People who are engaged in cross-border e-commerce should have more or less heard of the term alliance marketing, but some people may not have tried it or understood it. Today, let's introduce what alliance marketing is all about. Whether you want to do promotion or earn commission, you must understand alliance marketing.
1. What is alliance marketing?
Alliance marketing is a paid for results marketing method, which involves multiple partners to jointly promote and sell products or services to achieve common marketing goals and profit sharing. To put it more generally, the merchants provide their own product links to the affiliate customers, who promote their products in their own way. When someone buys the products promoted by the affiliate customers, the affiliate customers can get commissions.
Alliance customers here can play various roles, such as deal station, coupon station, mass media, social celebrities, etc. In the entire alliance ecosystem, in addition to alliance customers, there are businesses, alliance platforms, and consumers in all directions.
Merchants can also be advertisers or brand merchants, providing product links. The alliance platform is a platform for alliance customers to promote products. It can track and test the effect of alliance customers' promotion behavior, and eventually the merchants will pay commissions to alliance customers for the effect.
Image source: Tu Chong's creativity 2. Operation mode of alliance marketing
The merchant opens the alliance marketing project, installs the code of the alliance platform or tracking software, and the alliance customer obtains the promotion product link provided by the merchant, and then promotes it through social media, blogs, forums and other channels. After seeing the product from the alliance customer, the consumer clicks to jump to the merchant platform to place an order, In this process, the alliance platform will track links and collect order messages to generate commission, sales and other data. In the end, merchants will pay commissions for affiliate customers according to each transaction order, which is the most common operation mode of affiliate marketing. Some merchants will also choose to pay for each click, without requiring affiliate customers to conclude transactions.
You can also regard affiliate customers as partners or agents of merchants, but affiliate customers can freely choose the alliance projects they want to promote, without performance pressure, with a high degree of freedom. They have full autonomy in the way, time and means of promotion, but their desire for commission will stimulate affiliate customers to redouble their efforts to promote products.
The best point of alliance marketing is that alliance customers can use their best ways to promote products, and ultimately achieve the common goal of alliance customers and businesses to make profits together.
3. How to open alliance marketing?
3.1 Select Alliance Platform
At present, there are many options for overseas alliance platforms, and these platforms allow brands to manage all aspects of the alliance plan in a one-stop manner, including recruiting members, uploading advertisements, tracking analysis, management commission payment, etc.
Here are some popular alliance marketing platforms overseas:
①ShareASale
This alliance marketing platform can provide merchants with a wide range of tools, including custom link generators, real-time tracking and detailed data analysis, and merchants can set commission rates. For alliance customers, it should be clear that the minimum withdrawal amount of the platform is $50, the payment cycle is on the 20th of each month, and there are many merchants, so the competition is fierce.
Image source: shareasale.com ②ClickBank
This is a leading platform in the field of digital product alliance marketing. At present, there are thousands of registered businesses and products, both physical and virtual goods can be promoted on this platform, and there are more than hundreds of thousands of alliance members.
After joining Clickbank, you need to perform the initial certification of the product and pay for it. After that, you don't need to pay for the added products. The sales expense is fixed at 7.5%+$1. In addition, there is also a commission. Although it sounds expensive, it is more cost-effective than Kia Masson. It should be mentioned that Clickbank is more suitable for independent promotion of products. If you want to establish an alliance promotion plan on your website, it is not suitable.
It should also be noted that if Chinese sellers register their accounts in Clickbank, they will find that they will soon be blocked. This is because there are too many "criminal records" of Chinese sellers and they are blacklisted. Although they can still register successfully after your background and platform give feedback again, they should also pay close attention to the rules in the subsequent use process.
Image source: clickbank.com ③JVZoo
Compared with Clickbank, the platform is much more relaxed, with more than 800000 members and a wide range of products. Basically, any product can be promoted on it. In terms of cost, if you only promote products, JVZoo's cost is the lowest among all alliance marketing platforms, which is very suitable for small brands to promote.
Image source: jvzoo.com ④Impact
This is an alliance promotion platform that brings together Wal Mart, Lenovo, Microsoft, Adidas and other major brands. This platform can not only promote products, but also support the promotion of mobile apps. If you have your own brand app, it is also a good promotion method to guide users to download your app through impact promotion.
In addition, there are alliance marketing services owned by platforms such as Amazon Alliance and AliExpress Alliance. Users are the sellers within the platform. Amazon Alliance is also the world's largest commodity marketing alliance.
Image source: impact.com 3.2 Formulating Alliance Marketing Plan and Structure
Before starting the alliance marketing, you need to determine whether to pay the commission according to each link click or each order, and whether to choose a fixed fee or a proportional payment. These should be set before starting the alliance marketing.
First, the commission. The higher the commission, the more league customers will be attracted. However, the higher the commission, the higher your cost may be. Therefore, you must first calculate the commission.
The second is to confirm the validity period of the website cookie, which is used to track the customer's visit route, count and collect the sales of each order, and is an indispensable part of marketing.
In addition, the terms and restrictions that need attention in the process of alliance marketing should be noted in advance, such as not wanting alliance customers to participate in pay per click advertising series, or refusing alliance customers to create discount codes.
The formulation of marketing plan must be combined with the final goal to be achieved, keep consistent in action, and give yourself a clearly defined marketing goal to ensure the interlocking of alliance marketing.
3.3 Look for suitable alliance customers
If you want to promote your products better, the best way is to find alliance customers with high verticality of your products. Recruiting alliance customers who can provide effective promotion is the top priority. This alliance guest should be very active on its activity platform, or have a large fan body and a good user base.
3.4 Continuous monitoring and improvement
After implementing the alliance marketing plan, monitor each step of the plan in time to see how effective it is. Especially for novices who are trying alliance marketing for the first time, it is very important to maintain a good relationship with alliance customers, which requires you to always confirm the effectiveness of cookies and product links to avoid wrong orders and missed orders.
Image source: Tu Chong's creativity 4. Benefits of alliance marketing
4.1 Low risk
Alliance marketing is the form of effect payment, that is, the merchants who generate orders need to pay commissions, which is different from direct advertising. Merchants need not worry about the ineffectiveness of money investment. The advantage of alliance marketing is that the risk coefficient of merchants is lower than other promotion methods.
4.2 Low threshold
After registering the alliance marketing platform, you can launch the commodity release task without complicated operations. Because commissions are paid only when orders are generated, there is no high requirement for capital reserves of merchants.
4.3 Wide coverage
Because the alliance customers on the alliance marketing platform come from all over the world, their communication and promotion can cover your products to different social platforms around the world.
4.4 Diversified promotion forms
Because alliance customers can be bloggers, deal stations, blogs, forums, etc., the promotion forms of alliance marketing are also diversified, and the groups targeted by these promotion channels are usually more accurate, which is very beneficial to the promotion of products.
4.5 Concentrate on product development
The product promotion is handed over to the alliance marketing platform for promotion, which saves the time for myself to go to the promotion to find the traffic, and can concentrate on developing new products and doing a good job in sales.
(Source: Yage said cross-border)
The above contents belong to the author's personal views and do not represent Hugo's cross-border position! This article is reproduced with the authorization of the original author. Reproduction requires the authorization of the original author.
