What Are The Benefits of Affiliate Marketing?
As with any digital marketing channel, an affiliate marketing program has to be able to justify it’s worth. Fortunately, the benefits of affiliate marketing are easily measured.
Fundamentally, affiliate marketing is performance-based advertising. Affiliates are, in the main, rewarded for their work to promote a brand by receiving a commission on each sale made, each sign up completed or each subscription taken out. Whether that is a percentage of the sale delivered or an agreed cost per transaction that is outlined at the start of the relationship, this is how affiliate marketing established itself and what has often made it quite a stand-alone channel.
As a result of this commission-based model, the most common metric used for measuring the success of an affiliate marketing program has been how much revenue it has delivered. Since its inception, 10-15% of online sales has been an accepted appropriate contribution and as long as things have been in and around that number then it is accepted that a program is performing well.
That certainly remains the case and it’s a sound starting block for measuring how well your venture into the affiliate space is going.
As the digital marketing sphere has evolved though, affiliate marketing has evolved with it and now the capabilities of the channel to deliver greater percentages of online revenue, or deliver smaller numbers but in a really targeted and therefore entirely worthwhile and necessary way, are huge and form a key part of an all-round online marketing plan for a retailer.
At Fuel Affiliate, we have used the affiliate market space to suits the needs of the clients first and foremost. This means the revenue coming out of the channel isn’t necessarily the key performance indicator, although it is always a very important one.
We have taken some retailers, those who might not yet be well known but are making sales based on the quality of their products and service and put them on to affiliate websites that have millions of users. This puts them in front of a whole new audience and positions them on a digital high street where they can sit shoulder to shoulder with huge household names that sell similar products. This allows them to increase their brand recognition in a way that could cost thousands to achieve if done in more traditional channels like television or radio marketing.
The increased brand awareness this can bring, leading not only to affiliate sales but more direct traffic and growth in numbers of social media followers, is a measurable benefit of affiliate marketing that few businesses consider. We are also finding that Fuel Affiliate’s particularly unique model of running affiliate marketing programs, where the cost is purely a percentage of revenue, is also a huge benefit to the clients we work with.
This allows our clients to have at least one digital channel that, no matter the volume of sales coming through it, is always profitable and costs nothing if there are no sales. This is a reassuring presence for our clients and gives them time to develop a channel that makes a key contribution to overall online sales, whilst providing measurable and meaningful benefits from the very start.
To learn more about the benefits of affiliate marketing or the services that Fuel has to offer, please reach out to seve@fuel-affiliate.co.uk.for more information.
