Grow with an affiliate program

The digital form of word-of-mouth advertising, also known as affiliate marketing has been increasingly popular with businesses for years. Nowadays, you regularly see brands set up their own affiliate program and thus become independent of the well-known affiliate networks.

This article explains in more detail what affiliate marketing is and how it works.
⦁ What is affiliate marketing
⦁ The potential of affiliate marketing
⦁ Who is affiliate marketing interesting for?
⦁ Promote your affiliate program
⦁ Manage your affiliates with Sir Filiate

What is Affiliate Marketing

You will no doubt have heard the term affiliate marketing come up before, but what exactly is it and how does it work? With Affiliate Marketing, you are basically using a 3rd party to do promotion for your product or service. This 3rd party (Company or person) is then rewarded for each new customer that is delivered, this is done through commission on the order amount. So in this way you can build an affiliate network outside of your own "sales team" of individuals and companies doing promotion for your business.

The result? Growth in sales and brand awareness.

So how exactly does this work? Every affiliate who joins a company's affiliate program receives a "referral url" that they use for promotion. The referral url contains the general website url with a unique code added, this code is linked to the affiliate and is therefore recognized when a sale is made.The url looks something like this:

“https://www.sirfiliate.com/?ref=01FNY7VFQ85S61AAAGB746E7E2“

The unique code can also optionally be replaced with an "Alias," which is a freely fillable value. You can optionally do this if you want the referral url to look a little neater. If the affiliate uses the general website without adding the code. Then it will not be recognized and the commission will not be awarded to the affiliate. This is considered an organic sale.

The potential of affiliate marketing

That affiliate marketing works has been proven by many companies, but what is the power of this marketing model and how big is its potential? Affiliate marketing is fundamentally very powerful because it is one of the few Pay Per Sale (PPS) models. This means that you only incur costs once a sale is made by an affiliate, i.e. no upfront investments. Do you have an affiliate who does not realize any sales? Then you don't owe any commission either.

This method of cost and revenue makes an affiliate program tremendously scalable. Whether you have 10 or 100 affiliates does not fundamentally matter. Of course, as your affiliate program grows, other things do come into play that require attention.

To highlight the potential here are some market facts:
⦁ On average, an affiliate program generates 15% to 30% of total sales
⦁ 16% of all online sales worldwide are generated with affiliate marketing
⦁ Affiliate Marketing is the most successful channel for 20% of brand marketers
⦁ 56% of affiliate programs increased sales during the Covid-19 lockdown

For whom is Affiliate Marketing interesting

In principle, this marketing model can be used for any business with a webshop (Sales take place online) because it can be tracked. However, it is important to check if your business model is interesting for affiliates. For example, do you only sell products worth €10 or less? Then the commission you are willing to give is probably a small part of that as well. This may cause affiliates to be reluctant to work with you, since for some affiliates it is also a business model that generates a monthly income.

Not an online shop but interested in starting an affiliate program? You certainly can. For many companies, filling out a contact form or request for quotation is also of great value. It is possible to give a commission on these actions as well, to achieve this a "Tracking Code" is added to the website. This way, you reward affiliates for every request that is made, which ultimately also results in new customers.

Promote your affiliate program

Setting up an affiliate program is the first step; the next step is to make it known to your network that you have this model. You obviously want affiliates to start signing up with you to do promotion.

There are several options to get more visibility for your affiliate program:
⦁ Email: Send an email to your current contact list explaining what the affiliate program is, what commission you give, and where they can sign up.
⦁ Social Media: Make it known through Social Media that you have an affiliate program, you can even run an ad for this if necessary.
⦁ Landing Page: Create a new page for your website "Affiliate Program" explaining what the affiliate program is, what commission you give and where they can sign up. This way, everyone who visits your website will see that there are opportunities to promote your business.

Manage your affiliates with Sir Filiate

The moment you start an affiliate program, a number of administrative tasks come up. Which affiliates do you work with? How do you manage the results achieved? When should you pay out? And so on. Sir Filiate is the software tool to manage your affiliate program in 1 dashboard. The platform takes over the administrative tasks so you have time to focus on the important things. Some features of the platform are:

⦁ Manage and add automatic affiliates
⦁ Track and manage the performance of your affiliates
⦁ Perform automatic payouts
⦁ Automatic invoices generated and sent