If you own an eCommerce store and you want to get the most out of your eCommerce affiliate programs, do not ignore the following strategies if and whenever you want to promote an offer.
1. Decide on Your eCommerce Offer
This is one vital decision you must take before you start looking for affiliates to help in the promotion. It is hugely important to decide at the outset what you are going to promote and what results you expect. What you decide on will serve as your offer. It is this offer you can use to attract affiliate marketers. For affiliate marketing purposes, the details of the offer must include, your product/brand/business, the commission rate, shipping information, product descriptions and images/graphics related to the product/brand.
2. Position Your Website Landing Page Well
The landing page of your website is the first point of call when visitors hit your website. For this reason, it must be captivating enough to hold visitors’ attention for a while. As a rule of thumb, it is not advisable for the homepage of your eCommerce store to be its landing page. The reason is because most of your website visitors may not pay enough attention to your homepage before they get distracted. Exception however is if you are able to arrange your homepage in such a way that it serves as your products page too. The goal here is to be sure this page helps you to convert as many leads as possible to sales. For best results, marketing experts recommend that your homepage must be eye-catching and interesting enough to hold visitors’ attention a few seconds longer. To guarantee this, your main headlines must be bold, grabby and punchy. The page must have a social proof and of course a CTA. It must have eye-catching media content particularly graphics/images as well as videos. Your marketing story-line must be compelling enough with clear products benefits and features. With these seemingly little but important details in place, you can make your landing page even more effective to help procure more conversions.
3. Track with the Right Tools
The most popular tools in the business for now are Google Analytics tools and many are free to use. With these tools, it is fairly easy to determine exactly how affiliate marketing impacts your eCommerce site. From the insights garnered from the use of these tools, you can have a very distinct idea of how many people click on your ads/links, how many of those clicks turn into prospects and how many of those turn into conversions. For most marketers, such data amounts to a hugely important trove of information that allows them to effectively measure the direction and even success of their affiliate marketing campaigns.
4. Promote with Videos/Visuals
To instantly grab the attention of your website visitors, you need good visuals. The more visitors’ attention you can grab, the better for your business. Technically and for marketing purposes, visual content usually works better than written words because visuals tend to grab attention faster and better. The higher the quality of your visuals therefore, the better they attract the attention of visitors. You can even get better results if you effectively combine videos and written content perfectly. Most affiliate marketers appear to be used to that sort of combination. For this reason, eCommerce store owners should always endeavor to create and share high-quality visuals with their affiliate marketers.
5. Choose a Promotion Strategy
For a successful product offer, strategy is very important. You must decide on a suitable promotion strategy for your offers and get your affiliate marketers to key in. If for instance you decide to go with an advertising network like Google, it is imperative for you to provide all necessary information about your offer and your affiliate marketers will decide for themselves how best to promote it. Same strategy applies even if you decide to work with larger affiliate networks. However, creating the best affiliate offers naturally starts with the right products. Next is to identify which segment of people would be better drawn to your products. This you can determine by drawing patterns from their online behavior. From this pattern, you can better target them where they can be found then tailor your ads to their biases. That way, you get the best results.
6. Direct the Right Products to the Right People
This requires audience segmentation. Without it, you risk marketing haphazardly with very poor results. A good strategy is to make sure the bulk of your marketing activities are directed towards meeting the right demands of your consumers. For effectiveness, you must always identify the right products that meet the needs of each set of consumers based on segmentation. Characteristically, most online users are always quick to disregard unspecific ads/campaigns that are irrelevant to their current needs. This is why, for effectiveness, online advertising must be targeted with pinpoint accuracy.
7. Promote with Time and Location Consciousness
The Internet is a worldwide 24/7 market place. This is why time and location are two critical factors in eCommerce marketing. You must time and direct your ads in such a way that they have a very high chance of being seen by the people you are targeting. So, you must give very careful consideration to time and location when developing your marketing campaigns if you want to get good results. You must pay careful attention to differences in time zones around the globe. That is what determines when your prospects are most likely to see your ads. In addition, your ads should be shown only to those prospects within the geographical reach of your distribution services. Promoting a product to people you have no means of serving amounts to wasted efforts which you can least afford as an eCommerce store owner.
