Using affiliate marketing for e-commerce is a great way to produce immediate results with a measurable ROI.
Affiliate marketing helps e-commerce websites to secure leads and to generate sales. What’s more, its success can be easily measured and quantified. By using quality affiliate marketing and a bit of technical knowhow, you can make sure every penny you spend has some kind of return on investment. Here’s how it’s done.
1. Sell The Right Products to the Right People
Internet users are great at ignoring bad advertising. In fact, they’re so great at it that, even if you manage to get people reading promotional content for your e-commerce site, you could still be ignored if your content is terrible.
This is why online advertising needs to be targeted with pinpoint accuracy to get through. Without understanding exactly who your potential customer is and what they are thinking before and after clicking on your ad, you’ll get nowhere. If it’s uninteresting, uninspiring, or irrelevant, a potential customer won’t even click
So, consider campaigns which focus on a single product rather than your e-commerce website. It’s not good enough to have the name of your sports brand appear on a sports website. You should be pushing the right pair of tennis shoes to the right kind of tennis player.
2. Be Time and Location Sensitive
For even more accuracy, consider exactly where and when your adverts are placed. Be bold and combine that thinking with one-time offers. Imagine you run a stationery shop and that it’s August. For your football-loving students starting a new semester at university in the UK right after the new season has started, how about a one-time 50% discount on your range of English Premier League football-themed pens?
The more you can fine-tune your campaigns, the more likely they are to have an impact. What’s more, a fine-tuned campaign is easier to track — and the importance of that can’t be understated either…
3. Know Exactly How Affiliate Marketing Impacts Your e-commerce Website
One of the biggest problems with businesses who want to improve their current marketing campaign is that they don’t know what their return on investment is. A business person might spend money placing an advert somewhere and, if the business makes more money that month, they might say it’s because of the advert. If the business makes less money that month, they might say the advert didn’t work.
The problem with that approach is that it’s indirect, unscientific and it doesn’t factor in any variables. In short, correlation is not causation. You might buy a new hat on the same day that your business makes a huge deal with another company, but your new hat is not the reason for that huge deal happening.
To find exactly how affiliate marketing impacts your e-commerce website, you need to have a clear idea of how many people click on your adverts, how many of those clicks lead to leads, or how many of those leads turn into conversions. If you don’t know any of those figures, then you might as well just be guessing.
4. Use the Right Affiliate Marketing Network for Your e-commerce Site
Affiliate marketing for e-commerce only works if the ad network you’re using understands the difference between affiliate marketing for your e-commerce site and affiliate marketing for some other e-commerce site. In other words, you need to make sure that the network you use understands the need for a tailored approach to marketing.
It’s also important to use a network which allows you keep track of every penny you’ve spent. Ideally, you’d even be able to know how much of a particular product’s sales you can directly attribute to a particular ad. If it’s working, you want to be able to spend more. If it’s not, you want to be able to invest elsewhere.
With Adsterra, you get exactly that kind of service. We perfectly match up websites with particular campaigns in particular locations. As well as that, we provide a range of payment plans so you can choose exactly how to measure the success of your ad campaign.
For an affiliate marketing campaign which you can track dollar for dollar, contact Adsterra.
