How To Use Affiliate Marketing To Boost Your Ecommerce Sales

Have you started using affiliate marketing for your ecommerce business? Are you using it but are yet to see a spike in sales?

Affiliate marketing can help you grow your ecommerce business by reaching people who are likely to be interested in your products. It's a tactic that helps you increase sales by allowing other people (affiliates) to earn a commission for recommending your products and driving sales.

You can partner with affiliates who have similar target audiences as yours. They can recommend and spread awareness about your products through their social media accounts, websites, and blogs. If someone buys your product using their custom affiliate link, you’ll pay them a commission.

It’s a win-win situation for both you and your partner affiliates. While they earn a commission for selling your products, you only have to pay for the number of sales generated.
That’s why most marketers have adopted affiliate marketing. In fact, affiliate marketing spending in the U.S. is expected to grow to 8.2 billion dollars by 2022.

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But how can you use it to boost ecommerce sales? Let’s find out.

Table of Contents
How Can You Start Using Affiliate Marketing to Grow Your Ecommerce Business?

1. Decide on a Payment Model
2. Optimize Your Product Pages for Conversions
3. Choose an Affiliate Program
4. Offer Incentives
5. Track Efforts

Are You Ready to Boost Your Sales with Affiliate Marketing?

How Can You Start Using Affiliate Marketing to Grow Your Ecommerce Business?
As a marketer, affiliate marketing is an effective strategy as you only spend your marketing budget for sales generated. Affiliates can bring in sales and introduce your brand to new audiences. So how can you start leveraging this tactic to boost your ecommerce sales? Keep reading to learn how it works.

1. Decide on a Payment Model
First things first, you need to determine the amount of commission you’re willing to pay your affiliates. Remember, the commission percentage you decide to pay should allow you to make a profit.

It’s important to consider if your business will be able to afford that much commission rate. You might have to raise the price of the product before you start using affiliate marketing.

Another thing to consider is your payout model. Will you pay according to cost per sale (CPS) or cost per action (CPA)? If you choose the CPS model, you will have to pay a commission when someone makes a purchase. It’s a great model because you only pay when a sale happens. However, this model requires a high-percentage commission.

With the CPA model, you will pay for actions taken by the affiliate’s audience. It could be for registrations, form submissions, clicks on links, etc. The commission rates, in this case, tend to be less than that for the CPS model.

But there is no guarantee that a user who visits your product page will also make a purchase. So how should you proceed? Choose a payment model that aligns with your marketing goals and budget.

2. Optimize Your Product Pages for Conversions
Affiliates will help drive traffic to your ecommerce site and product pages, but it’s your job to engage visitors and convert them. It’s not enough to get people to your product pages. You need to convince them to purchase your products.

How can you do that? You should start by choosing a great ecommerce platform on which to build your online store. While choosing a platform, you should consider factors such as features offered, scalability options, uptime, SEO-friendly, mobile responsive, and pricing plans. You should also check whether the platform provides technical support.

Once you have selected a platform to host your ecommerce site, you should ask yourself a few questions including:
- Is there a clear call-to-action (CTA)?
- Have you used high-quality product images? You should include images that showcase your product from multiple angles, emphasize unique features, and allow users to zoom in.
- Does your content have a friendly tone? Will it capture visitors’ attention? Your product descriptions should be self-explanatory and useful for visitors.
- Will you be able to build trust? You can include social proof, customer reviews, and expected delivery time to get visitors to trust you.
- Do you accept payments via different payment gateways?

You should consider all of these factors to optimize your product pages and increase the conversion rate of your website.

3. Choose an Affiliate Program
You have two options: You can either build your own affiliate program from scratch or join an existing affiliate network. What are the benefits of creating an affiliate program from scratch?
- You only pay affiliates. No extra costs required to join an existing network.
- You can communicate directly with affiliates.
- You can control every aspect of the program.

One of the main disadvantages of creating your own program is that it could take up much of your time and resources. You will have to find affiliates, collect data, monitor campaigns, track results, and make payments - all by yourself.

However, there are many affiliate software solutions that can make your life easier by sharing your workload. These platforms can help you automate a lot of tasks. But what if you want to join an existing program? Let’s take a look at the benefits of joining an existing affiliate program?
- You get access to a vast network of affiliates.
- You can track performance metrics to analyze how your affiliate program is working. You can also evaluate the performance of individual affiliates.
- You can automate payouts when an affiliate helps you make a sale.

The main disadvantage is that you need to pay an additional commission to the affiliate program you join for every generated sale. You should make a decision based on your resources and time. Creating your own affiliate program could eventually help you save a lot of money. An existing affiliate program, on the other hand, helps you kick off your program immediately, quickly grow your audience, and increase sales.

4. Offer Incentives
Not everyone who signs up for your program will actively promote your products. So, how can you encourage affiliates to participate actively? You can offer bonuses to affiliates who perform well. For example, you can give bonuses when an affiliate completes ten sales or you can give an additional commission if they sell X number of products in X number of days.

Giving incentives can motivate your affiliates to actively create content that can engage your target consumers and compel them to buy from you.

5. Track and Analyze Your Campaigns
Tracking the performance of your efforts can help you optimize your marketing strategy. You should keep a close eye from day one and compare sales generated before and after starting the affiliate program.

Did the number of sales increase? You should assess the contributions of each of your affiliates to find out if they were able to reach out to the right audience and create targeted content to drive conversions.
Some of the metrics you should track include:
- Referral sales
- Referral clicks
- Conversion rate

Analyze the results of your affiliate marketing campaigns and of your affiliates. You can use these insights to reward top-performing affiliates. It can also help you run affiliate programs for the right products and give insights about the kind of content that your audience resonates well with.

Are You Ready to Boost Your Sales with Affiliate Marketing?
Don’t miss growth opportunities by failing to run successful affiliate campaigns. Affiliate marketing can help your ecommerce brand acquire new customers and increase sales. But there is a catch: You will have to find and partner with the right affiliates, choose an efficient platform, and offer the right incentives. Optimizing your product pages can also help you boost conversions.