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Affiliate Marketers act like a salesforce for a business.
Marketing can be a costly investment for businesses. Big investments into advertising can be an elevated risk if you do not know the return.
Would it not be great if someone else better at marketing took up that risk and funded the marketing?
You could pay them a small commission fee for each sale. It may sound too good to be true, but it is not. This is called affiliate marketing.
This article explores affiliate marketing, how it works and the benefit it provides to both the seller and the affiliate marketer.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is an endorsement-based advertising strategy, that earns promoters (affiliate) money when internet users act on that marketing.
Based on a model of revenue sharing, vendors (merchant) offer a financial incentive such as a commission, through an affiliate program. Affiliates earn a piece of the profit for each sale through creating marketing content to try redirect customers through a customer URL to the merchant’s product.
Affiliates can make money promoting products and services and make an income, without actually having any of their own.
For the merchant, it employs the help of affiliate to invest time and money into marketing your products or services. to expand their reach on the target (online) audience.
According to Mediakix, affiliate marketing spending increases every year in the USA, with around a 10 percent yearly increase in affiliate marketing spending.
Affiliate marketing refers to an online relationship between the so-called merchant and the affiliate, where the merchant pays the affiliate a commission to redirect potential consumers to the merchant’s website (Libai et al., 2003).
How Affiliate Marketing works
Affiliate marketing involves four different parties:
• The merchant,
• The affiliate,
• The affiliate marketing network, and
• The customer.
From a marketing point of view, there are two components: the merchant who has produced the product or service for sale and the affiliate marketer who promotes it.
With a traditional business model, the seller bears the risk that profit exceeds the overall marketing costs. However, an affiliate takes on the promotion efforts and then earns a piece of the profit from each sale they make. This is usually via a predefined commission, and the sales are tracked via personalised affiliate links.
For the affiliate, they just need to be good at marketing. It works similarly to somebody employed in sales on commission. Such as real estate agents. This incentivises their performance. This is a huge benefit to the merchant having a purely commissioned sales force and predictable marketing costs.
In the other hand, affiliates can create a revenue stream without investing in inventory or infrastructure.
“The key to successful affiliate marketing lies in the construction of a win-win relationship between the advertiser and the affiliate.” (Duffy, 2005)
The merchant is also known as the seller, vendor, or retailer. They are the party who created the product to market — it could be a physical object or a service. They could be a sole trader or a large corporation. Once the product is created, they are not required to be actively involved in marketing. They have others do the promotion, in exchange for a commission on sales.
2. The affiliate
Also known as the content creator or the publisher, the affiliates try to create appealing marketing to attract customers to the merchant’s website. They create content for the products to share on social media, blogs, and websites.
Affiliates often already have an audience or following on social media, so they choose products in their niche that meet the needs of their audience. For example, If I had built an audience posting content about fitness and health, I would not become an affiliate marketer for a candy company.
“There are thousands of affiliates, working for many different advertisers simultaneously, driving incremental traffic and sales in exchange for commission.” (Duffy, 2005)
3. The network
Many merchant/affiliate relationships are managed through affiliate marketing networks. There are two key relationships: The first is with the affiliate and the second is with the merchant. The network works as an intermediary between the merchant and the affiliate.
Affiliate marketing networks such as Linkshare, Commission Junction, and Clickbank facilitate the tracking of sales transactions, payments and product delivery. Their technology tracks all the activities and manages the commissions and the issuance of payments to affiliates.
These networks also serve as a database of products, out of which the affiliate can choose products or services to promote. The network facilitates the management of applicants, making the process of participation easy for both the merchant and the affiliate.
Amazon also has an affiliate network (Amazon Associates Affiliates Program), to help promote consumer products such as books and toys, sold on their platform.
4. The consumer
The consumer (or customer) make this relationship work. If they do not purchase, there is no revenue and the affiliate will not receive a commission. When consumers buy the product, the seller and the affiliate share in the profits.
There will not be a higher price for consumers purchasing through an affiliate, as the cost of the affiliate network is typically included in the price.
Email Marketing has become one of the most popular and effective marketing method and relationship management tool used by businesses since it rose quickly into prominence with the internet about 25 years ago.
Pretty quickly, most people had a personal email address and were checking their email, making it a powerful tool to communicate with people.
This article explores the use of email as a marketing tactic.
