Partnering with an affiliate marketing company is the insider secret to scaling e-commerce revenue.
Mobilizing an experienced team of professionals on your affiliate program allows for many advantages including rapid scale, leveraging existing agency partnerships and lower affiliate channel costs.
But that doesn’t mean that every digital retailer needs to work with an agency to manage their affiliate channel.
Many digital retailers are in the midst of determining whether they want to hire a manager internally to run the affiliate program, or partner with a company that offers affiliate management services.
It’s a very common question, so if you are reading this post, you are not alone.
Who Does Not Need an affiliate agency?
- Advertisers that have multiple affiliate team members with varying experience and skill levels including extensive affiliate strategy experience and a broad array of established affiliate relationships
- Advertisers that do not sell online nor collect leads online
- Advertisers that have no marketing budget for commissions and vendor assistance
- Advertises who do not have an affiliate program in their digital marketing channel map
Who Needs an Affiliate Management Company:
- Any advertiser that does not have budget to hire multiple FTE’s with varying skill levels
- Any advertiser that needs to quickly scale their affiliate channel
- Any advertiser that has no bandwidth to launch, manage and optimize an affiliate program
- Any advertiser that is unable to find the necessary talent to scale quickly
- Any advertiser that is struggling to find and develop strong relationships with a wide array of different affiliates and publishers
- Advertisers struggling with their Customer Acquisition Costs
- Advertisers relying to heavily on coupon affiliates
- Advertisers that need more new customers through their affiliate channel
- Advertisers that are struggling with customer attribution
So, if you’re a company with over $1M in online sales and are looking to reduce customer acquisition costs, enter new markets or gain $10M in sales over the next 3 years – you will want to partner with an affiliate management company.
What Does an Affiliate Management Company Do?
Affiliate management agencies increase new customers and reduce costs associated with a digital retailer’s affiliate marketing channel. Utilizing creative and customized commission structures, proactive affiliate partner recruitment and key performance indicator management, affiliate management agencies provide solid structure to lower your blended costs and increase your revenue.
There are so many ways to optimize an affiliate program and in this article JEBCommerce outlines the major components of affiliate management.
How an Affiliate Management Company Scales Revenue:
Adding new partners through the affiliate agencies’ existing relationships and their active recruitment and development teams allows affiliate management agencies to find higher performing campaigns with a diverse sector of affiliate partners.
Instant Experience Managing Your Program
Affiliate management companies provide an experienced team to manage and grow your program right away.
Immediately you acquire an entire team, with combined experiences, skills and proven track records that go far beyond what one single manager can provide.
This breadth of knowledge and exposure to an increasingly wide range of circumstances proves itself to be very valuable in launching and growing affiliate programs.
No Training Costs
Oftentimes, an affiliate manager is still going to need training time.
Because an affiliate management agency has its own training program, you don’t have to pay for this part of affiliate program management (JEBCommerce has an extensive training program we call MyAffiliateCoach).
Agencies are also exposed to many different circumstances, experience that only comes from working on multiple accounts across industries that allows us to act more quickly to circumstances because, in all likelihood, we have experienced something similar with a different client.
Lower Overall Costs
A good affiliate manager can cost upwards of $100,000 to $150,000 plus bonuses a year.
An affiliate manager with 7-10 years of experience, successes over multiple programs and demonstrated success is priceless and worth every penny.
Don’t worry if your firm does not have that amount to budget.
Affiliate management companies allow you to get a team of industry leading experts working on your program, for a fraction of the cost.
Where you could only afford one person, an outsourced affiliate management firm provides 2-5 people on your account.
When you compare the resources put to your account by working with someone like us and what you could get internally, the cost/benefit analysis falls heavily to the outsourced agency.
Exposure
When you begin working with a company, like JEBCommerce, you join a stable of clients, across industries, sectors and business models.
Simply by being in this “club”, your program reaches the affiliates in all these programs.
We also operate as a team on all the social networks, major affiliate forums and are constantly communicating with affiliates, as a team, reaching more affiliates every week.
Less Internal Resources Needed
Because an affiliate management company can provide technical, creative and recruiting and activation resources, you only need to be available for a short meeting each week and a few emails.
For example, JEBCommerce manages everything from approvals and affiliate inquiries, to top level strategy development and execution to profitability and goal setting.
Lower Risk Involved in Finding “the Right Fit”
With every new employee hire you run the risk of hiring incorrectly.
And although you run this same risk with any type of outsourcing, the risk is lower.
Adding headcount is difficult and there is a value in not having to hire and fire an employee.
With an Affiliate OPM, you can keep that relationship and request a different account lead if one isn’t working out for you.
Because we work as a team on our clients’ accounts, if one account manager is unable to meet your marketing needs, we have another trained professional ready – resulting in no downtime and no learning curve.
Every affiliate manager at JEBCommerce is brought up to speed on each account during our daily morning meetings.
Results Oriented
“We eat what we kill” is often the mentality of a performance marketing agency.
It can be an unsavory analogy, but one that fits quite well.
Our industry is commission/performance/results based.
An affiliate marketing agency is motivated to deliver results because they are fully connected to the gains.
Economies of Scale
There are certain functions in affiliate management that can be done quicker and more efficiently when done across many programs.
We often speak to one affiliate about all our programs at one time.
For example, instead of 10 individual 30 minute conversations, we can discuss each client at once in one conversation.
There are many different examples of this type of efficiency available to an outsourced affiliate marketing agency that an in-house affiliate manager is not able to take advantage of.
Network Access Discounts
This is pretty self explanatory, but most agencies are able to offer discounts from the major affiliate networks.
The Juice
“You like-a da-juice?” (how could I not include this outstanding Saturday Night Live reference?).
There is a certain undefined characteristic of an agency that is hard to measure or quantify, we call it the juice.
It’s a culmination of our team’s diversity, our clients’ industry segments, our passion and experience lead to innovation, efficiencies, and full throttle performance.
Working with an affiliate management company has real financial impact on your affiliate program and your overall digital marketing performance.
JEBCommerce has demonstrated over 15 years that adding a team of experienced affiliate managers to your marketing team increases ROAS, decreases Customer Acquisition Costs, limits regulatory liability and has a higher probability of reaching your profitability targets.
Be sure to read, “Affiliate Program Management Tips,” next. In this article JEBCommerce pulls back the curtain to share an insider secret to affiliate program management, how to manage affiliates like a pro.
