Affiliate Portal: Add Magic to Your Business

Online marketing is the new phase of the digital era. Connecting with people is the core of any business and online marketing is the heart.

To connect with a large customer base you have started using affiliate programs to connect with people easily.

Look at the below given scenario:

Suppose you have a women’s clothing brand and many women often stop by your shop to purchase things for them as well as for their friends or family.

And someone inquires about men’s shopping brands and you recommend some XYZ shops all the time as you know about their unique collection.

But, what's happening in reality? You are marketing someone else’s product and every time you end up marketing the same shop. Additionally, you are not even getting anything in return.

Just imagine, if you can get the benefits after finalizing the deals.

Did you like the idea? Thinking of a way you can achieve this?

Don’t worry, here is a solution for you.

"Affiliate Marketing"

In simple terms, let’s understand how affiliate marketing works.

Company X will be directing customers to Company Y where all the transactions happen and in turn Company X earns commissioned money on transactions done on Company Y.

Affiliate marketing started in the 1990s and has grown rapidly. According to some of the reports, affiliate marketing industry is worth 6.5 billion dollars across retail, finance, gaming, travel, education, etc.

You can use them in two ways:

1. Consumer Based
2. B2B

Usually, affiliate programs are revenue sharing or pay per model. A small portion of it follows the cost per action.

Let’s get a sneak peek into ecosystem of affiliate marketing:

Participants of affiliate marketing ecosystem are known as publishers or advertisers. An advertiser is the offer provider and the publisher is the one who promotes the offer.

To make the affiliate programs easy, many companies provide affiliate portal to advertisers and publishers. Once the individuals log in to these portals they can get various details like product sales, transaction history, etc.

Advertisers like affiliate programs because there is no loss to suffer as they get payment on the basis of performance. But, businesses cannot completely rely on single advertiser to sell their products.

On the other hand, advertisers need to continuously build their channels of sales and marketing and earn on the basis of their performance.

Let’s look at the way affiliate marketing portal is useful in the B2B market:

To make affiliate portals a huge success in the B2B market is a challenging task, but success is possible.

Web traffic is the key to success in driving sales.

Usually it is the responsibility of the publisher to generate significant traffic and make sure it returns. If you are a high traffic publisher, it is important to showcase the B2B features and generate a good amount of sales.

Working with B2B publishers who have blogs makes the task easy for B2B advertisers because advertisers can easily understand customer interest and promote their products.

But, remember that both the entities are independent.

Below, I have mentioned some steps you need to consider while launching your own affiliate marketing portal or connecting with other affiliates:

• Understand your customer-base:

This is the first step towards your goal. Understand your blog readers, newsletter subscribers, social media followers, etc. These things will help you understand your customer better and in turn you can start getting a gist of the type of affiliate portal you can create or the affiliates you can connect with.

• Marketing your affiliate program:

You as a company have decided to start the affiliate program, but you need to search for the right website owners or bloggers who can help promote your company’s products.

• Acquire quality traffic:

Build relation with more than one affiliate as this will not make you dependent on a single affiliate. At the same time you will also get quality and diversified traffic.

Conclusion:

I can understand having a business and managing an affiliate is a difficult task. But, they will help you in increasing the sales of your products and generating revenue. Affiliate programs are safe because you won’t suffer loss. Additionally, make sure to use affiliate marketing portals to make the process easy for your affiliates.

Mr. Maulik Shah is the founder & CEO of CRMJetty, a hub of innovative customer relationship solutions, provides ready to CMS integrate portal solutions for SuiteCRM, Sugar CRM, Salesforce, and Dynamics CRM including WordPress Customer Portal.