What is Email Marketing?
Short for electronic mail, email is the sending of messages to one or more recipients, distributed by electronic means via the internet. Email marketing is a digital marketing tool that uses email to develop relationships with prospective customers and maintain and strengthen relationships with current customers. The end goal is to influence these people to make a purchase and be ongoing customers.
“Companies often list email as one of their most powerful marketing channels. To this day, the size of your email list is a demonstration of your reach and thought leadership. However, your email marketing campaigns should be part of a holistic approach to educate your contacts about your company.” (Georgieva, 2012)
The popularity of email marketing has been a part of the ongoing trend away from a product-focused marketing strategy to a customer focus of customisation and relationship management, to satisfy the needs of each customer.
Email marketing has been growing since the mid-1990s and is a widely used marketing tool by the majority of B2B and B2C companies. In 2015, one study indicates that over 80% of firms use email as part of their marketing strategies (See Zhang, Kumar, & Cosguner, 2017).
The benefits of email marketing
Email is a powerful marketing tool, with several benefits for businesses using it to build customer relationships and increase sales. Using their database of email addresses, businesses can design email marketing campaigns, personalised for diverse groups of leads and customers. Some of the benefits of email marketing are:
• Brand awareness — keeps the brand top of mind and people informed about what you offer.
• Speed — a quick output and quick response for lead generation.
• Segmentation— allows you to selectively email members of your database depending on their behaviours.
• Cost-Effective — Low cost per contact for customer acquisition. A better return on investment many other forms of marketing.
• Targeted — you are sending relevant materials to your audience.
• Customer Dialogue — encourages a two-way dialogue with customers, where communication is one way with many other marketing methods.
• Trackable — Analytics allows you to track the performance of your emails.
• Conversion — turn prospects who are interested in your industry or your products/services into customers.
• CRM — customer relationship management helps maximise the lifetime value of customers by increasing customer retention and repeat purchases.
Objectives of email marketing
Email Newsletters are great not only for marketing to prospects but also for nurturing your existing customers. Some of the objectives of using email marketing are:
• Send recipients to other marketing content such as landing pages with exclusive offers, blog posts or other valuable content.
• Communicate with a community, customers, employees or other stakeholders to generate a reaction or a result.
• Inform the reader about a new offer or send them to a blog post.
• Maintain and develop long term relationships with current customers.
• Motivate customers to finish a purchase who have items in their shopping cart that was abandoned.
• Increase sales by converting more leads into customers and selling more to previous customers.
Analysing the results of your email marketing
One of the major benefits of email marketing is the ability to monitor subscriber engagement and interest.
It is a process of continual improvement — testing and tweaking your email content and database management. To analyse the performance of your email marketing, there are several key metrics to help measure the performance of each campaign against previous benchmarks.
For example, analysing the interaction that people have with your website after they click on a link, this can help you pinpoint how to improve the user experience on your website. Two different landing pages could be used to test which one receives better results.
• Open rate is the proportion of people opened the email. But this can be an inaccurate gauge as customers who are active in opening a firm’s emails may not be active in purchasing and vice versa. Some people are more responsive to emails. Some people like to browse. Other people may purchase but never open their emails. Therefore, it is important to track more factors than just your open rate, such as tracking your click-through rates and conversion rates.
• Bounce rate is the total emails sent that could not be delivered to the recipient’s inbox, If one particular campaign has a lower than average delivery rate (high bounce rate), examine the subject line and content of that message to check if there’s something that could have flagged it as spam.
• The list growth rate is how fast your email list is growing. This is calculated by subtracting opt-outs and hard bounces from the number of new email subscribers gained per month.
“Be clear to your target market about what they will get out of subscribing to your emails. Give them a clear description of what the value proposition is. For example, will your emails offer: (1) tips and tools on how to run their business more efficiently, (2) product updates from your company, or (3) special offers via email? Your audience will want to know “why” they should subscribe before they decide to clutter their inbox with even more emails.” (Georgieva, 2012)
• Unsubscribe rate is the proportion of people in your database who unsubscribe from receiving your emails. This is not always a reliable picture of the health of your email list, however, as many subscribers no longer want to receive emails will not bother to go through the formal unsubscribe process. They will just stop opening email messages and delete them instead.
