Two decades ago, businesses invested a considerable amount of money in TV, radio, and ads for the development of their businesses. However, depending solely on paid advertising seems to be too ordinary and ineffective, especially when your business is operated in the dynamic and competitive markets as today. Recently, companies of all kinds have been innovating themselves to expand their customer base, boost sales, and increase brand visibility.
Being known as one of the most popular schemes for monetizing your product, Affiliate, or Affiliate marketing has helped an increasing number of firms become successful in their field. That is the reason why spending on affiliate marketing in the United States has increased by 10.1% each year. It is estimated to reach $6.8 billion in 2020 and $8.2 billion in 2022. Impressively, Affiliate programs generate up to 30% of sales for advertisers.
Starting an Affiliate program is not simple. You need tools to manage that precious network effectively. If you are looking for a Magento extension that can maximize your Affiliate program performance, the Mageplaza Affiliate extension for Magento 2 will definitely be a wise choice.
In this article, we are going to introduce to you a host of benefits of having an Affiliate network as well as a practical solution.
What is Affiliate marketing?
Starting your own affiliate program is the easiest and fastest way to increase sales and explode your profits when you have publishers called Affiliates who effortlessly assist you in advertising products, services, or sites. In exchange for promoting action, they will be rewarded with a specific amount of commission. Simply, the Affiliate seeks for an enjoyable product, then promotes the product and earns an amount of money from each purchase made thanks to their recommendation.
There is a win-win situation for brands and affiliate marketers in an affiliate network. If you have products and want to get strong sales effortlessly, consider building an affiliate campaign and recruiting your affiliates. On the other hand, if you have no products and want to make money online, look for some providers and become their affiliate to earn money.
How does your business benefit from running an affiliate program?
Generate strong sales with ease
In general, the ultimate purpose of all eCommerce stores is to grow revenue to the maximum. There is no better way to create positive sales motivation than an Affiliate campaign.
Because affiliates only get a commission once the desired action has been performed, they are more motivated to drive the conversion you are looking for. Especially when each Affiliate has its own websites, visitors, and opt-in lists, there is a higher chance that your products are advertised widely to a large audience. With these advantages, the sales of your store will incredibly increase accordingly.
Tips: Besides using the Mageplaza Affiliate extension, you can utilize Mageplaza Abandoned Cart Email as well to lower the bad rate of cart abandonment and boost sales.
A low-cost but effective marketing strategy
Affiliate marketing enables you to lessen the amount of money you spend on advertisement allocation and reduces the risk of having a bad ROI.
Instead of investing a large amount of money for the entire marketing campaign, businesses only need to pay a small amount of commission to the Affiliates. Furthermore, since you have to pay for your affiliates when you make a sale, you are confident that you only make an investment when there has already been a return.
Convert more traffic to the website
In comparison with other marketing methods, you have to wait for a certain period to see the result, but still can not be sure whether your ads have reached target customers or not.
When managed properly, an affiliate program can bring a new source of traffic and generate good-quality sales, thus quickly leading to the development of your business. The more links that affiliates introduce, the more visitors visit your store site. That is one of the decisive conditions that you can take advantage of to convert these ordinary visitors to paid clients.
Boost store site’s ranking on search engines
With an affiliate program, huge numbers of your store site backlinks will be referred largely to a big network, which helps to add more value to your sites on the search engines. Together with outside resources referring to your website, you are at such a good advantage to optimize your SEO efficiency.
Increase the brand’s exposure
Without a doubt, exposure is key to any component of a marketing strategy. By having affiliates, you can quickly find your target audience and then expand your brand’s presence.
Exposure also allows you to build an image and brand name. Building those allows you to leave a lasting impression on prospective customers so that they are more likely to come back, make a purchase, and recommend your products to their friends, relatives, etc.
Why Mageplaza Affiliate extension for Magento 2 is a must-have extension for your affiliate campaign?
Maximize profits through multiple affiliates programs
Affiliate extension by Mageplaza gives no restriction to set up Affiliate programs. Store admin can create an unlimited number of affiliate programs as they wish. Besides, they are able to assign each campaign to specific affiliate groups and configure its duration. Having such full control helps store admin manage your program more efficiently.
