Could you do it all in-house?
You’ve researched affiliate marketing, you like the possible returns and you have a budget for rolling out your plan. It’s important to note that successful affiliate programs take time, effort and constant monitoring, internally and externally in order for them to work effectively.
By Martina Mercer
There a few routes you can take to start the process:
In-house affiliate marketing
As affiliate marketing becomes more popular, bigger brands are assigning entire teams to the marketing in house. A lot of experts must come together to create a great affiliate campaign, and if done in house, a whole new extension to a current website must be added.
Those that do this in house have a designated area for affiliates. This area allows affiliates to:
• Log in or Sign Up
• Manage their accounts
• Manage payments, withdrawals and commissions
• Choose creative for ads, such as banners
• Grab links and code to insert into their own website
Once an affiliate is accepted, given membership and added to your network, the links and code they pick up will lead their visitors to your products. Each piece of code must be unique, as it is this that will enable the effective tracking of conversions, in order to monitor the affiliate’s commission and conversions.
This is obviously a very complicated task, as it involves many aspects along with fulltime management once the facilities are set in place. However it can provide the best return long term. It can give you an incredible reach as you can have as many affiliates as you want.
With a detailed registration process and someone monitoring the applications you can also ensure that affiliates are worthy of promoting your brand.
In-house marketing like this also allows you to specify a budget as you roll out a commission that’s the same for everyone.
For instance, many High Street retailers have affiliate programs in house, and find that they can change campaigns quickly, maintain control, adapt strategies through analysis and keep long term costs low.
On top of this an in house affiliate program can give you better results as you develop one to one relationships with your affiliates. This allows you to gain feedback and roll out extra incentives if times are a little slow or there’s a particular product you want to push.
Affiliate networks
Affiliate networks are popular for both big brands and SMEs, for example, John Lewis uses two affiliate networks to manage their campaigns. (See the five best affiliate networks here).
An affiliate network can have the following benefits:
• Quicker implementation as the software is already present
• Instant affiliates as you use the networks contacts
• Easier acquisition of affiliates as they search regularly find merchants through the network
• No training required
• Streamlining of payments as you pay the networks not the affiliates directly
This route obviously has a lot of positives and is probably best for the budget when testing the waters of affiliate marketing but to make it work you must do a little research on the advantages each network offers.
Other options
You could also outsource your affiliate marketing to a programme manager. These are experienced teams or agencies that focus solely on your campaign. They are usually paid only by results, so they already have an incentive to analyse progress and maximise your return.
Already trained, a programme manager will know the do’s and don’ts of affiliate marketing and will ensure this expertise is extended to your brand. This can cut down the risk of competition advertising closely to you, or a lack of conversions through varying factors.
The agency can manage all of your affiliates so you simply pay the agency rather than affiliates individually. They will also ensure your reputation is upheld as they monitor spam and social networks.
The benefits and risks vary depending on the business, but there’s no denying that affiliate marketing for merchants can be an incredible way to raise brand awareness and reap big rewards. As affiliates work for you outside of usual office hours, it allows revenue to come into the business at any time of day or night.
