Approach your potential affiliates

Making money while you are sleeping, it sounds like an unrealistic dream! But according to IBA, Affiliate marketing is a global industry worth over $12 billion, plus, as recorded by Web Marketing Support, 81% of marketers and 84% of publishers leverage the power of affiliate marketing.

Appling Affiliate marketing strategy to your online store is a promising option to rocket your revenue. However, there might be a downside that if you don't have in mind a suitable strategy to leverage your campaign that actually works with your business's condition, both of your time and resources can be wasted while a little increase in sales can be observed.

Everybody knows the key of any ambassador campaign is the publishers (Affiliates), the more affiliate that works for your business, the more audience you can reach (but do not focus on quantity only, quality is the one that truly matters)

Therefore, in order to recruit an adept ambassador team, launching an appealing offer with a professional image is the first key.

Below are best practices to make your affiliate campaign attractive for all potential affiliates:

Make sure affiliate can easily approach your affiliate campaign

Think about some ways that affiliate can approach your campaign: they are scanning their social feed and see a post of your affiliate campaign, they accidentally see your product and find it could be a lucrative item to promote, they are researching some shop in the niche and find yours,...

There are many ways to catch affiliate's eye proactively or passively, but make sure whenever they enter your main site, your campaign is transparently shown, the best practice is to put your program on Shop menu or footer or pin the project on your social profiles.

Also, if you are new to the affiliate model, one recommendation is that you should try as many channels to approach affiliates as possible, after testing all the options, you might find the one that actually works for your brand.

Find professional publishers on online freelancer marketplaces

There are numerous influencer websites to actively approach freelancer affiliates such as Social baker, Influenex, Grough high,... but the most popular and free one is Fiverr.

On Fiverr, there is a massive diversity of freelancers that work on all industries, and affiliates are definitely not excluded. You can become a seller and post your offers to attract freelancer on your niche, or search some keywords such as: Affiliate, eCommerce Affiliate, Influencer, Shopify affiliate,... or narrow the search range down to Affiliate + your niche.

For each profile, you also can view their gig, skills, their other campaigns and how sellers review their work, then decide if they are the ones who match your need. A quick contact me button is available if you want to chat with them personally.

All the negotiation process can be done within Fiverr chat, or you can invite them to be your lifetime brand ambassador if, within the period you work with them, their performance shows outstanding results.

Convert your own customers to your brand ambassadors

Any business owner must have at least heard about the power of word-of-mouth (WOM). Word of mouth marketing describes the targeted efforts and natural behavior when customers/users share their satisfaction of a brand.

A report from Nielsen showed that 92% of people tend to trust the recommendations from friends and family over any other kind of advertising.

However, before hoping someone might refer your items, make sure you master the tactics to optimize product quality and customer experience.

Implementing the WOM marketing strategy, your brand can gain unexpectedly massive benefits:

  • Boost your sales without using ads spend

  • Reference become effortlessly and more trustworthy

  • Increase customer lifetime value (CLV)

Hence, one of the best practice we recommend making the most of WOM marketing is: Turn your customers into brand ambassadors, still, keep them as loyal customers.

To apply these tactics, one simple direction is:

  • Once your customers finish their purchase, ask them if they would like to join your ambassador team with a lifetime benefit: When they refer a friend, their friend gets a discount, and they get a commission.

  • Once your customers successfully refer, pay them with a store coupon, which can be used to keep purchasing within your shop.

Surely, this process can be set up manually, but why do you mind making things manually while an automatic option is available?

With the option to Convert customers to affiliates from Affiliate by Secomapp, the whole process is premade: Once the customers finish their check-out, a popup shows up with an appealing invitation with benefits being highlighted.

To make it more effective and separated with other types of affiliates, we recommend you to create a separate program for Converted customer, you can set this program to pay with Store credit exclusively, that will help to keep your them as loyal customers.

List your offer on our Marketplace

Our Marketplace includes top Shopify offers that are open to any affiliate to join and apply. Listed offers are shown according to app's plans (Enterprise => Professional => Growth => Free) and shops' referral orders. Also, affiliates have an option to filter offers by categories, payment method, commission structure and even lifetime commission, offer format applies to all profiles, so the more information is provided, the more possibility it is that affiliates are interested in yours.

A basic Marketplace listing would include program details, payment methods, category, description, slogan and website, however, we recommend you to list other optional information so anyone who is interested can get the most out of it such as Banner, Geology limit, Average earning per sale or a Video to best describe your business.

Choosing your correct category and having a competitive commission rate is a key factor to increase the chance your offer will be more noticeable than the others.

Plus, on your description, be noted to focus on how your products stand out from the rest on the market, as well as highlight some beneficial points when becoming your brand ambassadors.

Once the viewers want to know more about your brand, they will have an option to visit your website, it's halfway there to turn them into your members.

Grow your affiliate team on a large scale

Anyone who works in the Affiliate industry should be familiar with this term: Multi-level marketing (MLM).

MLM refers to a marketing model in which the distributors' income includes their own commission and a percentage of the sales group (network commission) they recruit or refer (known as a downline affiliate).

Although affiliate marketing and Multi-level marketing are considered as two separated models, one can still work as an affiliate marketer AND a Multi-level marketer.

With Affiliate by Secomapp, you can apply this MLM strategy to encourage your ambassador to invite or refer their peers to join the system. The monetary motivation is in form of network commission: when a downline affiliate successfully brings an order, the upline one gets their extra reward. This tactic not only motivates your affiliate team to grow your list but also inspire them to push their downline team to work harder, more effectively.

When setting an MLM commission level rate, consider thoroughly the goal, budget and profit margin to make sure you set the commission level rate within the reasonable boundary based on your condition.

In Conclusion

Finding and recruiting affiliate partners is only the beginning part of utilizing the affiliate model to grow your business. Having a good product and an appealing offer is big upside but you also need to consider implementing some tactics to motivate and empower your ambassadors, which will be shared on the next blogs of this series.

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