5 Reasons Why Every e-Tailer Should Use Affiliate Marketing

Anne Garcia - November 4, 2010

It has become easier than ever to launch an Affiliate Marketing Program for your website. There are numerous Networks and Affiliates eager to start marketing your business in return for a small portion of your sales.

Affiliates work for you, the Merchant, to get more visitors to your website and complete transactions. Affiliates are associated with a specific Network where your Affiliate Program is set up.

Here are the top five reasons why every e-Commerce website should invest in Affiliate Marketing:

5. Increased traffic to your website. As soon as you launch an Affiliate Marketing program, you will see an influx of visitors to your website. An Affiliate’s goal is to advertise your website to drive sales in order to receive commissions. Therefore, they are incentivized to drive as much qualified traffic as possible to your website.

4. Easy to track results. Affiliate Networks make it easy to install and implement tracking pixels on your website in order to determine what leads were generated from their Network and Affiliates. A Network and an Affiliate only gets paid for sales generated from traffic referred by them.

3. Quickly see sales from your Affiliate Program. Starting an Affiliate Program through an Affiliate Network only involves minimal start-up fees and is easy to set up.  Once your program is launched, affiliates can begin sending traffic to your site immediately. Sales and transactions are posted in real-time within the Affiliate Network.
 
2. Affiliates are like an extension of your Marketing department but work 24/7. Affiliates use different internet marketing strategies to get visitors to your website — the most common are organic search engine optimization efforts, paid search, email blasts and banner advertising. As a Merchant, you can create limitations on the types of marketing efforts Affiliates are permitted to use in order gain traffic and sales.

1. You only pay Affiliates when there is a completed sale or transaction. The top reason why Affiliate Marketing is so beneficial to e-Commerce websites is because you only have to pay an Affiliate when it performs. You determine your commission payouts and do not have to pay for unqualified traffic and/or visitors.