Affiliate marketing is an advertising model that involves paying a commission to anyone who promotes your products.
The affiliate partners would share a product or service on platforms such as blogs, social media, or video platforms. Then, you’ll pay them after each sale is made.
For many businesses, an affiliate program is an affordable way to boost sales and revenue. To set up, you’ll mostly need affiliate marketing software to manage offers, tracking, campaigns, and commissions.
In this article, we’ll explain how affiliate marketing campaigns can benefit from sales CRM systems.
Content Outline
What is affiliate marketing and do you need CRM software?
A simple affiliate marketing scenario involves a business setting up an affiliate program and asking existing customers to invite their friends.
When people sign up or make purchases using an affiliate link, the affiliate partner gets paid. Depending on what your business offers, you can use affiliate marketing to promote anything.
So, what is a sales CRM? A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is a central place for storing customer data, tracking customer interactions, and for passing vital information to team members.
With a CRM system, you won’t miss any detail about each interaction with customers that may occur before, during, and after their purchases.
How can e-commerce businesses benefit from affiliate marketing?
Small-to-mid-sized businesses spend between 10 to 20% of their revenue on digital marketing strategies like SEO campaigns, social media ads, and PPC advertising.
However, an affiliate marketing program doesn’t require such costs. Here are reasons why e-commerce businesses should use affiliate marketing strategies:
1. Low-Cost Marketing
An affiliate marketing program isn’t expensive since you only need to set it up once. Most of the marketing would be done by your affiliate partners.
You just need to make sure that you have good products that customers would love. Next, you’ll publish marketing materials such as product pictures, descriptions, videos, etc.
You should offer attractive commissions per sale and also provide support to affiliate partners.
2. Reach a Bigger Audience
Affiliate partners provide e-commerce brands access to their network of friends, family, and colleagues. Social media influencers can also promote products to their fans and followers.
It helps companies to reach a bigger audience and gain their loyalty faster than usual. Affiliate marketing campaigns allow you to improve brand recognition and awareness in no time.
3. Increase Web Traffic
When you have people promoting your website or store, they are indirectly creating backlinks. This helps to boost your website authority and increase your SEO rankings in search engines.
Affiliate marketing campaigns also allow more people to visit your website and check out what you may be offering. Then, they may choose to buy immediately or return to purchase later.
4. Ongoing marketing that requires minimal time and effort
An affiliate marketing system is usually set up to run for as long as possible. It doesn’t require you to promote products since you’ll leverage the efforts of your affiliate partners.
It allows your employees to focus on other activities and ensure that products are always available. So if you keep paying commissions per sale, people would want to market your products for you.
5. Increased Sales
The desired result of every marketing strategy is to improve sales. When your affiliate partners promote your products, there will be people checking out your website and placing orders.
And with many affiliates in your program, there’s no limit to how many sales you can get in your business. Affiliate marketing is a great way for e-commerce brands to boost revenue.
6. Low-risk marketing
Affiliate marketing isn’t as expensive as other digital marketing methods. This makes it safe for any e-commerce business to attempt.
And if the campaign isn’t highly successful, you would not have lost much productivity and money. It’s a low-risk advertising model that wouldn’t require you to invest much time and money.
Can you use a CRM system to run affiliate marketing campaigns?
An affiliate marketing program requires proper management to ensure smooth running. You have to manage, track and pay commissions to your network of affiliates. It’s best to use sales and marketing software to run such campaigns.
There are several CRM software systems that allow you to manage affiliate campaigns. Some sales CRM software can link to certain affiliate marketing software programs. A sales CRM helps to track all incoming traffic from affiliates.
Using a CRM system ensures you don’t miss any sale or interaction with a customer. It also provides proper analytics so you can track how well your affiliate campaigns are performing. It can also automate the payout of commissions.
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