Powerful Magento Affiliate Extension to Kick-Start Your Affiliate Marketing

Magento is one of the leading online shopping platform which is being used by millions of online stores. It is being widely appreciated because of its stability. As an entrepreneur or a beginner in online marketing, affiliate marketing can prove to be an amazing sales channel as the risks involved are pretty low and the reward is high. Affiliate marketing is a perfect sales strategy, a perfect tool if your startup’s goal is to sell a product or service but you’re having a hard time with your revenue model. Well, it’s not particularly meant for startups only, but the giants in the electronic commerce such as Amazon use affiliate marketing as a mean of achieving greater market penetration through websites, who target specific groups of internet users. One can imagine the scale of affiliate marketing by keeping in mind that only the brands from United Kingdom spends almost £1.3 Billion ($1.6 Billion) on affiliate marketing every year. (source) The reason why affiliate marketing is better and more effective compared to other marketing strategies, like PPC advertising and content marketing is that it is relatively inexpensive and relies on the efforts of a motivated network of affiliates and partners who only benefit when sales are made. To understand it better let’s unwind the definition of affiliate marketing, its origin, and how it works.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

To be precise, affiliate marketing is a tool used a by a company to sell its products by incentivizing third-parties to drive traffic to the website in return for a commission, which can be paid for leads or for completed transactions. This means that the third party will be paid commission only when the visitor is converted into a consumer by making an online purchase.

Origin of Affiliate Marketing

Most of us perceive affiliate marketing to be a new domain; however, the fact is that basic concept of affiliate marketing dates back to the 90s when e-commerce introduced a new sales strategy by sharing revenue with some third parties that are supposed to drive sales to your store. This new tool instantly gained popularity as it removed much of the day-to-day hassle of running a marketing campaign from the store’s owners and puts it in the hands of affiliates.

How does Affiliate Marketing Works?

When you start the affiliate marketing program for your e-commerce stores, the affiliates choose the products they want to sell and are provided with a unique affiliate code which they use to refer traffic to your website. Affiliate programs offer ready-made text links, banners and other forms of creative copies whereby the affiliates have to copy the code and place it on their website to start referring traffic. When interested visitors click on these links from affiliate’s site they get redirected to the product site and if they purchase a product or subscribe to a service the referrer in return makes a commission. In this way, Affiliate works as a real estate agent who doesn’t own house but gets commission on its sale. For instance, we take the example of the most popular and well-known e-store that is Amazon.com. Amazon affiliate program had over 2 million affiliates in 2008, almost 10 years ago. (source) Now Amazon which sells books, electronics, pharmaceuticals, toys, and many other items has thousands of affiliated interest specific websites from where the visitors can reach products offered by Amazon. The entire sales transaction takes place at Amazon's website which is equipped to handle the complete online payment acceptance process. Amazon passes on a percentage of the sold item's price as commission to the affiliate website from where the sale originated. With Affiliate Marketing program, there come several features for both merchant and affiliate that make the things simple and transparent. Such as, you as a seller or the owner of e-store are also provided with a facility to track the performance of your affiliates through their affiliate ID and the affiliate software’s (e.g. WP Affiliate Platform) which can be used easily. Similarly, the affiliates also have complete, real time access to all sales and commissions stats.

PAYMENTS

One of the main reasons why affiliate marketing provides a higher ROI than other marketing channels is because of the performance-based incentive. Merchants do not pay for click, they pay for actual visitors. This makes affiliates marketing much better than other channels, such as PPC, where you may spend a ton of money on clicks without producing any actual conversions. Payment gets much more complicated when there are multiple affiliates involved in one transaction. It’s even possible for affiliates to jump in at the last minute and claim commissions for customers brought in by other affiliates. To avoid these intervenes; successful programs use multi-channel attribution to ensure the affiliates that create the most value get paid the most. As a merchant, you can use different payment terms to remunerate your affiliates such as; PAY PER SALE: In this program, you simply pay a percentage of the sale price when the purchase is completed. PAY PER LEAD: You pay for the visitors who provide their contact information on your target site by filling out a simple contact form. PAY PER CLICK: This may sound contradictory here, but yes, sometimes when your e-store is struggling with traffic issues, you can use affiliates as well to drive traffic to your website. In this program, you pay affiliates based on the number of visitors it redirects to your website from affiliate site, whether or not a sale is made. Now if you have an online Magento store then affiliate marketing is your best bet in order to generate more revenue and at the same time it will also promote your products.

Affiliate Marketing with Magento

There are number of options available in the Magento worlds if you want to implement affiliate program like Magento affiliate plus or ahead work affiliates. Some Magento extensions are on a very basic level while some are too complex to be used easily. Magento affiliate extension by Jorhna is the most advanced extension containing all the tools to create and run a complete affiliate program from scratch. Jorhna is also very easy to use as it directly integrates into the Magento back-end and front end. If you have very little knowledge of Magento you can very easily integrate and use Jorhna. As it is highly interactive extension you will be able to see how your affiliate program will work out in real-time. Some of its advance features are:

• Create multiple affiliate programs with each program having its own unique conditions
• Option to set commission rate as fix or on percentage basis
• Assign payments on pay per profit i.e. pay only when transaction is completed
• Create attractive banners with different colors, sizes and designs for affiliates
• Separate sales and affiliate reports gives you full insight into your affiliate strategy
• There is also a plugin available for Magento multi-level marketing namely Affiliates Tier Addon
• Jorhna Basic is a Magento affiliate extension free version, which you can try without payment
• Jorhna’s another amazing feature is its free lifetime update and support

Conclusion Whether you have a huge online business or you are just starting up utilizing affiliate marketing will not only help you make more revenue, it will also help you advertise your products. By carefully designing your affiliate program you will have your very own personalized sales force that will work for you even when you are not around.