What is affiliate marketing and how does it work?

What’s affiliates marketing?

In any purchase process, the attraction stage is essential. To sell, we first have to attract and then connect with that potential customer.

Sometimes we can’t do it alone or we find ourselves in a stage of the business where we want to maximize results, minimizing our efforts. In that sense, affiliate marketing is an excellent strategy that you can carry out in your online business.

This strategy is based on the power of recommendation. then yesIf your goal is to increase the number of potential buyers and, of course, increase your salesIt is time for you to put it into practice.

What is affiliate marketing?

Under this marketing model, the premise is to establish a affiliate network. Thus, you will be able to attract potential customers through intermediaries that work as allies of your business.

The intermediarieswith people or brands that have a distribution channel (be it a website, a blog or ) and whose recommendations are positively valued by the public that follows them.

Establishing an affiliate network to spread your brand will allow you to increase your reach to potential consumers who may not yet know you, or dobut how to finalize the purchase.

In this way, affiliate marketing becomes a win-win relationship: the brand sells its products through its affiliates, while they manage to monetize their websites, blogs or social networks through that sale, charging a commission for each of them.

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Many companies have a affiliate program where the dynamics of participation, conditions and benefits are established. At Tiendanube, for example, we have a in which you charge a commission for each store created from your recommendation.

Our Associate Program

The Tiendanube Associates Program allows you to recommend our platform to your audience through your own personalized URL. With her, you will be able automatically offer to those who register 30-day free trial and a 25% discount on the first payment of any of our plans. We have plans starting at $599!

Every time a brand creates their Tiendanube with your URL, you receive the total value they pay in their first 2 monthly installments, depending on the plan you choose.

To become an associate, you just have to register, anyone can join! Generate your custom URL and start sharing it. We invite you to click on the following link and find out everything about the .

4 keys to carry out affiliate marketing in your business

When carrying out this strategy, there are some issues that you must take into account:

1) Analyze what stage of your business you are in. If it’s a emerging entrepreneurshipyou will need to first achieve a own positioning.

Although the affiliate begins to build trust with the potential customer so that he makes the purchase, the brand must also have generated a minimum of prior trust. Otherwise, the sale may not go through.

2) Set clear goals and commissions with your affiliate network. Usually, the objective of the associate marketing strategy is to make the purchase happen. Namely, andThe affiliate receives a commission for each sale, but there could also be other objectives, such as drive traffic to your online store or perform an action such as completing a form or clicking on a banner, for example.

Your objectives may vary according to the stage in which your business is. Many times, these actions are performed in special dates to encourage sales.

3) In affiliate marketing, it is essential that you can record the sales of each in detail and then pay the corresponding commissions. Below we tell you how you can measure these results.

4) Lastly, it is important that the values ​​of the brand are represented in each affiliate and that generates content associated with the universe of that brand. Otherwise, it can be a counterproductive strategy.

What channels do affiliates usually use to spread products or services online?

The channels most used by affiliates to promote products and services online are:

• Website or blog: the link with your audience is usually generated by the type of content they share. For example, pages that are based on recommendations on topics such as technology, fashion, food or beauty could be part of a brand affiliate program in those fields.
• Social networks: today they are the most used channels in associate marketing due to their great reach. Its main protagonists, and candidates to be part of an affiliate program, are brand ambassadors. They have a close bond with their followers, who trust their recommendations, and this allows them to monetize their social networks through this type of action with different businesses.
• E-mail marketing: it is a channel that provides direct access to subscribers, unlike social networks, where it costs more to convert followers into customers and where important work must be done. For this reason, there are affiliates who focus exclusively on building a strong database with loyal readers to whom they can then offer third-party products or services.

How can I track the sales of my affiliate program?

If you are going to implement affiliate marketing in your business, you have to know that there is a very simple way to detect from which affiliate the sales of your online store come from. One of them is generate a unique discount coupon for each affiliate to share it through your website, your social networks or in an email.

For example, if you work with an influencer named “Camila López”, you can create a discount code for you to share with your community. The code could be “CAMILOPEZ20” that would grant a 20% discount on the total of each purchase made with said code.

This will allow you to know in which purchase orders each coupon was applied, and count them for each affiliate.

Other slightly more complex ways to track affiliate sales or conversions are through tracking codes, parameters or cookies that are inserted into the websites. But if you are just starting out with this marketing strategy, we recommend discount codes.

See how Tiendanube does it with the influencer Agus Ramos Mejía from @look_connected, and with Nat Córdoba from @elblogdenatt:

conclusion

Currently, the more traditional sales strategies have been changing and other ways of doing marketing have appeared, of reaching the consumer and of.

All of them can complement each other but they must respond to common objectives and be specifically designed for the stage in which the business is.

If you put your affiliate strategy into practice, always remember toFinalize the results and optimize your strategy as many times as necessary.

Good sales!