B2B affiliate marketing, a paid marketing strategy that allows you to boost your sales by paying partners to promote your products or services, is on everyone's lips today. Companies from all sectors are using it to increase their revenue without blowing their advertising budget.
Do you also want to create your own B2B affiliate program? Then this guide is for you! We'll give you all the keys to a successful operation from A to Z. From the choice of partners to the setting up of the remuneration system, including the definition of objectives and performance indicators, nothing will be left to chance. Ready to become an affiliate marketing superstar?
B2B affiliate marketing: Definition and characteristics
What is affiliate marketing in ecommerce?
Affiliate marketing is a partnership between your brand and other sites or bloggers who promote your products or services to their audience. In return, you pay them a commission on each sale generated by their promotion. While there are various pros and cons to affiliate marketing, it's overall an extremely effective way to boost your visibility on the internet and attract new customers without having to invest huge marketing budgets.
What is the principle of affiliate marketing for businesses?
The principle of affiliate marketing in ecommerce is simple: you provide your affiliates with specific links to your offers, and whenever a user clicks on these links and makes a purchase on your site, the affiliate receives a commission. This can be a flat commission or a percentage of the total sale amount. Affiliates can be bloggers, influencers, or even websites that deal with topics related to your brand.
Some popular affiliate sites also present themselves as e-tailers, but with the Evolup solution, affiliates showcase the items from their partnerships to create a real intuitive and fluid catalog.
Example of the Purrfect Bag affiliate site created with the Evolup solution
By working with quality affiliates, you can reach new audiences and markets that you may not have been able to reach otherwise. Affiliates can be a great way to boost your sales while increasing your visibility and awareness on the web.
What are the benefits of an affiliate program for professionals?
- Increased sales and revenue
By working with quality affiliates, the goal is to benefit from their community and credibility to promote your ads to their own network. This can lead to increased traffic to your website and increased conversions, which translates directly into more money for your business.
- Acquisition of new customers
One of the goals of an affiliate program is to reach new targets that you may not be able to reach as easily with other marketing levers. By working with affiliates who have a relevant target audience or who have a network of engaged subscribers around them, you can reach your goals faster and more effectively than if you had to do it alone thanks to the strength of their content and the interest of their diverse communities.
- ROI optimization
An affiliate program can help reduce the costs associated with digital marketing, especially those associated with acquiring new customers. Since you only pay for the sales generated by your affiliates, it can significantly reduce new customer acquisition costs, such as paid advertising costs.
What are the different types of compensation for affiliates and influencers?
In addition to there being different types of affiliate marketing, there are also different types of compensation methods available. Learn about the different affiliate and influencer compensation methods and choose the one that best suits your marketing strategy!
- Cost per click (CPC): affiliates are paid for each click on the links or banner ads they place on their site or social networks.
- Referral affiliate marketing: affiliates are rewarded every time they refer another person and that person performs a certain action through their referral link.
- Cost per action (CPA): affiliates are paid for each action performed by the visitors they send to the advertiser's site. This action can be a purchase, a subscription to a newsletter, an application download, etc.
- Cost per thousand (CPM): affiliates are paid for each thousand impressions of the advertising banner they’ve integrated into their site.
- Cost per impression (CPI): affiliates are paid for whenever the banner ad they have integrated into their site is displayed to visitors.
Keep in mind that there are also other business models such as cost-per-time (CPT), network, and recurring affiliate marketing, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. Depending on your goals and target audience, choose the compensation method that best suits your affiliate marketing strategy.
How do you do affiliate marketing as a pro?
Set program goals and track key KPIs
One of the top affiliate marketing tips when you want to launch a successful affiliate program is to set clear goals and determine key KPIs to measure the performance of your program.
Some of the most commonly used KPIs include the number of clicks on affiliate links, the conversion rate of visitors to customers, the average order value, or the acquisition cost per customer.
For example, if your goal is to increase your revenue through your affiliate program, you can define average order size as a key KPI. You can then work with your affiliate partners to set up incentives such as exclusive promotional offers, coupons, or complementary product bundles to encourage customers to increase their order value.
If your goal is to acquire new customers through your affiliate program, the cost of acquisition per customer is a key KPI to track. You can work with your affiliate partners to target audiences similar to your existing customer base and implement attractive offers to entice those audiences to order from your site.
To summarize, here’s a list of examples of things to monitor during your affiliate campaign, which can be adapted according to your objectives:
- Number of clicks on the affiliate links
- Conversion rate of visitors into customers
- Average order value
- Acquisition cost per customer
- Retention rate of customers acquired through the affiliate program
- Open and click rates of newsletters sent to affiliate partners
- Rate of validation and payment of commissions to affiliate partners
- Number of new affiliate partners recruited each month
- Affiliate partner churn rate
- Total cost of the affiliate program compared to the revenue generated
Identify potential partners
In order to succeed in your affiliate marketing campaign, it’ll be essential to identify potential partners who can promote your ads in the best way. Sites, blogs, influencers, and other internet actors that can bring you qualified traffic and new customers will be welcome, as long as they can reach potential consumers in your target market.
Criteria for choosing partners include their target audience, their expertise in your field of activity, their notoriety on social networks, and their ability to drive traffic to your site.