• Click-Through Rate (CTR) is a foundation of email marketing analytics, as it indicates whether the message was relevant and the offer compelling enough to check out. This measure how many people click on the offer or other link in your email.
• Conversion rate is the proportion of people who clicked a link and completed the desired action, such as purchasing a product. This is also dependent on factors beyond the original email message, such as the quality of your landing page or the offer itself.
“Conversion rate is the ultimate measure of an email campaign’s effectiveness. The higher your conversion rate, the more relevant and compelling the offer was for your audience.” (Georgieva, 2012)
• Revenue per email measures the ROI of an email campaign, calculated by dividing the total revenue generated from the campaign by the number of emails sent. This is only relevant if you generate a lot of direct sales from email campaigns.
Spam
Because it is so cheap and accessible (anyone with an email address can send a mass-email), email is used as a tool to spread spam emails. Spam is unsolicited digital communication sent out in bulk to random email addresses without consent.
Spam has caused email marketing to leave a bad taste in the mouth for many people. We’ve probably all received an email or two from a Nigerian royal or long-lost family member promising us millions of dollars.
“Low production costs spur greater production, inducing entry to the industry by legitimate and not-so-legitimate marketers, which further increases the volume of email messages sent. As a result, consumers are awash in a sea of ads and information, some useful and some not.” (Pavlov, Melville & Plice, 2007)
The significant difference between spam and genuine email marketing is having an opt-in policy. If businesses keep rigorous with this, it means they are only emailing people who consented to receive them, and the business will not get any trouble. Most countries around the world now have anti-spam laws, so its best businesses are cautious with who goes into their emailing database.
Database management
A database can be powerful. But only if managed correctly.
A database should be continuously updated to make sure it stays relevant. If a user has been emailed 20 times and has never opened one of those emails, they probably should not be emailed once a week. You might email them once every 6 months or remove theirs completely. Your metrics will tell you who is no longer engaging.
Database members should be categorised so you can best meet their needs. Group them based on some common characteristics and behaviours.
Continually work to add new contacts to your email database, as the natural churn rate of an email list can be 25% or even more per year. Make sure you are gaining new relevant people on your database by providing a benefit to them by being on your mailing list (exclusive offers, gifts, industry updates etc).
Software such as Mailchimp or Constant Contact will help you manage your database as well as setting up your email marketing. Some systems will also you to set up your whole sales funnel with landing pages for lead generation, as well as for analytics and reporting to allow you to monitor the performance of your email marketing campaigns.
Email marketing strategy
Email marketing is about more than sending your latest offer out to your database once a month. Businesses must think of it like designing marketing communication campaigns — because they are! The objectives of email marketing should be clearly defined, who the target recipients are, the content must be developed to fit the purpose. Make sure it provides value!
The email campaign should be tested on a small sample, tweaked and then sent to the segmented members of the database. The results should then be measured to see what you can do better next time.
As well as immediate results, businesses should consider how their strategy will affect their future profitability. If your business sets up lead nurturing, emails are sent out automatically to new leads, according to the schedule you set up. lead nurturing is all about understanding the nuances of your leads’ timing and needs- tightly connected series of emails with a coherent purpose and full of useful content.
Tying a series of emails to a specific activity such as joining a mailing list, and then sending them an automated series of emails to learn more about their behaviour and potentially influence a purchase. The lead is qualified over a period with automation, saving a business time and energy.
Leads should be segmented into groups of buyers as you learn more about them to better meet their needs and provide them value. Targeted marketing has a far better return on investment than mass marketing — so do not be tempted to send the same email to all your contacts!
Email is a vital component of a marketing and sales funnel — where the objective is to turn as many leads into sales as possible. But email should be part of an integrated marketing approach — email does not work in isolation.
Your marketing emails need to be complemented by other efforts, such as search engine optimisation and content marketing on social media. If you blog, send people to your blog via your email and encourage people to sign up to your newsletter at the end of blog posts.
Your marketing strategy should outline how your individual marketing efforts complement each other.
Email content
What goes into an email? Of course, this will vary depending on the firm and its objectives. But there are some general rules when it comes to the content of email marketing.
The email title must convince the recipient to open the email. This is key. It must be related to the content of the email (stay away from clickbait), but at the same time be compelling enough that the recipient is curious enough to open the email. Because many people check their email via smartphones, long titles will not be displayed in full. Aim for 5 to 9 words.
