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NOW ONIn the process of enterprise brands going overseas, affiliate marketing, as a win-win business model, is increasingly welcomed by advertisers overseas.
Taking the United States as an example only, data from Statista shows that by 2022, the expenditure of local enterprises in the United States in affiliate marketing will reach 8.2 billion US dollars. The Big Commerce blog introduces that in the United States, 81% of brands and 84% of publishers have adopted affiliate programs, and it is estimated that as many as 16% of online orders come from the promotion of affiliate program participants.
So, what is affiliate marketing? How is it different from influencer marketing?
Affiliate marketing, often also referred to as affiliate program (or Referral Program), mainly involves brand merchants cooperating with bloggers, influencers, individuals and other promoters through the Internet, asking them to promote the brand merchant's products or services on the Internet (whether through their own websites or social media platforms such as FB, Email list, etc.). When successful conversions are brought about with the assistance of these promoters, the brand merchant will share the profits with these partners who assist in promotion.
As known by Inpander, the world's earliest affiliate marketing was the Associate Program launched by Amazon in 1996.
In order to make Amazon known to more people quickly, they invited members to join the affiliate program and promote the products on the platform, giving corresponding commission feedback, thereby bringing a large amount of traffic, popularity (visibility), and turnover to the website.
Step 1: Promoters place your products (banners, videos, text) on their websites (including blogs, social channels, etc.).
Step 2: Users click and form conversions.
Step 3: The clicks and conversions in this process can be tracked.
Step 4: Affiliates obtain sales commissions, and you obtain orders.
The uniqueness of affiliate marketing lies in the payment based on the promotion effect and the need for close cooperation of multiple participants to achieve the marketing method. These participants include:
They are often also referred to as advertisers, they are companies that own products or services that need to be sold. Brand merchants need to pay reasonable advertising fees to affiliate members based on the actual effect of affiliate marketing (such as sales volume, leads, clicks, etc.).
They select appropriate brand merchants through affiliate marketing platforms and earn commissions by playing brand merchant advertisements, easily turning website traffic into revenue.
Also commonly known as affiliate marketing platforms or advertising alliances, they are actually agents of advertisers, responsible for supervising and managing the daily operation and strategy formulation of affiliate programs from the perspective of advertisers, including partnership relations, affiliate recruitment, promotion guidance and advertising campaign optimization. Common foreign affiliate platforms include Commission Junction, ShareASale, etc.
They are the specific user groups that advertisers and affiliate marketers hope to market to. They will eventually generate consumption behaviors, or submit contact information, subscribe to company emails, try a certain service, become a new customer, etc.
Affiliate link: Also known as tracking link. This is a unique URL used to track clicks and conversions from affiliate members.
Conversion: An event defined by the merchant as being payable to the affiliate. It can be anything defined by the merchant, but is typically a purchase of a potential customer or merchant product.
Affiliate network: An optional middleman between merchants and affiliates that helps facilitate business activities.
Affiliate manager: The person who works with affiliates and acts as an intermediary with the merchant. Their goal is to maximize the performance of the affiliate program.
Affiliate program: An arrangement where merchants pay commissions to affiliates.
Offer: A specific promotion of a product.
Click-through rate CTR (Click-through Rate): - The percentage of affiliate link clicks per web page display.
Conversion rate CR (Conversion Rate): The percentage of conversions of clicks.
Cost per action CPA (Cost per Action): A commission model where merchants only pay affiliates for conversions.
Cost per click CPC (Cost per Click): A commission model where merchants only pay affiliates for clicks. It is often used with advertising banners, rather than affiliate network marketing.
Postback URL: A URL used for server-side conversion tracking; also known as server-to-server tracking.
Pixel: A hidden image that tracks when a web page viewing event occurs. In the context of affiliate network marketing, pixels track when conversions occur. Today, pixels are typically JavaScript code snippets embedded in web pages, rather than images.
SubID: A text string embedded as part of the affiliate link, defined by the affiliate and used to track affiliate conversions.
Creative: Advertising banner images or text that affiliates use to promote merchant products.
