Affiliate Marketing: Examples of How To Grow Your Ecommerce Brand

5 Minute Read

Need inspiration on why you should use brand affiliates? These affiliate marketing examples should shed some light on how you can boost your eCommerce sales.

Affiliate marketing is the ever-growing marketing trend that will help you tap into your target market. Whilst there are many different forms, at its roots affiliate marketing is the process of marketing your products through another individual’s channels and networks.

It is a popular choice amongst eCommerce brands. Affiliates are usually very talented at writing and creating video content; two skills that sit well with the eCommerce audience.

Over the past couple of years, content produced by affiliates has grown by 175%. Customers love being able to develop a better understanding of a product before they purchase, it empowers them and provides a more educated final decision.

This works well for brands, who typically use affiliate marketing because it is cost-effective, time-saving, low-risk and increases your brands awareness and traffic.

This post will talk you through the examples of affiliate marketing that will help you boost your brands awareness and sales. Let us know if they helped you decide to incorporate affiliate marketing into your strategy.

Being selective with affiliates

The most important thing to consider when undertaking an affiliate marketing campaign is choosing the correct affiliates. If you don’t, your efforts are wasted.

With such large affiliate networks available, your brand has the freedom to sift through the noise and find the people who hold the target market you are looking for.

The goal is to put your brand in the faces of the audience who is most likely to receive your products well. There would be no use in an affiliate who specialises in fitness advertising a local fast-food chain. It would fall flat with their audience.

Choose the networks and individuals who have an organic relationship with their following. Take advantage of the fact that their audience is actively involved in the sector that your brand is in. Remember, it’s about quality over quantity (cliche I know).

Don’t stick around if the conversions are low, you have the option to be picky.

Improving SEO

Improving your SEO is an affiliate marketing example that will boost your organic exposure.

The Google search engine loves valuable content, rewarding the brands who constantly contribute with higher search rankings. The main issue being, a lot of eCommerce brands do not have the time or resources to invest in quality content.

Fortunately, your new found love for affiliate marketing should come in handy here. Brand affiliates are typically very good at writing articles or creating video content. If you develop a healthy relationship, you will be able to feed your affiliates ideas which align with your brand mission.

Overtime, your organic search ranking should increase because there are more back links diverting traffic to your site. You should take advantage of getting your name onto other domains, they may rank higher than yours.

Using coupon sites

Another one of the great affiliate marketing examples is the use of coupons. Not the ripped-up bits of paper that your Dad carried in his wallet, but online coupon affiliate websites. Take Retail Me Not as an example…

By landing on the right one, coupon sites are the perfect place for your target market to hang out. Providing an upfront discount is a great way to introduce your brand, increase traffic and boost sales.

However, be careful which sites you associate with. Some sites are not as trusted as they once were. Sometimes codes don’t work and people get irritated. This can often lead to lost trust.

You can always go through an affiliate marketing platform like Commission Junction or LinkShare. These guys will hook you up with the latest and greatest sites that will hit your desired audience.

Exploring foreign markets

One of the great affiliate marketing examples of expanding your brand comes from the ability to explore foreign markets.

It’s a scary process to learn if your brand will be well received globally. It’s normal to be sceptical. But for eCommerce brands, it is pretty common practice to ship globally these days. The tricky part is getting recognised and trusted.

Start by building up your global connections online. Enter different networks and explore where affiliates tend to hang out; webinars, social media, blogs etc.

At a pretty low risk, it is definitely worth seeing what the rest of the market has to offer – you could find what you’ve been missing this whole time. If your brand is well received at home, your possibilities of growth are endless.

Discovering sources

Explore your options! One of the best examples of why affiliate marketing will grow your brand comes from your ability to explore and make decisions.

Affiliate marketing is performance based, meaning it won’t cost you a penny until one of your brand affiliates converts a sale. Because of this, you have a lot more free reign with testing out which avenue will work best. You have the following examples to consider:

• Blogging
• Review sites
• Email Marketing
• PPC
• Coupon sites
• Social Media
• Youtube

The best thing you can do, is find the most relevant affiliates in these sectors and analyse your results. You may be surprised.

Using an agency?

If you’re still struggling to find the right affiliates for your brand, or just tight on time, why not try out an agency? They
will do all the work for you; matching your brand with the ideal publisher to promote your products.

Take Soap Media for example. These guys will find your publishers, align a campaign with your brands goals, analyse competitors, manage the campaign and provide a final report including deep analysis of results.

For a busy eCommerce brand, using an affiliate agency is a great way to effectively tackle a campaign in a short-amount of time. It’s pretty self-sustaining. An agency will set you up with a network that will match your target demographic, increasing your changes of effective ROI.

Trying new tech

It is no secret that tech is evolving at a rapid pace. Developers are constantly keeping marketers on their toes by building groundbreaking tools. Which is why it is important to stay on top of the industry.

Shopcast is the latest innovation to hit the affiliate and influencer marketing industry. This social shopping tool allows brand affiliates to Live Stream a video of their shopping trips directly from your eCommerce site. Viewers can comment, vote, shop with time-sensitive discount codes and gain an in-depth review of your product range.

Shopcast is currently free to install and use, you should check it out for your eCommerce site.

Collaborating with influencers

Being able to collaborate is one of the best affiliate marketing examples that will grow your brands awareness. The pairing of influencer and affiliate marketing is increasingly being used as the two prove a lot of relevancy in the eCommerce industry.

A great way to do this is through affiliate links. Sharing affiliate links on social media is a good way to reach a large, relevant audience. You can also track the success of your influencers efforts.

Gifting items to influencers is also a way to introduce their audience to your brand; using the correct individuals shows that you have a keen finger on your industry pulse.

The most important thing when combining your affiliate marketing strategy with influencers is building a relationship. Connecting with the relevant, influential individuals may just be the next stage of exposure that your brand needs.

Wrap-up

Now that you understand the examples of why affiliate marketing is an effective way to boost your eCommerce sales, test it out!

The important thing to note, is that you can’t really go wrong. Make sure that your brand’s products are being seen in the most relevant places to reach your target market, you may be surprised by how well your efforts convert.