Affiliate programs

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Introduction

Affiliate marketing is a method of promoting online businesses in which an affiliate is rewarded for every visitor, subscriber, customer, and/or sale provided through his/her efforts. Compensation or commission may be made based on a certain value for each exposure (CPM), visit (Pay per click), registrant or new customer (Pay per lead]), sale (usually a percentage, Pay per sale or revenue share), or any combination of them.

Merchants like affiliate marketing because it is a "pay for performance model", meaning the merchant does not incur a marketing expense unless results are realized. Some businesses owe much of their growth and success to this marketing technique, especially small and midsize businesses. However, unlike display advertising, affiliate marketing is not easily scalable.

This system comes with its own Affiliate marketing engine which enables you to create one or more programs that reward affiliates differently but fundamentally designed to drive qualified leads to your website.

To take advantage of Affiliate Programs and use them to drive leads to your website, you would:

Create an Affiliate Program
Add one or more affiliates to your Affiliate Program via the integrated customer database (CRM)
Give each affiliate their own unique tracking link for this Affiliate Program so they can place this on their website or in their email marketing campaigns
Run regular reports to see how each affiliate is tracking and reward them accordingly

Every user on your site is identified by a unique code (cookie that is placed on the users browser). When the user clicks through an affiliate link, the affiliate is associated with that user's unique ID. The cookie that we use to store the unique ID has an expiration window of one year, and is renewed every time the user visits the site.

What this means is that to the extent that a customer visits the site at least once a year, the affiliate will continue to receive commissions for the life of the customer. If there is ever a one-year lapse on the part of the customer, then the connection to the affiliate will be lost.

Creating an Affiliate Program

Creating an Affiliate Programs is extremely easy and takes no more than a few minutes.

Simply give your program a name, e.g. Mums at Home. You must also select the landing web page for your program. When a referral is made the referee is taken to this landing page first. You can customize this web page so it is in context to your Affiliate Program.

Now you have to subscribe affiliates to your program. Affiliates are those who will refer leads to your customers. Go to your customer database (CRM) and locate your affiliates.

Go to Manage customer subscriptions link and subscribe contact to Affiliate Program.

Select Save & Finish to finish.

Unique Affiliate Link

Its important to note that every affiliate has a unique tracking URL for every Affiliate Program that they participate in. The unique tracking URL enables the system to track the number of referrals made by every affiliate, when these referrals are being made and the conversions that are taking place as a result of these referrals.

To send this tracking URL to an affiliate simply click on the Email Affiliate program details button in the "Manage customer subscriptions" section of a customers record.

Rewarding Affiliates

The ultimate goal of an Affiliate Program is so every person that is referred eventually becomes a customer. Hence it is imperative that all leads that are referred by an affiliate is tracked closely in order to identify whether a lead eventually becomes a customer.

How you reward affiliates is ultimately up to you. You can reward them for simply referring leads to your website or you can only reward them if these leads take a specific action as listed below. Or another popular form of compensation is based on how much money the referred lead spends on your website.

For any lead referred the system will track the following actions:

Make an enquiry via a web form
Subscribe to a newsletter
Purchase Products via the Online Shop
Request-a-Quote via the Online Shop
Make a Booking to an Event

Using the Results tab in Affiliate Programs feature you can run reports to see all referrals and conversions for your program. You can also filter to see referrals for a date range or how a particular affiliate is performing.

Conversions

If you look at the reports, you will see Referrals and Conversions. Referrals are simply clicks on the affiliate links and the conversions are the form submissions.

If you send yourself an affiliate link and click on it, then go to the Affiliate program and go to Reports, you will see the following:

Total Customer Referrals: 1.Total Conversions: 0.

That means that the customer has clicked onto an affiliate link and was taken to the site, but hasn't filled in any forms.

If that customer then fills in the form, you will see the following in reports:

Total Customer Referrals: 1.Total Conversions: 1.

You can then also see the name of the conversion and click on it and be taken to the details inside the customer's record.