Copy: Written text that helps sell merchant products.
Landing page: The merchant web page that members direct traffic to through affiliate links.
Ad blocker: Web browser technology that can prevent tracking of affiliate network marketing clicks and conversions. In addition, it can also prevent the display of advertising banners.
Attribution: The process of correctly identifying which affiliates are generating conversions.
Charge Back: An invalid conversion that results in the confiscation of affiliate commissions.
Commission: The income that an affiliate earns for generating conversions. It is also called referral fee, finder's fee or bounty.
Cookies: Information stored in the potential customer's web browser to identify a specific visit. Through affiliate network marketing, cookies are used to track affiliate network link clicks and potential conversions.
Link Cloaking: Hiding affiliate links using a more concise URL than provided by the merchant. Link Cloaking can be used to better manage links and track clicks and conversions.
Affiliate marketing is relatively simple and does not require a lot of bandwidth to implement. Once the brand establishes a mechanism for creating a unique URL for each member, all they need to do is track the conversion of each sale. However, it is important to note that the brand must be mature to support a successful affiliate marketing program.
Affiliate marketing is a risk-free strategy because affiliates only make money when sales are made through affiliate links. Unlike traditional advertising, brands do not pay for impressions or clicks. Commissions are only paid when a sale is made, regardless of the clicks on the affiliate link.
Although affiliate links have no direct impact on search engine rankings, they do increase web page traffic and increase the chances of converting sales. The excitement created by affiliates around products or services creates a "halo effect", increasing consumer trust and prompting more people to search for your products and navigate to your page.
Studies have pointed out that the value of the global affiliate marketing industry is as high as 6.5 billion, spanning industries such as retail, personal finance, the gaming industry, tourism, education, publishing, etc.
Most affiliate marketing profit-sharing methods are calculated on a per-order basis, but larger organizations will also give different commission percentages based on the degree of promotion. According to the return payment methods given by the merchant website to affiliate members, affiliate network marketing can be divided into three forms:
CPC, namely Cost-Per-Click, the affiliate network marketing management system records the number of times each guest clicks on the text or image link (or Email link) to the merchant website on the affiliate member website, and the merchant (Merchant) pays the advertising fee according to how much money is paid for each click.
CPL, namely Cost-Per-Lead, or called CPA (Cost-Per-Acquisition). After visitors enter the merchant website through the link of the affiliate member and fill out and submit a certain form, the management system will generate a lead (Lead) record corresponding to this affiliate member, and the merchant pays the member according to the number of lead records.
CPS, namely Cost-Per-Sale, the merchant only pays the affiliate member after the guest introduced by the affiliate member's link has generated an actual purchase behavior on the merchant website (mostly online payment), and generally a commission ratio (ranging from 10% to 50% of the sales volume) is set.
Revenue sharing often blurs the line between affiliate marketing and influencer marketing, but just because both methods may involve creator commissions doesn't mean the compensation models work the same way.
Affiliate marketing is almost exclusively used to drive traffic to the brand website to complete transactions. Brands do not pay affiliates for brand awareness, increased web traffic or cold lead generation. Affiliates are only compensated for making sales, which means they must be motivated and constantly strive to increase conversion rates.
In influencer marketing, brands establish longer-term KPIs such as click-through rates, user-generated content and increased SEO. The influencer model focuses on content creation when promoting brands, products or services, and marketers work with influencers to increase their credibility, authenticity and sustainable inbound traffic. Therefore, influencer compensation includes commissions, product gifts, flat rate fees or a combination of all three.
As the world turns its attention to social media, consumers are now increasingly "relying" on others to help them make purchase decisions. For example, popular stars, topic figures, professionals in a certain field or well-known beauty and food bloggers, etc., their comments and recommendations will have wide influence and appeal.
This also makes the new marketing model of affiliate + influencer release new energy: the former can bring direct income, while the latter has great potential in promoting brand information and awareness. By combining the two, a wider audience can be reached, thereby generating greater ROI.
So, for overseas brands, how should they operate specifically?
