What is Affiliate Management and How to Choose the Right Team?
The world of affiliate marketing is one that not everybody is on board with, yet it can be a very useful area of commerce and marketing. Affiliate marketing is about using the leverage of other businesses to enhance yours. Many businesses employ an affiliate manager, and some an affiliate management team, as it is one area of the business that does need constant and accurate monitoring and management. In the article that follows we will be looking at what an affiliate manager and team do, and how best to spend your available affiliate budget. Let’s begin with a few explanations.
What is Affiliate Management?
Affiliate marketing is about getting more links to a website. It’s also about making money, on both sides. How does it work? If you look at an eCommerce website – just pick any one you fancy – you will find somewhere the invitation to become an affiliate. What does this mean? Let’s say you have a website selling a particular product, and you find an eCommerce website that has a product or service complimentary to yours. You join as an affiliate and carry a link to their site on yours.
Are you with us so far? Great, now what happens is this: every time someone visits your site, sees the affiliate link and – being interested – clicks through, you get a commission. Usually they have to make as purchase, and the commission is paid either as a percentage or a flat fee. The benefit of this type of affiliate marketing is therefore clear: the affiliate gets a cut, and the business you are an affiliate for also gets more business. So, if it’s that easy, why are many eCommerce businesses employing affiliate managers or even affiliate teams?
Why Employ an Affiliate Management Team?
It’s easy to think that affiliate marketing is a ‘plug in and play’ scheme: you sign up affiliates, and they start getting you business. This may have been the case many years ago, but a lot has changed in the digital world in relatively few years. The simple fact is that, as with all areas of marketing, optimization is the key to success and growth. What do we mean by this? Let’s have a closer look.
When we described the process of affiliate marketing above, we mentioned complimentary businesses. Let’s say you are a carpet supplier. Businesses that may wish to be affiliated with you could be carpet and upholstery cleaners, painters and decorators, anyone – in fact – involved in the interior decorator of a house. That’s because someone buying carpets is more likely to need a carpet cleaner or a decorator than they are, for example, someone who fixes cars.
This is why companies such as iAffiliate Management are in the business of providing expert help in choosing the right affiliates for your business. This means had work in looking for affiliates who will bring in the business and be worth spending your budget on.
Who to Pick for a Team?
If you are set on using your own, in-house affiliate management team, it can be a useful division to have. You need to pick people who are experts in your immediate market, and who know their way around computer data analysis tools. That’s all very well, but then you’ve got to pay them! You may find that, as many have already, it is more cost-effective to engage the services of a professional, dedicated affiliate management company. They will not only have the expertise to get the right results for you, they will do so at a sensible cost, and with attention to detail throughout.