“In the Subject: line Each word makes a critical difference in whether your message is opened at all. Once its opened, you only have seconds to capture the readers imagination. You have to grab their attention and keep it.” (Sterne, & Priore, 2000)
Your content must be brief and relevant for the recipient. Grab their attention right away, by containing the most information in the first paragraph. Try and keep it the length to under 100 words.
Use a personalized greeting at the beginning of the email and a clear call-to-action at the end of the email. Include a couple of hyperlinks to other useful content such as a blog or video on your website, or a custom landing page that contains more information (find out more, or to order).
An option to unsubscribe must be available. Email marketing software with automatically using an unsubscribe option.
The layout and design of email marketing are important — especially if it is a newsletter. But you do not want to go over the top trying to make it aesthetic, simple can be beautiful. Try to use a maximum of two colours.
Include one or two images in the email, one of those can be the company logo for brand awareness. Make sure the images have alt text for those not viewing the email in HTML (quite often images are turned off automatically).
Your contact information as well as social-following buttons for your social media accounts should be at the bottom of the email.
How many emails should you send?
The right number of emails to send is difficult to pinpoint, as it will depend on your customers. If you are emailing qualified leads, it might be once or twice a week. Other customers, once a month or once a quarter might work better. It will depend on the engagement level of your audience.
“Sending the right number of emails is critical for the firm’s profitability, especially since most customers tend to complain about the large number of emails sent by firms.” (Zhang, Kumar, & Cosguner, 2017)
Many companies start to send fewer emails to keep subscribers. However, the frequency of emailing does not necessarily negatively impact subscriber retention. There can be email overload, for sure. But also, ask yourself if you are emailing the right people with the right message.
The use of the media to influence the perceptions of vast audiences has long been used by governments and corporations.
This is called public relations (PR), where the media is used as a gatekeeper for releasing a story to the wider public.
However, over the past 20 years or so in the age of the internet and social media, the average business or individual now has access to PR without needing a connection in the media or a big budget to pay a PR company to gain exposure.
This blog explores the use of public relations as a part of a marketing strategy.
What are Public Relations?
Public relations (PR) is the manages the release and spread of publicity from a firm or individual to the public to influence their opinions, attitudes or behaviours. PR aims to build and maintain relationships with stakeholders and those who influence the target audience, to enhance the public reputation.
Public relations professionals are storytellers and image shapers who create a positive narrative for their clients by working closely with journalists and other media. This allows them to manage and generate positive publicity for their clients to enhance their reputations.
Public relations are controlled internally as a strategy, but publicity is controlled and distributed externally.
“(Public Relations) helps establish and maintain mutual lines of communication, understanding, acceptance and cooperation between an organisation and its publics; involves the management of problems and issues; helps management keep abreast of and effectively utilise change.” (Harlow, 1976)
PR has been a profession since the dawn of the 20th century, but the roots of the idea of widely influencing public opinion and action can be found and during the movement to abolish slavery in England 100 years before that.
Because of these beginnings, one of the underlying assumptions of PR is that it should be socially responsible and go beyond organisational goals to play a constructive role in society.
Depending on the situation, PR will have a particular tone — whether it is showing empathy and understanding, storytelling and creativity, or more persuasive messaging. Messages are tailored to the relevant target audience/s.
PR applies to all organisations from small businesses to corporations to governments or activists. They could be from the private, public or third sector. The third sector is an umbrella term for voluntary and community organisations such as social enterprises.
Some of the tools used for PR are:
Owned media (e.g. website)
Earned media (e.g. newspapers)
Shared media (e.g. social networks)
Sponsorships and fundraising
Face-to-face
Photography
Moving images (video)
Print (e.g. newsletters)
Events (e.g. conferences)
Public Speaking
Publics
Public Relations is a critical link to manage communications between a firm or person and its publics. ‘Publics’ is any group of people or stakeholders who have a common interest in a particular subject.
Some of those publics are:
Employees (and potential)
Suppliers (and potential)
Partners
Distributors (and potential)
Investors
Donors
Political audiences, decision-makers and other opinion formers
Media and other commentators
Social media influencers
Customers
Objectives of Public Relations
Public relations can be used to protect, enhance or build reputations.
The “management of communications between an organisation and its publics.” (Grunig, 2013)
The goal is for firms or individuals to establish, build, nurture and maintain trusted relationships with their target audience.
