Paid Partnerships
Affiliates and Business Partnerships
What are Paid Partnerships?
Paid partnerships are 3rd party websites or Apps that will send traffic to your site in exchange for a commission.
Paid partnerships (also known as affiliates) are one of the oldest forms of internet marketing. An affiliate partner is effectively aiming to drive targeted traffic to your website/product in return for a commission fee.
As a business, you must decide what this fee is. Most affiliate partnerships are based on a percentage of the sale value given to the person who referred the traffic. Alternatively, some businesses work on a fixed fee for each sale that results from them sending over the initial lead.
Affiliates are one way for your business to grow with minimal risk. If the commission is based on the result of a sale, then you can rest assured knowing that you have received a conversion prior to paying any commission. Tricky one to explain, we know!
The result is that, unlike other marketing channels, there would never be a scenario where your marketing activities are ROI negative (unless you have chosen to pay more commission out than your profit made from each sale).
Benefits of Paid Partnerships:
You have total control over costs
Partnerships with other brands can help you gain trust
Partnerships can be run with a guaranteed positive ROI
What are examples of good affiliates?
Typically, a business that’s in a similar category but does not have the same target customer is an ideal partner. Examples include:
A website that specialises in providing Mortgages may offer a number of affiliate links to loan or credit card websites.
A dentist which recommends a number of high value electric toothbrushes would get a commission for each one sold.
How affiliates are tracked?
Affiliate partnerships do require a longer and more difficult initial setup process. However, once they are live, they don’t require much ongoing resource. Traffic is normally tracked using cookies that log a user that leaves your site and lands on the third party website. If they then go onto convert on the targeted site, you will receive a commission payment.
Don’t worry if the customer doesn’t buy straight away, a cookie will typically track anywhere from 24 hours to 30 days. This means that as long as they haven’t gone through another affiliated website, you will still get the credit for any sales that take place.
Are affiliates a smaller channel?
Don’t be fooled into thinking that affiliates are something you should skip over in favour of PPC or SEO. Large businesses such as Amazon and Apple all run affiliate schemes, they see them as important parts of their marketing channel mix.
How we can help…
Affiliates is a typically more niche service, however we have a vast amount of experience and launched various affiliate partnerships over the last 15 years.
Both of us (AJ and Jules) have been part of European award-winning affiliate teams and managed multiple million pound affiliate budgets for business that we have worked over time. We can discuss the benefits with you and see if affiliate marketing is an option to grow your business.
Usually, our initial planning sessions would include some, (or all) of the following:
Suitability criteria
Affiliate parter appetite
Market analysis
Technical Site Audit
Competitor analysis
Partner pitch documents…
We can help with your Paid Partnerships strategy
If you’ve read this far and you’d like to know a bit more about Affiliate partnerships or how DigitalFoxes can help, just drop us a line…
