The ultimate goal for any brand is a healthy, high-converting affiliate program. To achieve this, brands should focus on building and nurturing a well-rounded program that includes partners from various verticals. Expanding your affiliate partnerships can enable your program to:
Attract Your Ideal Affiliates: One effective way for merchants to attract top affiliates, especially content partners, is by maintaining a strong Earnings Per Click (EPC) rate. EPC is a metric that reflects the potential earnings for an affiliate. It is calculated by the number of clicks it takes to earn commission. A merchant's EPC rate varies based on a number of variables including commission rates and the amount of traffic driven from a merchant site. The higher a merchant's EPC rate is, the more attractive the program is to affiliates. Merchants can boost their EPC by increasing sales volume through partnerships with diverse affiliate types.
Introduce Your Brand to New Customers: Many consumers without strong brand loyalty often browse larger coupon and deal sites for their purchases. Contrary to common belief, brands don't necessarily need to discount their products to collaborate with coupon, deal, or loyalty partners. Working with loyalty partners and offering cashback helps incentivize the shopper to convert, therefore helping your EPC and conversion rate. Even if you do not offer sales or discounts, these partners can highlight your free shipping threshold or even just an affiliate link to your homepage.
Ensure an Optimal Affiliate Partner Funnel: AvantLink offers commission sharing and splitting and new customer reporting to help you feel comfortable expanding your affiliate partners. These reporting capabilities allow you to see where each affiliate is falling into the sales funnel and award them based on where they fall.
Types of Affiliate Partners:
AvantLink partners with top-performing affiliates across various categories, including:
- Content Partners: Content sites can come in many different shapes and sizes from in-depth review sites, to lifestyle blogs, to traditional media publications.
- Influencer/Social Media Partners: Social mediums such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube quickly became strong affiliate partners on their own without the association of a blog or content site.
- Loyalty Partners: Also known as “cash-back” or “reward” sites, they offer money/points back to their customers for shopping through their site. They do this by sharing their commission earned on purchases with the customer. These sites are great for programs who don’t have discounts on their products, but still want to tap into the more price conscious customer and offer incentive.
- Coupon Partners: Coupon sites increase consumer confidence in purchase price. They capitalize on search results when a customer is looking for a coupon. You do not need to have discounts and coupon codes to work with these sites, but it can be more effective.
- Deal Partners: Deal sites focus on “Best of Web” pricing and product based deals. They generally promote a specific product deal vs. an overarching sale or coupon code. Deal sites have loyal users who check their site regularly or set alerts for product deals. Some deal partners allow their users to post deals to their sites.
- Subaffiliate Partners: Sub-affiliate networks are technology sites at their core. They have their own “network” of affiliates that work within them so they can access merchants across various networks. Their technology makes the link creation seamless across networks, so affiliates are willing to give up some of their commission earned to work with these sites.
- Technology Partners: This is a niche category of affiliates who focus on conversion optimization for your site. They can create digital campaigns for your company to address specific pain-points in your customer’s journey - from on-site conversion, to email capture, to cart-abandonment and cross-device tracking. Every affiliate is unique. Inquire directly to discuss how they can help your affiliate program.
- Search Partners: Search partners will help you with your pay-per-click bidding on keywords and/or brand name. SEM works in tandem with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to help people find your website. These two strategies result in paid traffic and organic traffic, respectively. Again, every search partner is unique. Inquire directly to discuss how they can help your affiliate program.
As always, the AvantLink team is here to help you. We can review your program and make recommendations about the best way to effectively expand your program to meet your brand’s affiliate goals.