subject: Getting Affiliates to Promote Your Products: Trading Commission Payments for Increased Sales [print this page] Getting Affiliates to Promote Your Products: Trading Commission Payments for Increased Sales
As a product owner there are only so many potential customers you can reach as a result of your own markerting efforts,but if you had an unpaid sales team out there you could sell much, much more.
By unpaid sales team I mean a happy group of marketers who are content to promote your product or service for no upfront salary at all and who rely entirely on earning commission on the products they sell.
If recruiting this unpaid sales team sounds like something you would like to do then offering an affiliate scheme for your product range is something you should seriously consider. Quite simply you sacrifice a percentage of the money you take in sales in return for getting a customer you would not otherwise have obtained.The more generous you are with the percentage of the sale you are willing to pay to the affiliate then the more successful you should be in attracting this unpaid army of sellers.
Some marketers are even willing to just break even or take a small loss with some of their affiliate products in the hope that they make more money from their new customers with future sales of more profitable back end products over time.
When it comes to setting up your own affiliate scheme there are two main options you need to choose from and that is whether to administer the whole thing yourself or outsource it to a specialist company.If you do it inhouse you keep more control over the process, will avoid paying fees to a third party but will have more work to do in the administration of the scheme.Doing it yourself will also mean you have to do all the promotion work while a specialist affiliate company will help advertise your scheme to its members.
Clearly if you are just starting with a small affiliate program then running it yourself may be the best option as the time and effort needed may not that be all that great. On the other hand, if you have a large number of products and are looking to attract hundreds of affiliates then outsourcing would make much more sense because you want to spend your time running your business and not running your affiliate program.
Outsourcing may also be more attractive from the would-be affiliate's point of view as having a third party run the scheme may make them feel more confident about joining up and actually getting paid their commissions on time.
There are also various ways you can pay your affiliates with a commission on actual sales or commissions on leads generated being two of the most common methods.Some schemes require the customer to go directly from the affiliate's link to the product owner's sales page in order for commission to be paid while others allow commissions if the buyer leaves without buying but returns to purchase a week or even several months later.
You will also have to put some considerable time and effort into making life as easy as possible for your affiliate sales team and the provision of free promotional materials such as banner adverts and sample email copy are all things you may like to consider.
Finally don't forget to reward your top affiliates to encourage loyalty and keep them selling for you rather than switching to a rival's product. Incentives such as cash prizes, electronic goods and holidays for your top earners may well be worth the initial investment.
