Issue 3 - The one about affiliate marketing

Happy Monday! October, and 2022 come to that, is flying. It’s a busy time for advertisers and one form of marketing that is at its peak, is affiliate marketing, so this issue is going to focus on just that.

• To: Those who want to learn more about affiliate marketing
• Date: 24th October
• Subject: The what, why and how of affiliates

I find that a lot of big brands are familiar with, and run affiliate marketing successfully but outside of this, particularly in the SME space affiliate marketing is a lesser known marketing channel and even when people do know about it, they think it’s some strange wizardry form of marketing, this newsletter aims to clear some things up.

What is this ‘Affiliate Marketing’ that you talk of?

In simple terms - it’s the process in which a website earns a commission for promoting a product or service for a retailer or advertiser.

How does it work?

There’s a few ways affiliate marketing can run;

• Manage this on your own and partner with websites?
• Manage it with through an established affiliate platform

If you manage it solely, it’s a case of working individually with websites / brands to negotiate the deals and getting paid for commissions. If you manage it through an affiliate platform, you can manage at scale with payment being automatic and have countless websites and brands easily accessible. There’s pros and cons with both and this could be a whole topic in itself.?

Jargon busting

Some common terms in the affiliate space:

• The Affiliate / Publisher / partner - The website which promotes the advertiser and earns the commission when an agreed sale is made. Examples of them are Topcashback, Vouchercodes.co.uk or Bluelightcard
• Advertiser - An advertiser is the brand that an affiliate promotes i.e Argos, Next,?Boots etc
• Network - The platform in which you manage everything as either an advertiser or publisher. Everything is managed through the platform; commission rates, payments, sign ups.?AWIN, CJ, Linkshare, Partnerize and Amazon Associates are some of the biggest
• Customer - The end buyer of the advertisers product through the affiliate
• Commission -? The payment that is made to an affiliate as a ‘reward’ for a set objective. This is usually a set % for a sale, but can be a set ￡/$ for the sale or a set ￡ for a lead
• Affiliate/Publisher types; There are many types and formats of affiliates:

Voucher - Websites that list offers and voucher codes for lots of different advertisers

Reward/incentive/cashback - Lots of different types of sites that offer that customer a reward, outside of just voucher codes. Staff benefits, service worker discounts and cashback sites are popular ones. Usually the commission earned by these affiliates are split with the customer (or they earn their money through tenancy payments - see below)

Content - These sites are usually blogs or content rich sites which are focused on a particular niche

Technology - There are a growing number of tech partners who offer conversion rate optimisation techniques which run through the affiliate model (i.e their tech drives a sale, and the agreed commission is paid)

Social media / influencers - These are people / businesses with an engaged audience in which they monetize their content by promoting an advertiser

• Tenancy - A tenancy is a payment made in exchange for increased exposure from a publisher/affiliates i.e a newsletter feature, homepage coverage or a social media post to promote the advertiser

What’s going on in the affiliate world?

Last week was the PI Live Show, one of the biggest events in the industry with over 3,000 attendees and 60 exhibitors, so if you’re in the affiliate space then it’s the one to go for - and for Northerners like me, it’s a great trip down to that London.?

The best affiliate brains are there and it was great to have conversations around incrementality, ways to scale up the brands we manage and general catch ups.

Some of the key takeaways from the event:

Photo credit above from PI Live (featuring me if you look closely). What a setting!

Affiliate Marketing Tip

Technology partners can save time and free development resources to implement lots of ways to optimise conversion rates on-site. There are lots of different partners that can do this; Intent.ly, RevLifter, Upsellit, Envolve Tech. This is in no way selling any partner but worth looking into if you have backed up development resource, a lagging conversion rate and if you're already on a network, it's really easy to start using these partners and improving on site results.

Affiliate Marketing Stat

Affiliates can be quite hard to forecast what it can deliver, as it's not like PPC where you can say if we spend x, we'll get roughly y clicks, leading to z conversions. So even with the right strategy and implementation, it's a little bit unknown exactly what it will deliver.

For one new advertiser to the affiliate space, they went from ￡0 to almost ￡70,000 revenue in one month. This was incremental revenue, leading to one of their best months. Within one month, we’d signed up 150 new partners and the sales are coming from a good mix of partners.

We celebrated a bit like this... but lots more to do!

Affiliate myths

“It’s a passive, easy income" - This is one you hear a lot and there definitely isn't anything passive or easy about affiliate marketing. Long term, sustainable growth takes lots of nurturing, utilising partner relationships and a lot of hard work + time.

“It’s only for big brands” - I can definitely contest against this one, you don't need to have huge marketing budgets or be a well known brand to see success in affiliate marketing. The strategy and tactics should be different for every brand but the barrier to entry with affiliates is much lower than other channels.

Thanks for reading. Have a good week y'all.