First of all, you need to join the affiliate platform, create a member recruitment landing page with activity introduction and product promotion guide for your marketing campaign, and generate links and discount codes so that you can track the revenue generated by each affiliate and attribute the return on investment to each individual performer and the entire program.
Established in the United States in 2000, it has more than 225,000 affiliate resource media, has cooperated with more than 16,500 advertisers and brands, and the commission rate depends on the situation, generally between 5% and 20%.
For merchants, its core advantage is: Merchants can customize the registration page and place it in the independent station footer for recruiting and attracting distributors; it can provide merchants with free distributor recruitment tools; merchants can set differentiated commissions to meet different promotion needs.
Google's advertising alliance.
Its core advantage is: For distributors, it has few restrictions, high unit prices and no tax deduction, and it can also customize the design of advertisements to match the style of its own website, with high degrees of freedom and operability, so it attracts all kinds of distributors to settle in, and independent stations in all walks of life can use it for affiliate marketing. At the same time, Google Adsense's powerful reporting and optimization tools can help distributors optimize the merchant's marketing content in a timely manner, making marketing more flexible.
The world's largest comprehensive advertising alliance. Founded in 1998, it is currently the largest and most powerful comprehensive advertising alliance in the world. It mainly focuses on sales and lead registration. It is a good choice for Chinese overseas merchants, especially beginners. Moreover, CJ Affiliate can also provide merchants with comprehensive reports, and the tracking function is also very powerful.
The built-in affiliate marketing entrance of TikTok Shop. Merchants increase the conversion rate of products by setting up three marketing methods of "targeted plan", "public plan" and "store plan" to allow sellers to find suitable talents to promote products.
For merchants: The TikTok Shop affiliate program uses TikTok's creator resources to help brands/sellers connect with talents through commission-based cooperation.
For creators: The TikTok Shop affiliate program connects creators and sellers through commission-based product marketing. Talents have obtained a new way to monetize their creativity and influence by showing high-quality products in short videos and live broadcasts.
Facebook's off-site promotion. Its huge traffic and strong traffic appeal are naturally not to be underestimated. Currently, more than 7 million merchants worldwide have done affiliate marketing here.
However, to take care of Facebook users, it does not allow advertisements to be displayed too frequently and is only available for applications of merchants in the App Store or Google Play, which has certain limitations.
The off-site promotion of the well-known e-commerce platform Amazon. It has a very rich variety of products and excellent usage experience, and it is easy to attract traffic. Traffic means exposure and clicks, which are what merchants urgently need. At the same time, its application threshold is extremely low and it is very friendly to merchants.
Method 1: Post the link containing the event landing page on overseas social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram to attract online celebrities to participate actively.
Method 2: On various online celebrity search platforms, find online celebrities that meet your requirements and contact them to participate in the event.
Note that after finding the right online celebrity, you need to be more proactive and take the first step.
The typical influencer has a much better relationship with his or her audience, and they don't want to risk alienating his/her supporters for a business arrangement.
Therefore, you can offer some free products to any influencer you wish to use as a member so that they can test it and ensure it is suitable for their followers.
You can send emails every two weeks or every month to tell your promoters the following information, so that they also have new information to share with their followers:
Send some news media that mentions your company/product to your partners and let them put this information in the promotional content to increase credibility.
If your partner shares through social media, then when he mentions your product, service or brand name, give a corresponding response, integrate into his community, and let your promoter know that you care about him and are very grateful for what he has done to promote your activities.
At the same time, you can also forward the share to your own social network to let your existing fans know your influence.
If you have enough partners, maybe you can hold a thank-you party for partners every quarter, every six months or every year to let them know that you value and thank them.
Participating in seminars related to affiliate marketing is the fastest way for you to find affiliate marketing partners. Through such a conference format, you can not only promote your affiliate marketing program, but also directly contact those influential promoters and persuade them to promote your products or services.
Brands can place tracking links in the promotion content of online celebrities to track conversions from affiliate members, and can also track online celebrity marketing activities to analyze and report longer-term goals, focusing on establishing a more authentic connection with the target audience.