Internet Affiliate Marketing
In the early days of ecommerce, businesses set up your site, bought a domain name, placed banner ads and hoped for the best: press coverage, word of mouth, banner ad click-throughs and eventually a closed sale. Life got more complicated quickly as banner ads proliferated and people managed to ignore them with increasing skill. Internet marketers thus had to become more savvy, and the affiliate model was introduced. The model: get other sites to reference your site and increase traffic and sales with “a little help from your friends.” This concept of having others reference you (and sometimes setting up a joint-referencing model back at your partner) is the premise of affiliate marketing.
For prospective marketers considering entering this new space, this paper suggests how to create and maximize the affiliate experience. It will also highlight pros and cons of affiliate marketing and suggest situations where it may be best to avoid such a strategy altogether.
One of the best examples of affiliate marketing comes from retailer Amazon.com. Amazon has at least 30,000 affiliates and a 15% commission rate for sales of what they call “linked-to books.” Such a structure is not static, as Amazon now offers additional 5% commission on purchases made by shoppers brought to their site by an affiliate[1]. Such information indicates that even a media and ecommerce giant like Amazon has decided it pays to join forces with others and the benefits warrant paying others for the service!
In an article on affiliate marketing, web author Dr. Ralph Wilson suggested six considerations in setting up an affiliate program. His suggestions are:
Provide a regular accounting of sales.
Pay as often as ...
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...and ad revenues—think of pointclick.com and others). This affiliate marketing paper has covered a “submodel” – one that fits inside proposition two and proposition three. For readers interested in seeing how much more savvy the field has become, go to the following locations: www.netcentives.com, and www.mypoints.com. Both sites advertise and promote a customer-loyalty, revenue-generating ecommerce solution that reads like an affiliate program on steroids. I suggest delving into both of these sites if readers are interested in seeing the latest tactics for marketing in the business to business and in the business to consumer market.
[1] Wilson, Ralph, “How To Retain Your Affiliates,” Web Commerce Today, Issue 10, May 1998.
[2] Wilson, Ralph, Dr., “The Waning and Waxing of Affiliate Marketing Programs,” Web Commerce Today, July 15, 1999.
[3] Ibid.
Pelton, L. E., Strutton, D. & Lumpkin, J. R. 2002, Marketing channels: a relationship management approach. McGraw-Hill Irwin: Boston, p. 387.
Burns, A. C., & Bush, R. F. (2007). Marketing research: Online research applications (5th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
7.Gregory Wester, Stephen Franco. The Internet Shakeout 1996. Interactive Commerce Research Bulletin. the Yankee Group, Boston, MA. December 1995
Driving site traffic will be the biggest hurdle for this business model. Getting sellers to populate the site and buyers to browse will require marketing both on and offline. Though a marketing mix designed for the target audience and eventually the general public will be able to escape this hurdle.
Promoting healthy competition among banking affiliates and incentivizing all affiliates managers to share information about effectively marketing of bank products or
“Affiliates” means entities that control, are controlled by or under common control with Company and any third parties that facilitate the booking of Hotel room reservations through the System.
...t referral and what rewards do they get for a referral. If a company educates their referral sources, they have a better chance of getting more customers.
The eMarketing space consists of new Internet companies that have emerged as the Internet has developed, as well as those pre-existing companies that now employ eMarketing approaches as part of their overall marketing plan. For some companies the Internet is an additional channel that enhances or replaces their traditional channel(s). For others the Internet has provided the opportunity for a new online company.
In today's competing world, many organizations are rethinking their strategies in terms of the online business and its capabilities and culture. Organizations are taking advantage of the widespread web to buy and sell goods from other companies and recently from individual customers. Exploiting these opportunities of convenience, availability and widespread reach of the web or Internet, many companies such as Amazon have benefited from the use of web successfully.
The sales outlook in the Internet, catalog, and retail outlet markets remains very positive, with estimated rates on return above 25%. Capable and adequate workforce is available in all areas researched. Legal considerations will be minimal.
Since its comet-like boom in the nineties the internet has attracted myriads of companies to do business on this boundaryless media. And the boom does not seem to stop. eCommerceis a catchword, which stands for a whole branch of new types of businesses that mushroomed up in the last couple of years. Retailers, all sorts of companies, even law offices are using the web for their daily business. There seems to be no comparable other way to develop and exploit global markets. The internet is more and more used as a fast, innovative and cost-saving tool to gain and serve customers where they feel most comfortable and relaxed, namely right in their office or at home (Jonscher, 1999, p.204). In the following there are just three examples of companies, which base a significant fraction of their business on the web.
The conversion of online searchers or online customers into buyers by researching or marketing for customers through interaction, thereby simplifying the customers of consumer process of finding the products they wish to buy. Secondly, the increase in cross-sell by charming or pleasing the customers by upgrading the quality of the manufactured goods which is one of the factors that are not originally implemented and thirdly, creating successful relationship between customers.
Affiliate Marketing is a popular method of promoting web business in which an affiliate is rewarded for every visitor, subscriber and/or customer provided through his efforts. It is a modern variation of the practice of paying finder's-fees for the introduction of new clients to a business. Compensation may be made based on a certain value for each visit (Pay-per-click), registrant (Pay-per-lead), or a commission for each customer or sale (Pay-per-Sale)¡¨ (Affiliate Marketing, 2006).
growth in usage by both consumers and businesses. The unique capabilities of the Internet has captured the attention of the marketing community. While a growing number of companies have or are interested in developing an Internet presence, there is still a great deal of uncertainty about it and the potential ethical issues associated with its use as a marketing medium. Although many businesses are acknowledging the importance of a Web site, but the potential ethical issues related to marketing on the Internet still having an uncertainty in this situation. Much less attention has been given to the business community's perceptions of the ethicalness of this new medium. The unique interactivity of the Internet has captured the marketing community's interest as a way to develop and enhance customer relationships and establish greater brand identity. Thus, many commercial services have become available on the Internet that allow consumers and organizations to interact electronically. These services include booking airline tickets online, buying books and compact discs, and receiving stock market information. Although the number of consumer users and commercial organizations navigating on this "information superhighway" is growing almost exponentially, the benefits of the Internet are not without drawbacks.