Why use and affiliate program to increase your sales

Why use and affiliate program to increase your sales?

PDF version of this report

One of the best ways to drive up your sales is to use an affiliate marketing program. Affiliate programs are one of the most effective ways to drive traffic to your site while rewarding your affiliates for their participation. You provide your affiliates with a special link to your site, whether it is a text link or image or even a picture of your product. The affiliate displays your link on their site and then you sit back and watch visitors start traveling to your site. You then reward your affiliates for sending traffic your way.

Affiliate tracking software will help increase your web sites traffic volume raising sales. You can reward your affiliates on a per sale, per click, or per lead basis. You can even customize the commission schedule for individual affiliates.

Affiliate joins your affiliate program through the sign-up page.
Affiliate logs into the member area, obtains the code for banners, text links, product images, etc. in order to link to your web site. These special links identify the affiliate site with an Affiliate ID. Affiliate console.
Visitor X clicks through from your affiliate’s web site to your web site.
Our software places a cookie on visitor X's computer and tracks them as they browse your site.
Visitor X makes a purchase from your online store.
Using tracking code on the confirmation page from your store, the software associates the sale with the affiliate whose site’s visitor X came from and records sale in the database.
The Administrator is notified of sale by email, clicks on the link to accept the sale and the affiliate is automatically notified of their sale by email.

Affiliate Program for increasing sales features.

We can support up to 5 tiers of affiliate tracking. With a multi-tier affiliate program your affiliates are not only rewarded for sending you sales directly from their web site, but also for sending you new affiliates who then send you sales.

Categorization of Affiliates. All affiliates can be treated as equals or you can segment affiliates offering different commission rates as well as different promotional materials

Flexible Commissions. We can support Per Sale Commissions (Flat Rate or Percentage of Sale), Per Lead Commissions, and Per Click Commissions. Each Affiliate can support one or all types and can have individual rates for each type.

Advanced Reporting – We can offer numerous advanced reports to help you measure affiliate performance. All statistics are recorded on a daily basis so date-specific reports can be presented to the nearest day.

Supports rich Media Banners. Support is provided for Rich Media banners including FLASH, JavaScript, HTML, Popup Banners and others. Even search boxes can be used.

Support for an unlimited number of Banners. You create the banners of any size then let your members decide which ones they display on their site.

Support for rotating banners. Your affiliates may choose to rotate a group of banners in which case special code will be generated for them through their administration page. You define which banners will rotate on their site and can change them at any time. The reporting screen will give you details as to which banners are performing better than others.

Intuitive Web-Based Affiliate Administration Console -- The administration page provides everything you need to manage your affiliates. View and search for affiliates, modify their accounts and commission rates, add/delete banners, change banner links, view real-time stats, and add/delete sales, all through your web browser. Because this is all done through your browser you can administer your affiliates from anywhere that you have internet access!

Intuitive Affiliate administration console allows affiliates to check their real-time affiliate stats, change their user information, and generate links on the fly.

Automated signup for new affiliates. You provide a link to the page where members can join making it seamless for new members to sign up. Each time a new member signs up you are automatically notified by email. Notification will also be automatically emailed to the new member.

Automated Sales Notification -- Each time a sale is made from one of your affiliates, an email notification will be sent to the administrator. The administrator can than click on a link in the email to accept or reject the sale. If accepted, the Affiliate will automatically be notified by email of their sale.

Email Earnings Summaries to Affiliates/ Pay Your Affiliates -- At the click of a button, you can send earnings summaries to your affiliates for any period. CC your accounting person and they can then cut the commission checks from these statements

Export Sales Summary Data to Excel -- Export sales summary data for a user-specified period to Microsoft Excel. Data can also be exported for upload to PayPal so that you can

pay your affiliates using Pay Pal.

Option to mark commissions as paid, option to set minimum payout rates. Save money by only cutting checks when an affiliate exceeds a threshold commission. Once a commission has been paid it will be marked as such and a payment record is maintained in Administrative console.

Send Marketing Emails to your Affiliates -- Need to email important information to all your affiliates? Type in your message and at the click of a button your email will be broadcast to all of your affiliates! HTML email messages can be sent.

Full support of IE 6 cookies -- Fully supports P3P cookies in IE6

Affiliate-specific cookie expiration dates -- Want cookies for specific affiliates to last longer? You can assign affiliate-specific cookie expiration dates.

Automated Reminder when it is time to pay affiliates -- You will never forget to pay your affiliates because we can email you reminders up to twice per month when it is time to pay your affiliates.

Support Recurring Commissions -- For example, if you offer a subscription service on a monthly basis and want to reward your affiliates for each month's payment, we can track this.

Multi-Tier Affiliate Tracking Software with up to 5 Tiers

We can provide support for multi-tier affiliate tracking with up to 5 Tiers! With a multi-tier affiliate tracking system, not only are your affiliates rewarded for sending direct sales to your web site, they also get rewarded for encouraging other affiliates to join your affiliate program. As an example, supposed:

1. John joins your affiliate program and begins earning commissions as a tier 1 affiliate.

2. John tells his friend Jane who has a related web site about your affiliate program. He provides Jane with a link to join your affiliate program. This link is produced by our software on the web, when John logs into his account. This link identifies his unique AffiliateID so he will get credit for referring Jane.

3. Jane follows John's link and joins your affiliate program. Jane now earns Tier 1 commissions on all sales made directly from her site. John earns tier 1 commissions on all sales from his site and also earns tier 2 commissions on all sales from Jane's web site!

4. Now suppose Frank comes along and joins your affiliate program after being referred by Jane. Jane will earn Tier 2 commissions on all of Franks sales, and John will earn Tier 3 commissions on Franks sales.