Communication tactics are planned and executed to influence peoples’ attitudes and behaviours, ultimately to maintain or foster a positive opinion of the firm or person.
Much like marketing, PR has several individual activities and can have distinct goals. The intended audience could be prospective customers, investors, partners, employees, or just the general public.
Some of the objectives of PR are:
Increase brand awareness: inform the public of the policies, procedures and interests of a firm, promote an idea, or recognise accomplishments.
Crisis communication: managing a company’s reputation when negative news is public, formulate a response and ease the damage.
Internal communications: communicating within the company itself, employee relations.
Government relations & lobbying: public affairs is engaging and interacting with the government to influence public policy.
Media relations: building and maintaining close relationships with the news media.
Social Media/Community Marketing: leveraging social media marketing to distribute messages to desired target audiences.
Public relations strategy
PR is a strategic communication process, and a strategy often begins with an idea to create a story that would be of interest to the general public and will leave a positive impression for the company or individual.
A second way could be to follow up with a comment on the latest news or a current event connected to the firm/person or the industry they are in.
“Public Relations is a strategic communications process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organisations and their publics” (Grunig & Hunt, 1984)
A PR message might be prompted by a piece of news, but a PR strategy is deliberate and should begin with an analysis of the organisation to pinpoint strengths or opportunities to guide the positioning of the strategy and messaging.
A PR strategy should be actively managed and grounded in research, to gain an understanding of the environment that shapes decision-making. Messages that are consistent with organisational values and goals, but also consistent with public values and goals is key.
The interests and concerns of the company’s stakeholders should be acknowledged in the strategy — listening to their concerns to build a mutually beneficial relationship. To avoid having contradictory or confusing messages, there must be consistency in the overall message and theme.
Several distinct but complementary messages are created to target different audiences. For example, a charity event. One message would be crafted towards the general public, and one message crafted towards corporate sponsors.
There’s the same goal of a successful event that raises lots of money, but there are different value propositions for somebody paying to attend the event and enjoy a night for a good cause, to a corporation wanting to increase their brand awareness.
“The overall planning, execution and evaluation of an organisation’s communication with both external and internal publics — groups that affect the ability of an organisation to meet its goals.” (Grunig, 2013)
PR activities
There are several activities and tools that businesses can use for PR. There used to be a reliance on media companies and PR firms to use media such as TV and magazines to reach a certain target audience. The internet has created several opportunities for businesses to do their own PR.
Firms or individuals can produce and share content via social media to respond to a circumstance or to enhance brand awareness with their target audience.
Some of the individual PR activities that businesses can use include:
Writing and distributing press releases
Managing internal communications
Arranging interviews for company spokespeople
Holding press conferences and media interviews
Speechwriting
Writing and sharing story pitches directly to journalists
Hosting or sponsoring events
Personal networking
Writing blogs and newsletters
Social media promotions
Is public relations marketing?
Public relations have become a component of marketing over the past 20 years or so since social media started being used for press releases.
The fragmentation of mass media has dissolved a lot of the barriers public relations had for small businesses and PR has shifted into more interpersonal channels of communication.
PR can be used for market positioning and branding, aligning it with marketing goals.
The fundamental idea behind PR is for businesses to gain exposure to their target audiences using topics of public interest, this coverage received for free. Referred to as ‘earned media’, this is what makes public relations different from advertising.
However, social media can blur those lines — a boosted post for example where a normal social media post becomes a paid ad.
Think of PR as the generation an article featuring a client, rather than having a paid ad next to the article. This positive story enhances reputation as it is more credible coming from a third party.
Some of the main differences between advertising and public relations are:
Paid vs Earned
Builds exposure vs builds trust
Visual vs language
Creative control vs Media control
The audience is sceptical vs media gives third party validation
Thank you for reading.
I hope you enjoyed this blog about public relations and how the media can be used as a tool to spread a positive message about a business or person, to influence public perceptions.
If we’re the same as everybody else, nobody will remember us. If we’re a brand, we want to be memorable, right?
We want people to think of us when they are thinking about purchasing a product or service that we offer.
If we have a point of difference to our competitors, we are more likely to be remembered. We also want to offer a unique benefit that our competition does not offer.
This week’s marketing blog, this article explores differentiation as a business strategy.
