Making more sales is the goal of every business. Regardless if you offer services or products through the internet you can very easily create your own affiliate marketing program and reward your existing customers and random website visitors who bring you new sales.
The current Affiliate strategy
This strategy is so underutilized that just by using it you will gain an advantage over 90% of your competitors. The number of client who have an affiliate link program at all is <20% and you can get one only if you are an Influencer ( YouTube, TikTok, Instagram etc ). Those business owners who use it have realized the amazing effectiveness of partnering with an established influencer and giving an affiliate link/code ( with or without a discount % ). Finding the right person to partner with is a hit and miss game. My best approach is to use multiple influencers and determine which one has the best audience for your products or services.
The issue
Despite being in a much better position that the companies which don’t use influencers at all working only with them is not enough already and that show in the declining average CV% ( conversions rate ) year over year. The return on marketing investment is getting worse on average over time because of those two reasons:
- There are many more Influencers than just 3 years ago. I can’t stress this enough, the amount of content uploaded on the internet now vs before the P. is insane! Influencers are probably 50% more in every segment then 3 years ago and in 2020 the Internet was already very well developed.
- Web users have learned all the tricks which companies try to do to them through Influencers. The best strategy is giving a genuine Discount on your best products/services.
The Opportunity
What this leads to is an opportunity to grab.
It is to utilize micro influencers. I am Not talking about small accounts with 1,2,3 K followers on different platforms. I have in mind the people who have been or will be a customer of your business. Mount to mount advertising is the best. Nowadays it is also about link sharing, so speed is your friend. If you give the opportunity to a person to make some money by recommending your store to their friends without having to do so publicly ( unless they decide to do so ) people will use that opportunity. You gain allies in the face or everyday people and that is the best strategy I know of. Just look at Elon Musk, he has so many ordinary people who support him, Tesla had a referral program everybody could be part of for years and this create a perfect storm for the company. Another strong example is the Internet influencers and businessman Andrew Tate: he has the largest education based affiliate program I personally know of with over 200K active monthly subscribers. He also have realized that the best form of advertising is the ordinary person who likes you and can make a little money if they recommend your business to their friends. The strength of this models comes from the ease of use, speed and the large number of people who can participate.
How to Do it?
- Use a system to generate unique Codes which can be used at checkout. This allows for the simplest form of tracking, it requires to give some form of access to the people to check how many times their code has been used each month. Either give view access to a part of your system or find a software which allows to this data to be accessible to both sides without giving access yo your CMS/CRM.
- Use a B2C affiliate marketing platform. Those SaaS platforms allows you to focus on your business without having to pay for a custom software system or give access to the admin section of your website. Choosing a good platform depends on the following factors: Analytics, support, 3-rd party integration options, good API. Several good platforms are Impact, UpPromote ( Shopify ), Affisea and Tapfiliate.
- The second platform category is the Affiliate Networks. Like the name suggest they offer a whole bunch of different brands which allow people to sell their products for a commission. This is an option worth exploring also because people on the internet browse those platforms in the search of attractive products which they can sell in order to make money. Such platforms are ShareASale, FlexOffers and CJ ( Commission Junction ). I will advice you to focus on the previous type of affiliate marketing platforms because this will give you full control.
Summary
Follow the steps in the last paragraph and if you don’t see any increase in your sales please call me because I want to study you…no for real, this is not possible. If you choose the best SaaS Affiliate marketing platform for you and make sure to tell you existing customers and website visitors about it I don’t think there is a way not to make more money.
