reality is not that.
The merchant is selling digital products. He doesn’t spend any huge amount to craft/manufacture just like physical products.
For example, consider a digital product like WordPress Theme worth $100. For a single sale, the affiliate earns $75 and the merchant earns $25. When 5 affiliates earn $75 for each product sold, the merchant earns $125 ($25*5). Thus, the Merchant is still the one who is earning the highest.
2) Helps to build Backlinks to Boost Domain Authority:
Affiliates link to the products in the Merchant site. By, this way, the merchant site will get a lot of backlinks. Though the affiliate usually puts a nofollow tag to avoid Google penalize their website, these nofollow links help the merchant to boost their Domain authority.
3) Better ROI compared to advertising:
When you do PPC advertising, you will be charged for each click made on your advertisement. You might spend $100 on an advertisement, but will you get any guarantee that your product will be sold?
You won’t get such a guarantee.
But, in affiliate marketing, you pay your affiliate only when a product is sold through the unique affiliate link.
So, affiliate marketing has a better Return on Investment (ROI), when compared to Advertising.
4) Word of Mouth:
Affiliates usually promote their affiliate products through Blog Posts, reviews etc. When more and more quality marketers start to mention your product in their blog post and write reviews about them, it will start the word of mouth.
This will help you in building a brand reputation with free of cost. Because you pay only when your product is sold.
5) Build your Customer Base:
Whenever these affiliates bring new customers to your website, you will get to know the contact details of your new customer.
By, this way you can start marketing to these new customers and build your loyal customer base.
6) Controlling promotional activities:
Most E-commerce stores when comes to advertising will have a set of channels, where they want to promote.
Affiliate Marketing gives you that control too. You can restrict your affiliates on which channels they can promote your product, for which keywords they can do PPC advertising etc.
So, thus affiliate marketing is best for E-commerce stores.
And, now you have planned to do affiliate marketing for your E-commerce store.
But, where will you start your affiliate marketing campaign?
Why type of Affiliate Program you should start?
You can start your affiliate program, either by creating your own in-house affiliate program using software and tools available on the internet or you can join any Affiliate Network.
If you are new to E-commerce industry, then you might not have that brand reputation for people to come and join your affiliate program.
In that case, you will have to join any good Affiliate Network. Because these affiliate networks will already have thousands of affiliates willing to promote products.
So, by joining these affiliate networks, you can easily find new affiliates. Else, you will have to undergo a tough time looking for affiliates to promote your product.
When you are about to join an Affiliate Network, you might get a confusion with the terms used there.
Since you are running an E-commerce store and willing to sell your products through affiliate marketing, you will be considered as an Advertiser.
And the affiliate will be considered as a publisher.
Which Affiliate Networks you should join?
I suggest you join in either ShareAsale or CJ. The reason behind recommending these two affiliate networks is that they are the most popular Affiliate Networks. So, you will easily find new affiliates to market your products.
Wrapping Up:
I will summarize the content in short.
E-commerce stores can sell their products through affiliates, by paying a very small commission, whenever a sale is made.
There are so many reasons to try out affiliate marketing before you quit your online business.
Try joining in popular affiliate networks, because you can find affiliates easily.
Author Bio:
Nirmal Kumar is a Blogger at OnlineRockersHub. He loves to Blog on Affiliate Marketing, WordPress, SEO etc. He blogs with passion and started OnlineRockersHub with zero investment!