For example, if you’re a fashion brand specialized in women's shoes, you could target women's fashion blogs with a strong audience in your niche, influencers with a community of followers interested in fashion and trends, or affiliate sites specialized in fashion and accessories.
It's also important to choose the right types of partners based on your marketing goals. If you are looking to generate short-term sales, strong affiliate sites with high domain authority and traffic volume can be a wise choice. If you're looking to build brand image and awareness in the long term, influencers with an engaged community may be a better fit.
Set better commissions than your competitors!
Your affiliates deserve to receive attractive commissions for joining your program, but they shouldn't embarrass you by being too high... To ensure that you’re on the right track, you need to start by setting clear payment terms for commissions, including payment frequency (monthly, quarterly, annually), minimum payment threshold (the amount below which commissions are not paid), and payment methods (bank transfer, Paypal, etc.).
You’ll need to organize your commissions carefully. For example, you could set commissions of 5% for every sale generated by an affiliate partner, with a minimum payment threshold of $50 and monthly payments by bank transfer.
It's also important to take into account the differences in commissions depending on the types of products or services offered. To get an idea of the ecommerce leader and its commission rates, here is Amazon's scale according to the types of niches.
How do you create a B2B affiliate marketing program?
Create your own program and promote it
Do you want to start an affiliate program as a brand? As we've seen, once you've determined your key elements to build solid "deals," you can share this news with your networks.
You can use social media, newsletters, and advertisements to get the attention of potential partners. Also, don't forget to communicate regularly with your existing partners to motivate them and inform them of new offers available.
Regularly monitor the performance of your affiliate program and adjust your commissions and promotions accordingly.
Work with a professional affiliate marketing platform
If you don't want to deal with all the logistics of running an affiliate program, from getting your offers on the internet to creating consistent compensation plans, creating visuals, tracked links, and recruiting the most qualified affiliates and content creators for your brand, you can turn to specialized solutions that’ll support you in every step of your professional affiliate business.
Professional affiliate platforms provide a range of features and services to help brands and affiliates track clicks, sales, commissions, and payments. Examples of popular professional affiliate programs include Affilae, Kwanko, Awin, ShareASale, TradeDoubler, Effiliation, NetAffiliation, DaisyCon, etc.
On these platforms, you’ll be able to place your ads on marketplaces systems where all brand offers are available. Professional media, blogs, publishers, or influencers will be able to submit their profile and results based on traffic, performance on their site, or networks before you choose to collaborate with them or not.
Provide promotional tools to affiliates
One of the most common tools is the affiliate link, which allows affiliates to track the clicks and sales they generate. Banner ads are also very popular, as they allow affiliates to promote offers in a visually appealing way on their site or on social networks.
Promotional codes are another effective tool, as they offer affiliates a way to entice customers to make a purchase by offering a discount or bonus. Referral programs are also common, offering affiliates a commission for every new customer they refer. These promotional features help affiliates maximize their revenue potential by effectively promoting the company's offerings.
What is the best affiliate solution for your affiliates?
The Evolup turnkey affiliate solution
When you start building your affiliate program, you need to make sure your affiliates have the right platform to showcase your catalog. It's a win-win: if affiliates generate clicks that lead to purchases, you make money and so do the content creators.
In the world of affiliate marketing, it's essential to have an efficient, smooth, and easy-to-use platform to maximize your revenue.
That's where Evolup comes in, the ultimate solution for affiliates.
With Evolup, creating your own affiliate site is a breeze. With our SEO-optimized foundation, the affiliate gets increased visibility in search results, which helps attract more traffic and potential customers. And with the AI built into our solution, writing product descriptions, blog posts, and other site text is a fun task, allowing you to focus on what you enjoy most: promoting items you love!
But that's not all: a team of business coaches helps publishers make the most of their daily tasks. Whether you’re an experienced professional or a beginner, our coaches are there to accompany you throughout your affiliate journey, guiding all entrepreneurs in the best practices and most effective strategies to reach your goals, all at an affordable price of only $10 per month.
Benefits of Evolup for businesses
The Evolup solution for your company will allow you to put an additional lever in place for your marketing strategy while relying on an ultra-optimized platform for your success.
On the one hand, as we’ve seen, Evolup will be a way for you to provide an efficient solution to your affiliate network so that they can generate maximum traffic to your site and potential sales. In the blink of an eye, they’ll be able to set up a professional site, presented as an ecommerce store, and integrate all your ads in a fluid interface and with simple navigation.
On the other hand, for professionals, another lever can work depending on your niche with an affiliate site. If you’re at the head of a winning ecommerce site, already positioned for many queries on search engines, then you can imagine multiplying your presence at the top of search results through an affiliate site of yours.
Your affiliate site will also be ranking for queries that convert. On this affiliate site, you’ll be able to add your own catalog and therefore links that will lead the internet user back to your ecommerce site. In this way, you can create a self-affiliated network, a double online presence to convert more and more.
Obviously, this advice is for advanced e-merchants. To learn more about affiliate marketing with Evolup and the possibilities available to you to create even more business, don't hesitate to test the solution with a 7-day free trial and also sign up for the WiziShop ecommerce solution (15-day free trial) in order to understand and grasp all the benefits that a precise and well-tested ecommerce strategy can offer you!
