An option for inbound marketing that was also practiced before the availability of the Internet, but has become widespread due to the Internet, is affiliate marketing.
As a manufacturer, service provider or retailer, you look for cooperation partners who have a connection to your target groups and have these cooperation partners refer you. The cooperation partners receive a commission from you as remuneration. The referred customers can be clearly assigned to your cooperation partners by marked coupons. The coupons are replaced on the Internet by links to cooperation partners, the so-called affiliate partners. The tracking of the clicks of interested parties on these links and the unique assignment to the cooperation partners can be achieved primarily through cookies.
Payment is usually made for leads (pay-per-click or pay-per-lead) and/or for sales (pay per sale).
If you offer consulting-intensive products that are rarely purchased directly online, “pay per click” or “pay per lead” agreements with your affiliates are recommended. For example, you can agree that your affiliates receive a commission if interested parties request information material from you and leave their contact details. This gives you access to relevant prospective buyers with whom you can continue the dialog. An important task is to get the contact addresses of your target customers.
For “pay-per-click” agreements, make sure that you conclude a “pay-per-click-out” agreement with your affiliate partner. Then you only pay for the clicks that arrive on your offer. This also gives you the opportunity to check the billing basis.
If you sell low-cost consumer goods or standardized market services, a commission payment agreement for direct online sales also works.
Make sure your affiliates truly match your market performance and offer a competitive, fair commission level. Even on the Internet, affiliates have limited advertising space, which they offer to those from whom you expect the highest commission payments. But it’s not just the commission rate per case that affiliates look for, it’s also the expected number of commissionable cases. The more marketable your service is, the more interesting it is for affiliates to include your link in their offer. Since everything in marketing is a matter of perception (“All is perception.”), make your offer in your online ad as attractive as possible so that as many prospects as possible click on your ad and follow your link. This can be realized by marketing messages by E-Mail more responsively than with marketing messages by Mail.
One particularly successful affiliate partner is Google, which operates a very successful business model for all stakeholders with its Google Ads. Both Traditional Advertising and Search Engine Advertising (SEA) are effective measurements to support affiliate marketing.