10 Surprising Ways Affiliate Marketing Will Transform Your E-commerce Business

Everyone looks around for a good recommendation. Whether to buy a smartphone or trusting a gift shot, we want someone to confirm that the service we’re about to avail is good. This very practice is used by e-commerce companies with affiliate marketing where they want an online influencer to say good things about their products and services to help drive sales.

In simple terms, affiliate marketing is an indirect form of marketing or a strategic move used by online companies to boost sales and reach out to an audience otherwise not possible. A growing number of brands, big and small alike, now use this affiliate marketing programs to achieve their sales objectives and realize the true potential of their business.

More so, affiliate marketing is a wonderful way to achieve cent percent return on investment every time, and it’s also a method where a brand has to pay only after the sale. In this unique marketing concept – both the involved parties, the merchant (the business planning to drive sales) and the affiliate (the influencer hired to promote products and services) work on pre-agreed terms.

In this arrangement, the affiliate or publisher will publish or market or promote products and brands on their website in lieu of a commission or certain fixed money per unit sale. The commission only happens when someone clicks on the affiliate’s website and then make purchase with the merchant.

Here are 10 ways in which affiliate marketing can transform your e-commerce business –

1. An expansion of the sales team
The use of affiliate marketing can help a business expand its sales team indirectly. There will be more expert people working for your e-commerce business with the aim to boost its sales and drive traffic. Such sales person will be skilled at the art of driving traffic and plus, they will be free from the burden of designing ads, seeking their approval and tracking their progress.

2. An improved customer loyalty
Brand loyalty pays rich dividends over time. In fact, customers who are loyal to a business often spend more than new ones. When a business leverages affiliate marketing, it stands to benefit from the trust and skills of not only the affiliates but their audience as well. So, apart from having the trust of own customers, the e-commerce business can benefit from a unique set of prospects just by taking support of affiliate marketing.

3. More avenues for conversion
By trusting affiliate marketing, an e-commerce business actually gets more avenues and paths for conversion. Plus, it can always have a control over what methods to ask affiliates for driving sales. Affiliates can be asked to capture emails of prospects, get filled a survey form or anything that can drive sales. Apart from multiple paths to conversion, the selection of a high-traffic affiliate site can also ensure a great traffic to the site easily.

4. A better ROI
Affiliate marketing gives the freedom of using marketing budget judiciously and getting a better ROI than any other methods. The best thing, it does not keep your budget engaged as here the payment is made only when products sell. So, the company can always use the marketing budget elsewhere and for better purposes. What’s more, a business can set the commission between 3 to 10% of the cost and it can vary from product to product.

5. Credibility boost to the business
An e-commerce company can always use the promotion by affiliate to add trust and credibility to their company. It can use the reviews and ratings and images and other similar things for the products marketed in different channels. The use of such third-party sources will always help the business gain more trust of customers in the market and then drive sales easily.

6. More brand promoters
Affiliate marketing helps e-commerce businesses get more brand promoters without investing much. Affiliates take brands to more audience and a wider market which eventually helps win more fans and followers for products and services. More so, the recommendations of influencers are seen very effective is driving sales of the business. So, it’s always better to leverage affiliate marketing and win more brand ambassadors for the business.

7. Enrichment of business through user-generated content
When an e-commerce business uses affiliate marketing, it takes a solid step towards having tons of user-generated content across digital platforms. Such content can work as referrals and recommendations and help drive conversions. Compared to paid ads, potential customers are more likely to be swayed by word-of-mouth and content that comes from users. That’s why it’s always better to have more people, fans and followers raving about your products to help your sales.

8. Control over the target audience
Paid ads are indeed helpful in targeting the audience that can see your products, content and offers. They help e-commerce businesses target the audience based on geographic, demographic and income data. Despite all this, there is never a surely if the audience actually sees the ads. However, affiliate marketing helps exactly know where and whom to advertise the brand. You can select websites and influencers and reach to the relevant audience easily.

9. Quick results
In most cases, digital marketing takes time to fetch results which is not liked by brands looking to achieve marketing results quickly. Affiliate marketing however is different where the results can start coming as early as the same day. Quick customer acquisition becomes a reality as there is no time needed for retargeting, emailing etc. as often experienced affiliates are availed for driving the conversions of the business.

10. A niche for e-commerce business
Affiliates can help take your brand, products and services in front of interested prospects. You can a complete new set of audience to cater to. You can gain insight into them, cater to their tastes and then carve out a niche for the business. You can hire digital marketing agency India to gain better results with affiliate marketing and achieve the true potential of the business easily. This is how growth potential is realized in true sense.