Affiliate Tools for Ecommerce Website

This is a complete list of affiliate tools or plugins to easily add affiliatAffiliate Tools for Ecommerce Website Ecommerce, Affiliate, and Affiliate Program are some of the most searched topics on internet. If you have an eCommerce website, you know the importance of Affiliate Marketing and Affiliate Tools. Affiliates help in promoting your business and convey a message that your business is big as there are third party websites like high traffic blogs are promoting it. That’s why affiliate relationship is so important for e commerce websites and ecommerce companies. And it’s also right time to talk about affiliate tools for ecommerce website.

Affiliate ecommerce website is a typical business model in the internet. Internet users can choose the most suitable ecommerce affiliate program from thousands of different programs. Promoting products and services through affiliate marketing can be one of the best ways to make money on the internet.

You may be aware of affiliate marketing or ecommerce. If you are interested in selling products online, read this first to know everything about affiliate website. In this article, we will talk about the best affiliate programs for ecommerce website and why you should consider these for your online business.

Ecommerce website is promising and a growing business for most start-ups. To be more precise, affiliate marketing for ecommerce have overtaken the traditional commission-based model where the merchants offer marketers a higher percentage of profit when customers are actually paying for a product. Let’s see which affiliate tools for ecommerce website as an affiliate marketer would work best

What is an Affiliate Program?

Affiliate marketing is the process of earning money by promoting another website’s products.

It’s a simple relationship between two websites: an advertiser and a publisher.

An advertiser (you as the ecommerce store owner) has products you want to sell, and a publisher (affiliate) promotes these products on their own site and earns a commission on every sale.

The ecommerce store owner works with other websites who publish content and review products. Ecommerce merchants can leverage a website’s influence, traffic, and expertise to generate sales for their business, and only pay after the sale is complete.

The publisher uses their influence and web traffic to make money from the advertiser.

They can earn a commission from on direct sales, but can also earn commissions based on a number of other actions taken on the website, based on their agreement.

Examples of Affiliate Program Payouts:

Direct Sales. Earn a commission from traffic that drives a sale.
Leads. Earn commissions on actions like email sign-ups, social media follows, form submissions, content downloads, etc.
Clicks. An advertiser looking to generate a large amount of traffic might pay an affiliate on a cost-per-click basis.

Things To Consider When Developing Your Affiliate Program

If you’d like to get started with an affiliate program, you’ll need to consider some key business aspects first.

You’ll need to research the competitive landscape, know your program’s goals and objectives, and calculate some key metrics to ensure you’re successful.

Here are the top six things you need to know to start your own ecommerce affiliate program:

1. Do competitor research.

Before you jump into the world of affiliates, analyze what your competitors are doing.

Make a list of your competitors and find their affiliate programs on Google.

You can create an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of their affiliate network of choice, commission payouts, incentives or bonuses, cost-per-action, and cost-per-lead.

You can even join their affiliate program to see what kind of emails, incentives, and bonuses they’re offering their affiliates.

For instance, if your competitor pays 10% per sale and you see his or her business on prominent review websites, you can match the commission and target those sites.

Many ecommerce sites offer commissions on product sales between 8 and 15%, so make sure you take margin into account while also being competitive, based on your industry.

If you have a limited budget, you can experiment with affiliates in different verticals, find affiliates that your competition does not have a relationship with, or maximize ROI with a few select affiliate partners.

2. Know your affiliate program objectives and KPIs.

After your competitive research, you need to set your objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs).

This will determine the type of affiliates in your program and your commission payouts.

Some common objectives could be:

To increase site traffic by 15% month-over-month.
To increase revenue by $10,000 by the end of the year.
To increase the average order value by $10 within two months.
To increase the conversion rate by 20% year-over-year.

Once you have a set of objectives, think of the metrics to evaluate your progress towards achieving your goals.

Some common KPIs include:

Click traffic – number of clicks your affiliate program received over a given time period.
Gross orders – total sales your program reported.
Net orders – number of gross orders minus orders that were voided due to complications such as customers returning the product, canceled orders, etc.
Commission – the amount you paid to affiliate marketers to promote your business.
Top affiliates and their share of total sales – the top affiliate partners that are driving the most revenue for your affiliate program.
Performance from each category of affiliate – the type of customers your affiliates are sending to your website. This includes the percentage of sales from coupon and loyalty affiliates, review sites, WordPress blogs, etc.
Conversion rate – the percentage of visitors who bought something from your site.
Total affiliates – number of affiliate marketers in your program.
Percentage of active affiliates – the percentage of affiliates that drive clicks in a given period of time.
Percentage of productive affiliates – the percentage of affiliates that drive clicks and sales in a given period of time.
ARPU – average revenue per order.
EPC – earning per 100 clicks. This is an important metric which reflects the earnings your publishers receive per click to your site. Publishers like to see healthy EPCs to continue working with you.

