Hello and thank you for checking out our latest blog post! If you have an affiliate program or run an affiliate program, you know how difficult it actually is to grow it over time in an exponential fashion. Well, at Experience Advertising, we have cracked the code on how to effectively and exponentially grow affiliate programs on a year over year basis. In this post, I will explain how 3 of the main KPI’s (key performance indicators) were grown on an annual basis. When running an affiliate program, you want to grow your numbers including: publishers/affiliates, clicks, ad impressions, sales, and overall affiliate participation. This client of our agency experienced exceptional growth in all of these areas.
So, as you can see, the overall revenue driven for the advertiser/merchant grew 193% year over year. This is phenomenal growth of the affiliate channel because most affiliates programs don’t grow at this rate in general. This was accomplished by onboarding 100’s of new affiliates via the CJ Affiliate Network. CJ Affiliate has the best overall selection and volume of larger producers and relevant affiliates/publishers of all the affiliate platforms out there, in our opinion. We use CJ Affiliate as our primary affiliate network of choice because we have the confidence that we can scale the affiliate program quicker and broader through CJ Affiliate than any other network. CJ’s recruiting tools allow us to recruit 100’s of quality affiliates/publishers on an ongoing basis.
One of the aspects that sets our agency, Experience Advertising, apart from other affiliate management agencies (OPMs), is our affiliate messaging. No other agency or inhouse affiliate managers can match the quality, friendliness, helpfulness, and frequency of our affiliate newsletters. We also provide affiliate strategy articles and videos to help affiliates become more effective. Most of the affiliate programs we manage receive weekly affiliate messaging. We also send personalized one-off messages to affiliates all throughout the month. It’s extremely important for DTC companies running affiliate programs to message out deals and promotions to their affiliates on a frequent basis. Without sending frequent promotions, the affiliate program just doesn’t gain traction and participation like it would with a lot of promotions on a monthly basis. When a good amount of affiliate messaging is sent out, your affiliate participation levels will steadily increase and therefore the amount of ad impression and clicks will increase. When the overall traffic is increasing, the overall amount of sales will increase over time. It’s a proven fact. That being said, you have to make sure the traffic your affiliates are sending is converting at some rate for each affiliate. If you have affiliates that are sending a lot of clicks and getting no sales then they need to be worked with or removed, or your CJ network EPC average will go down, and less affiliates/publishers will apply in the future. So, you want to make sure your CJ EPC is always increasing over time. You can also increase your CJ account EPC by increase your website’s overall conversion rate (another service our agency offers).
Another great KPI you want to see is your average order value increasing over time. This means that the revenue from each affiliate-referred order has increased which can offset some of the commissions you are paying out to your affiliates for referring sales. A lot of what contributes to the AOV increasing are things like seasonality and the website’s overall conversion rate. This is also one of the KPIs that CEOs and business owners want to see from their affiliate channel because they can compare it to the AOV from their other digital marketing channels. In general though, customers referred by affiliates are good customers that spend more and have better loyalty than other channels, which is why growing your affiliate marketing channel in the right way is absolutely the thing to do.
This is a great example of how affiliate programs can grow on an annual basis, however these results may not be typical and you have to keep your expectations for your affiliate program in check because it doesn’t always work out this well. At Experience Advertising, we use the best processes, techniques, and strategies to grow our clients’ affiliate programs. Our staff is at the top of the affiliate industry and we are committed to delivering excellent results for our clients. If you are looking to grow your affiliate program to new heights, or launch an affiliate program from scratch, contact us for a free evaluation. Thanks again for checking out this post, besure to share it with your friends and associates!
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