Suppose these 3 affiliates are setup with the following affiliate commission structure:

Affiliate	Tier 1 Per Sale Commission	Tier 2 Per Sale Commission	Tier 3 Per Sale Commission
John	20%	4%	1%
Jane	20%	4%	1%
Frank	20%	4%	1%

If Frank makes a sale worth $500 then he earns $100 (20%) in Tier 1 commissions, Jane earns $20 (4%) in Tier 2 commissions and John earns $5 (1%) in Tier 3 commissions. In total you paid out 25% in commissions. This example demonstrates only 3 tiers while however, you can run an affiliate marketing program with up to 5 tiers.

The multi-tier affiliate tracking system is a great way of encouraging your existing affiliates to recruit new affiliates and to reward them for their effort.

Categorize and Segment your Affiliates for Targeted Affiliate Marketing

We can provide support for categorization of your affiliates to simplify the management of your affiliates. This allows you to target different commission rates, different banners, links and products, as well as send unique promotional materials to the affiliates in specific categories. Customers find it useful to segment affiliates based on the Affiliate's target market, Affiliate's performance, etc. Affiliates can be transferred at any time from one category to another.

Here are some of the reasons why you will want to categorize your affiliates:

· Offer unique commission rates to specific categories of Affiliates. For example, you might pay your top performing affiliates higher rates.

· Offer different banners, text links, and product images to subsets of affiliates. This in turn allows you to send the referrals to different entry pages in your web site.

· Send targeted announcements to specific categories. Add some new banners for a specific category of affiliates and at the click of a button you can send them an announcement of the change.

Here is a simple example of how you might categorize your affiliates:

Example 1: Segmented by Performance

Category 1 -- "Top 1% of Affiliates"
Category 2 -- "Top 10% of Affiliates"
Category 3 -- "Average Performing Affiliates"
Category 4 -- "Poor Performing Affiliates"
Category 4 -- "Partner Web Sites"
Category 5 -- "Internal Advertising: Search Engines"

In the above example, category 5 is used for tracking sales and leads from paid advertisements on search engines. For example, you might use an affiliate tracking link to measure the performance of a pay per click campaign you are running on Overture.

Here is an example of categorizing your affiliates based on the demographic market they are reaching:

Example 2: Segmented by Demographic Market

Category 1 -- "Males under Age 30"
Category 2 -- "Males over Age 30"
Category 3 -- "Women under Age 30"
Category 4 -- "Women over Age 30"
Category 5 -- "Internal Advertising: Search Engines"

Detailed Reporting

You have a set of advanced reports for analyzing a variety of the metrics of your affiliate program. Reports can be broken down for any period to the nearest day. Reports can contain results for all affiliates or just one specific affiliate.

Reports can even be sorted! Simply click on a column header to sort the report by that field.

Overview of Administrator Reports

Product Sales summaries for all tiers
Sales detail
Lead summaries for all tiers
Lead detail
Per Click earnings summaries
Click detail (IP Address, Browser Header, etc.)
Total impressions and clicks by affiliate
Reporting by banners
Reporting by banner groups
Summary of all sales, leads and clicks on a single report
Listing of all affiliates
Payment report of past payments made to affiliates

Immediately upon logging into the administration console, you are presented with an overall summary of your affiliate program including the number of affiliates, pending affiliates, total sales, click and leads, and best performing banners. Here is an example:

Affiliates also have full access to real-time stats outlining their performance. Affiliates can report on all Tier 1 earnings by day for the past 60 days. They can also view a summary of all earnings during any specified period. They can even view a breakdown of clicks by banners. Here is an example of the overall summary report presented to an affiliate upon logging into the affiliate administration console. Although the report is cutoff in this example, the report always displays a breakdown for the past 60 days.

Intuitive Web-Based Affiliate Administration Console

Administering your affiliate program is easy by using the Administration Console. Because the interface is 100% web-based you can perform administrative tasks from anywhere with internet connectivity!

Interface Highlights

Full Search Capabilities -- Have numerous affiliates? Finding them is simple by searching. You can search Affiliate Types, Affiliates, Categories, Banners, Links, Products, Sales and Leads.
Intuitive Explorer Style Interface -- The intuitive explorer-style interface provides a familiar environment for managing your affiliates.
Help buttons on each screen -- Help is only a click away. Each screen has help buttons which will launch a popup help window for that topic.

Methods of Paying your Affiliates

You have several convenient ways to pay your affiliates. Whether you export the data, email the earnings summaries, or upload the data to Pay Pal.

Don't forget to pay your affiliates! We will not let you forget to pay your affiliates. You will be sent you a reminder up to twice per month on the days of your choice.

Save money by setting a minimum payout amount. Cutting checks can be an expensive proposition, especially for small amounts. You to define a minimum payout amount. Only affiliates earning more than the minimum payout will be paid. For example, you might decide to only pay affiliates when their commissions reaches $50. Affiliates earning less than $50 will not be paid yet their commissions continue to accumulate until the threshold is met.

Brief overview of payment methods

Data can be exported to Excel for re-importing into another application. Once the data has been exported to excel, you can manipulate the data and re-import to the tool of your choice.
Data can be exported in the proper format for upload to Pay Pal. You then upload the affiliate commissions to Pay Pal and Pay Pal will contact your affiliates by email and make the payments for you.
Earnings summaries can be emailed to affiliates. By CC'ing the accounting department, checks can then be cut and mailed to your affiliates. The email reports contain a full summary of earnings as well as the Affiliates contact information and payee name.

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