PRO TIP

If one affiliate partner drives 50% of sales for your program, then their departure could significantly affect your sales.

To avoid this scenario, recruit more affiliate partners to have a healthy distribution of affiliate sales.

3. Have a defined commission strategy

Next, figure out your cost per acquisition (CPA).

If it costs you $100 to acquire a regular customer, then you have to make $100 off that customer in order to break even, not including your gross margin.

A healthy affiliate return on ad spend (ROAS) is 3:1. So if you spend $100 on affiliates, you should make $300 in gross revenue.

Many ecommerce websites can run their affiliate programs at a ROAS of 10 or higher, as average commissions of 8-10% per order yield gross revenue 10-12.5x higher than the commissions themselves.

Okay, so now let’s discuss the formula for cost per acquisition (CPA).

This is the cost of acquiring a new customer.

Basically, you divide your affiliate spend by the amount of new customers gained:

(Marketing Spend/Customers = Cost Per Acquisition)

Let’s say that in your affiliate program you spend $10,000 and get 20,000 site visitors.

This means you spent about $0.50 per visitor.

If 5% of these visitors fill out an email popup and convert into leads (1,000 leads), then your cost per lead is $10.

If out of those 20,000 visitors, 1% convert into paying customers (200 customers), then your cost per acquisition is $50.

Coupling this data with your average order value (AOV), you can create a commission strategy in your affiliate program that takes into account cost per acquisition, conversion rates, cost of goods sold (COGS), and gross margin in order to come up with a percentage you can afford to spend.

After all that, there are some final factors you need to consider when calculating commissions, including customer retention and lifetime value.

4. Know your customer retention rate.

Your customer retention strategies will play an important factor in the commissions you can offer.

With a high retention rate, you can afford to spend more in your affiliate program because the customers you gain will come back to purchase more.

In contrast, a low retention rate means that you need to constantly acquire more customers to stay profitable in the long run.

To determine the customer retention rate, determine the following:

Number of customers at the end of the period – E.
Number of new customers acquired during that period – N.
Number of customers at the start of the period – S.

Once you have those, use the formula below:

CRR = ((E-N)/S)*100

Let’s say you started the quarter with 100 customers (S), you lost 10 customers but gained 50 customers (N), so when the period was over you had 140 (E).

Using the formula, calculate retention: ((140-50)/100)*100 = 90

You have a 90% retention rate, which is pretty high. Good job!

5. Know customer lifetime value.

The next step is to determine your customer lifetime value (CLV).

This determines the profit you gain from your average customer during the time they remain a customer.

Source: LinkedIn

To calculate CLV, you can use the formula below:

(Average Value of a Sale) X (Number of Repeat Transactions) X (Average Retention Time in Months or Years)

Let’s say, you have an ecommerce subscription business and customers spend $15 per month for 2 years, then you’ve got this formula:

$15 x 12 transactions x 2 years = $180

This helps you realize that one new customer generated from an affiliate sale is really worth $180 to your business, not that initial $5.

Of course, this is a very simplistic overview, but you get the point.

If you want to get a more accurate overview, you can segment your customers and forecast the average customer lifetime of each segment.

You’ll also need to factor in predicted revenues, estimate the costs of goods sold (COGS), gross margin, and so on.

You can also use the Compass Revenue Report to calculate your LTV instantly.

6. Calculate your commission payouts.

There isn’t a specific formula for commissions.

If you generate a lot of sales from your affiliate marketing program and you can pay a 20% on product sales, then go for it, but keep in mind the previous factors we’ve discussed like customer lifetime value (CLV), customer retention rate (CRR), return on ad spend (ROAS), cost of goods sold (COGS), objectives and so on.

Your margins play a large factor in what you can afford to pay affiliates. For example, if you’re working with dropshipping suppliers or dropshipping on Amazon and your margins are 30%, you should pay your affiliates less than if your margins are 40%.

There are a lot of factors to consider, but don’t get overwhelmed.

If you’re not 100% sure what your commissions should be, ask others in your field and lean on what your competitors are doing to finalize your strategy.

#1. Best Chatbot for Affiliate Marketing: MobileMonkey

The best live chat software allows you to proactively engage with customers and prospects in order to grow revenue, generate leads, and offer real-time support across multiple channels. And for affiliate marketers, live chat combined with chatbot automation can be extremely powerful.

In fact, studies have shown that live chat software:

Boosts website engagement rates by 3X
Increases conversions on websites by 45%
Makes consumers 63% more likely to return to a website

Most web chat software is only available to use on a company’s website. However, with OmniChat™ technology by MobileMonkey, you can engage with customers across multiple channels, whether that’s a website, SMS text messages, or other messaging apps.

