Affiliate Marketing for Direct Selling,  Increase digital sales, and empower representatives

Affiliate Marketing isn’t exactly new to the digital sales scene. Yet, it has been experiencing unprecedented growth lately and presents a huge opportunity for direct-selling companies to boost digital sales while empowering representatives. 

The affiliate marketing digital sales model is shown to be more effective today than ever before with one in four brands reporting over 30% of their sales are coming from this channel. 

However, for any strategy to be truly effective, it should be executed knowingly and with a plan in action. 

In this short guide by S4DS, we will explain what affiliate marketing is, how to set up a compelling affiliate marketing strategy in Direct Selling, and how it benefits e-commerce and Direct Selling businesses.

Ready to learn everything about Affiliate Marketing? 

First things first: What is Affiliate Marketing? 

Affiliate Marketing is a digital sales model where people sign up for free or at a low rate to sell a company’s products or services and make a commission from every sale. It’s usually done online through independent websites or using replicated URLs that affiliates can forward and share to their networks to complete the sale.

An affiliate marketing program can be used for any type of company and is usually implemented through any of these models: 

• Related: this is the most common for Direct Selling companies and is a model where affiliates target a specific niche to sell a product they trust and/or have previously used themselves. 
• Involved: it entitles a pre-existing relationship between the affiliate and the brand where sellers may have been involved either in the advertising or making of a product and then decide to sell it. 
• Unattached: the affiliate sells any product on the lookout for profit, no matter if they would use it themselves or have any sort of affiliation with it or the brand that they promote. 

Check out S4DS’s blog to learn the difference between affiliate marketing and other popular digital sales models like social selling and social commerce.

Affiliate Marketing for Direct Selling: Setting Up an effective strategy

An affiliate marketing program is a great strategy to acquire more leads and enhance your direct selling brand’s reach easily by looking for the consumer where they want to be reached in a cost-effective manner. More representatives, with higher independency, means more leads and more sales.

These are the top five things to consider when setting up your affiliate marketing program for Direct Selling: 

1. Define your target end-customer and representatives

To set up your affiliate program strategically, the first step should be identifying your end-customer and independent representatives. Who are they? How do they act? Where do they prefer to buy? How do they make decisions?

Then, reach them by using omnichannel solutions that provide a customer-centric experience to create unforgettable buying journeys. 

This will make you unique and is most likely going to convince customers to come back and buy a second time on your site. 

2. Set up Influencer Websites to push your reach 

Micro-influencing is a great way to reach your audiences and create the sort of trustworthy relationships that ultimately drive conversions. By leveraging S4DS’s Influencer Websites, your business may bring the spotlight to influencer figures to share their stories and generate more value around the benefits your product brings to people. 

Set up independent websites, all trackable to your URL and able to capture data for partners or affiliates with a bigger impact to leverage social selling skills and, use storytelling to create bonds by telling their own story, how your product impacted their lives, and the way they use it in a daily basis. 

Then, get sales by integrating wishlists and a shopping cart that can assign any conversion to the specific influencer and automatically calculate the respective commission to provide a successful experience both for the end customer and the representative.

3. Leverage Replicated Sites to acquire more leads

Other affiliates may not have such a broad reach as an influencer, but they can be decision divers within their communities and networks. With S4DS’s replicated websites it is possible to create as many sites as affiliates your company has with unique URLs that allow them to develop their business while leveraging technology to reach more leads. 

Make sure these replicated websites contain all the information about your business that affiliates may need to close a deal. 

Providing a unified experience with a complete E-commerce and catalog management software in S4DS, allows you to personalize campaigns in a single corporate website at the same time as the information gets published on each of your affiliates’ sites. All while you are allowing your end-customer to buy directly from the representative of their choosing while the company gets to gather behavioral information to drive future decisions. 

4. A good compensation plan keeps affiliates involved

When was the last time you reviewed your company’s compensation plan?

Having conversations with your top salespeople and maximizing the capabilities of your MLM software platform can get your Direct Selling business to leverage the expectations of your sales force and increase their interest in collaborating with you by enhancing your compensation plan and automating commissions payout. 

Take a moment and evaluate your business’ payout frequency and how it matches your sales force expectations. Is it working to keep affiliates motivated to grow their businesses? A commission plan is an incentive tool to motivate your salespeople. With this in mind, it is helpful to make a compensation plan that has realistic and achievable goals.

S4DS’s powerful commission engine allows you to manage  and visualize the progress of your affiliate networks while automatically calculating payouts in real-time: 

• Manage your indicators live
• Configure the ranges or qualifications of your incentives program
• Experience continuity of ranges to see the growth of your clients
• Use the commission engine to configure all business rules
• Achieve detailed monitoring of sales by cycle with real-time calculations
• Indicator adjustments and re-calculation of commissions
• Manage incentives and conversion rates
• Download and send reports 

5. Train your affiliates to become the best sellers they can be 

Having powerful LMS training that empowers representatives is vital to the success of Direct Selling companies who want to implement affiliate marketing strategies. Training is helpful to develop professional opportunities in your sales force while improving their skills to get better results for the company. 

Make sure you constantly  train your team and sales representatives on: 

• Social Selling techniques
• How your compensations plan works
• New technologies 
• Sales and leadership good practices

Make the most of your employee’s and representatives’ ability to improve by implementing S4DS e-learning modules.

Direct Selling e-commerce may greatly benefit from an affiliate marketing program

These are some of the top benefits of starting an affiliate program for your direct selling business, for the company, your representatives, and the end customer.

• The model benefits everyone involved both in rewards and results
• Allows the business to reach more people and acquire more leads
• Eases the opening of new sales channels to go Omnichannel
• It is Performance-based: commission is paid per complete sale not before
• Thrives with human connections: Affiliates have their own personal sales URLs and can influence the buying decision by leveraging the trustworthy relationship between end-customer and them
• Cost-efficient: enables the reach of an expanded audience while only delivering on actual sales

S4DS Software Solutions: the ally you need to start your Affiliate Marketing Strategy

S4DS’s powerful single-step software solution consolidates all the information of your business to ease operational tasks and drive better results. Manage your sales forces and monitor the business results in a single, modular, easy-to-use software solution that will help take your company to the next level. 

Experience the power of technology to boost your business results and adapt to your needs by scheduling a free demo today!