Affiliate program as a sales channel
Analyzing various sales channels of your Internet project, you always want to understand where to invest your strength, time and money in order to guarantee a profit increase. We learned from our experience that an excellent sales channel is an affiliate program. In this post we will describe how it can be developed and how this will affect the financial performance of the project as a whole. All statistics are collected during the work of the Monetti partnership center that we created (combines the partnership programs of all our services), but since we have a lot of partners today (over 1000), we will consider these data fairly objective.
If we compare the various sales channels of our projects, the affiliate network will be a confident leader. It gives us almost half of all buyers. At the same time, it is the channel with the least risk, compared to context-sensitive advertising that is very dependent on competition, which loses its effectiveness over time, and search traffic, which is impossible to predict at all due to the constantly changing search engine algorithms.
Figure 1. Share of various channels in project sales
')
In addition to direct sales, the affiliate program also performs tasks to promote the brand of your project. Due to the coverage of a large audience of partner sites, product awareness is growing significantly.
Last year, intensively engaged in the development of the affiliate program, we have received an increase in income, brought to it, almost 2 times. At the same time, the main investments need to be made in creating new technical opportunities for partners and maintaining communication with them.
Developing an affiliate program, pay attention to the following points:
1. Who are my partners and where to catch them?
Targeted partners - sites of similar subjects with your product or service / sites whose target audience coincides with yours (in this case, the subject matter may be different).
Partners can be involved:
- on specialized resources for an audience interested in affiliate programs (searchengines.ru. Mastertalk.ru, etc.)
- using the referral program
- direct contacts - especially for large sites of interest to you. Search for the people you need on social networks, on forums and through mutual friends - and they will be found :)
For example, our managers received contacts of the owners of one of the largest websites in the Russian Internet of congratulations after they found the developers of this site on Free-lance.ru!
2. About types of export
It is necessary to provide partners with as many types of export as possible from the simplest ones (banners and links) to the most scalable ones (XML). If you look at the statistics of the types of exports, we see that the partners show the greatest interest in ready-to-use storefronts, allowing you to organize a separate section with content on your site.
Figure 2. The popularity of various types of exports
3. Money decides everything
It is obvious that special attention should be paid to partnership payments. To increase partner satisfaction on Monetti we did:
4. 20/80
After the partners install the selected type of export on their website, the real work begins. Now your common task is to maximize the sales of your partner’s site and keep it there.
The existence of the affiliate program is subject to the standard formula 20/80: 20% of the largest partners bring 80% of revenue. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct individual work with them, constantly analyzing sales statistics and experimenting with types of export in order to find the best option.
5. Listen carefully
Constantly receive feedback from partners, and they themselves will tell you the main directions of development for the affiliate program. Forum, newsletters, polls - any type of online communication is suitable for this.
We mentioned only the main points that you should pay attention to when creating your affiliate program. And the main conclusion is to invest time, money and time in the affiliate program of your service. As a result, you will receive a reliable and scalable sales channel that will bring you a steady income for a long time.
PS Thank you mih for the topic and beautiful diagrams.
If we compare the various sales channels of our projects, the affiliate network will be a confident leader. It gives us almost half of all buyers. At the same time, it is the channel with the least risk, compared to context-sensitive advertising that is very dependent on competition, which loses its effectiveness over time, and search traffic, which is impossible to predict at all due to the constantly changing search engine algorithms.
Figure 1. Share of various channels in project sales
')
In addition to direct sales, the affiliate program also performs tasks to promote the brand of your project. Due to the coverage of a large audience of partner sites, product awareness is growing significantly.
Last year, intensively engaged in the development of the affiliate program, we have received an increase in income, brought to it, almost 2 times. At the same time, the main investments need to be made in creating new technical opportunities for partners and maintaining communication with them.
Developing an affiliate program, pay attention to the following points:
1. Who are my partners and where to catch them?
Targeted partners - sites of similar subjects with your product or service / sites whose target audience coincides with yours (in this case, the subject matter may be different).
Partners can be involved:
- on specialized resources for an audience interested in affiliate programs (searchengines.ru. Mastertalk.ru, etc.)
- using the referral program
- direct contacts - especially for large sites of interest to you. Search for the people you need on social networks, on forums and through mutual friends - and they will be found :)
For example, our managers received contacts of the owners of one of the largest websites in the Russian Internet of congratulations after they found the developers of this site on Free-lance.ru!
2. About types of export
It is necessary to provide partners with as many types of export as possible from the simplest ones (banners and links) to the most scalable ones (XML). If you look at the statistics of the types of exports, we see that the partners show the greatest interest in ready-to-use storefronts, allowing you to organize a separate section with content on your site.
Figure 2. The popularity of various types of exports
3. Money decides everything
It is obvious that special attention should be paid to partnership payments. To increase partner satisfaction on Monetti we did:
- real-time sales statistics - a counter was installed in the Partner’s Personal Account, which shows how much money it has earned at the moment, with an update every 4 hours.
- various payment options with a minimum limit - we pay affiliate remuneration by bank transfer (suitable for large partners) and in all possible electronic currencies.
At the request of partners, we also made payments more often (now 2 times a month) and reduced the minimum limit (now 250 rubles, but for legal entities there is none at all). - transparent history of mutual settlements - 2 times a month, a detailed report on the content sold and income received is generated in the partner’s office. All information about the paid remuneration can also be viewed in a special section.
- support service (email and telephone), ready to answer any financial question.
4. 20/80
After the partners install the selected type of export on their website, the real work begins. Now your common task is to maximize the sales of your partner’s site and keep it there.
The existence of the affiliate program is subject to the standard formula 20/80: 20% of the largest partners bring 80% of revenue. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct individual work with them, constantly analyzing sales statistics and experimenting with types of export in order to find the best option.
5. Listen carefully
Constantly receive feedback from partners, and they themselves will tell you the main directions of development for the affiliate program. Forum, newsletters, polls - any type of online communication is suitable for this.
We mentioned only the main points that you should pay attention to when creating your affiliate program. And the main conclusion is to invest time, money and time in the affiliate program of your service. As a result, you will receive a reliable and scalable sales channel that will bring you a steady income for a long time.
PS Thank you mih for the topic and beautiful diagrams.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/101055/
All Articles