There are a lot of web chat examples for marketing affiliates to choose from, such as:

The ability to use live chat on different marketing channels, all from one unified inbox, is a game-changer for affiliate marketers.

#2. Affiliate Marketing Tools for Ad Tracking: Voluum

Voluum is an ad tracking platform that’s designed specifically for affiliate marketers.

You can use Voluum to track all of your advertising campaigns, analyze data for insights, and optimize your ads performance.

Voluum is an affiliate marketing tool that works with most all advertising traffic sources and comes with pre-built templates for the following platforms, and more.

Additionally, Voluum supports all advertising formats, including the following:

Native ads
Search ads
Display banners
Push notification ads
Pop ads
Social media ads
Email advertising
Video ads

#3. Network Performance Analytics for Affiliate Marketers: AffJet

AffJet allows you to see your earnings across different affiliate networks all from one dashboard.

This enables affiliates to demote poor performing links, double down on missed opportunities, and boost commissions.

AffJet has a simple setup process where all you have to do is add your affiliate networks and import your data into the dashboard.

From there, you can apply filters to see the data that’s most important to your business from one or across multiple networks, track trends to spot new opportunities, and construct detailed reports to share with others or save for your own reference.

#4. Affiliate Marketing Tools for Ad Intelligence: AdPlexity

AdPlexity is one of the best tools for ad intelligence. The platform allows you to keep track of your competitors’ profitable ads across a number of different ad types, including:

Desktop
Mobile
Native
Push
Ecommerce
Enterprise

So, what can AdPlexity do? Let’s take the Mobile ads product as an example.

AdPlexity’s Mobile product keeps track of your competitor’s most profitable ad campaigns on mobile traffic sources. This helps you make better marketing decisions by learning what ads are already successful.

So instead of trying to build everything from scratch, hoping that you’ve created some ads that will have high-performance, you can simply copy what’s already working and make it your own.

AdPlexity provides comprehensive data on profitable campaigns, which include the following capabilities for mobile ads specifically:

See campaigns running in over 75 countries.
Uncover profitable campaigns running on mobile popup traffic sources.
Analyze in-app ads running on thousands of Android apps that AdPlexity monitors.
Download every landing page with page dependencies (images, CSS, javascript, etc.) in a zip file straight off AdPlexity’s user interface.
Uncover hidden campaigns that are running exclusively on mobile carrier traffic (120+ carriers supported).
Get real-time insights into campaigns running on mobile ad exchanges.
Find ads promoting affiliate offers from 100 affiliate networks.
Search by keyword, advertiser, publisher, affiliate network, and more.

If AdPlexity doesn’t have enough firepower for you, take a look at WhatRunsWhere. WhatRunsWhere is another ad spy platform that gives you actionable insights into your digital strategy.

What are the Benefits of Affiliate Marketing?

There are many benefits to pursuing affiliate marketing for your ecommerce site.

The internet has become a very collaborative place and the more websites you work with, the wider your reach and potential website visitors.

Here are some of the key benefits you’ll receive if you get started with affiliate marketing.

1. Everything is trackable.

You can view data on impressions, clicks, leads, and sales all in simple affiliate dashboards

2. Affiliate marketing has a strong return on investment.

One main benefit of affiliate marketing is that it is all performance-based, and you set the rules.

3. Affiliate marketing has the ability to scale.

In unison with your other digital marketing efforts, recruiting affiliates into your program will allow you to scale traffic faster.

By partnering with trusted influencers and high authority websites, you can improve your reputation and build consumer confidence.

5. You can focus on selling specific, high-value products.

When creating affiliate offers, online store owners can have affiliates promote all of their products, or just a select few. It’s a good idea to have affiliates promote your high-value products with strong profit margins. Plus, if you have a low turnover rate on certain products, you can use inventory management strategies to promote your excess inventory, improving your sell-through rate.

It isn’t expensive to get started.

For many reasons listed above, affiliate marketing is very cost-effective.

Conclusion

Nowadays, most of the ecommerce websites are using affiliate programs. It is a type of co-branding program used by online merchants and affiliates. Successful ecommerce website marketers hardly miss this opportunity to make money online very easily. There is no need to invest more time in affiliate marketing because it will bring you a good income with less effort. Before investing in any affiliate program, you should be sure that you know all its ins and outs which means you have to do your own research on it.

Affiliate marketing has been around for several decades now. It is the oldest monetization engine. The system is simple, you refer someone to a product and if they purchase it, you get a commission. Despite affiliate marketing model being pretty old, ecommerce affiliate marketing is still relevant for online retailers.