Establish a strong network of Affiliate with different commission tiers
Using the Mageplaza Affiliate extension, store admins can construct their own affiliate hierarchy flexibly. From Pro edition, for each campaign, you can add unlimited tiers and set different levels of commission according to each tier. The bigger Affiliate network, the more commission Affiliate can earn.
Manage commission withdraw properly
This module allows affiliates to withdraw their commission easily. Here are four popular methods:
- Paypal
- Bank Transfer
- Offline payment
- Skrill (coming soon)
Moreover, from the backend admin, online merchants can configure the permission for commission withdrawal, either automatic or need admin’s approval. Additionally, they can also choose the commission expiration time, which helps to encourage their affiliate commitments.
Create an extensive affiliate network across channels
With Mageplaza Affiliate module, Affiliates easily refer a friend via a variety of options such as sending the referral URL or email invitations to friends, sharing on social, and embedding snippets on affiliate websites. In particular, from Pro edition, Affiliate extension allows you to put the banners and links right on Affiliate’s personal pages and earn money per impression/click instead of putting links manually.
Make data-driven decisions with the support of Affiliate report
Magento 2 Affiliate Ultimate edition provides a comprehensive report of all the data related to affiliate actions. Noticeably, the important data including Best Sellers, Account, and Sales, are clearly displayed, which helps store admins measure the effectiveness of their affiliate program easily.
Together with Mageplaza Advanced Report, the statistics on Top Affiliate, New Affiliate, Bestseller Affiliate, and Affiliate Transaction are shown systematically.
Import/Export Affiliate Data
When admins want to make any changes in the affiliate system, they can backup affiliate data thanks to import/export function. Affiliate data from different systems can be imported or exported with ease.
API support
Affiliate Ultimate edition Supports API providing users with a filterable list of all their offers under the selected format (JSON) with the payout shown accordingly to the selected currency.
Moreover, with API support, you can customize to let affiliates return only the selected fields (transaction, campaign, withdraw, account affiliate, change the status of account affiliate, campaign)
Full feature list
General configuration
- Enable/Disable the module
- Cookie expiration
- Allow overriding cookies
- Affiliate homepage content
- Display Affiliate link on the footer or top link
- Customize Affiliate URL style (Hash or Parameter)
- Allow custom parameter
- Select the parameter value: Affiliate code or Affiliate ID
- Enable limiting the length of Affiliate code
Account Configuration
- Default Affiliate Group
- Enable Require admin’s approval
- Check “Email notification” by default
- Enable terms and conditions
- Checkbox text
- Add terms and conditions title/content
- Checkbox is checked by default
- Set the maximum of Affiliate balance
- Allow negative balance
Commission Configuration
- Allow earn commission from tax
- Earn commission from shipping fee
- Earn commission from Affiliate Discount
- Allow Affiliate receiving commission when invoice created
- Set the time limit for holding commission transactions
- Deduct commission from Affiliate’s balance when order is refunded/canceled
Withdraw Configuration
- Allow withdrawing request
- Payment Methods: Offline, Paypal, Bank Transfer
- Set fee for specific payment methods
- Set the minimum balance for requesting withdraw
- Minimum withdraw amount
- Maximum withdraw amount
Email Configuration
- Set the Email Sender
- Enable sending Welcome Email for New Affiliate account
- Send transaction email
- Update balance email
- Send withdraw email
- Withdraw complete email
Refer Friends Configuration
- Enable Refer Friends feature
- Refer Sharing Email
- Default Refer Url
- Use Cloudsponge to retrieve email contacts
- Insert default email content
- Set default message shared via social
- Affiliate campaign
- Add unlimited Affiliate programs
- Enable Pay Per Sale promotion to pay commissions
- 2 types of commission
- Add multiple tiers per Affiliate program
- Select specific groups for certain campaigns
- Public and Private affiliate campaigns for specific affiliate groups.
- Enable lifetime commissions
- Schedule start and end campaign
- Apply shopping cart rule for campaigns
- Set referral discount for each campaign
Banners & Links
- Upload banner title, image, and content
- Insert the Redirect banner link
- Set banners for specific campaigns
Report
- Report on Affiliate transaction on the admin dashboard
- Export data
- Export transaction data to CSV or Excel XML
API
Support API among systems
This is the guest post contributed by Daisy from Mageplaza Team
Daisy is a Mageplaza content writer, who loves to write about business solutions. She believes in the power of words and how a message can inform and even transform its intended audience.