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Starting affiliate programs, by companies that intend to promote products and services online, is a particularly effective marketing strategy as it allows you to get more user traffic and, consequently, generate more sales.
Before knowing what is the software to integrate and manage an affiliate program on your website, it is important to understand in practice what are the mechanisms behind an affiliate program.
What is an affiliate program and how to create it
The mechanism on which each affiliate program is based in the creation of an affiliate network, consisting of an indefinite number of affiliates, which promotes a company's products and / or services through its website or its social channels. In fact, in most cases, affiliates have social profiles, websites, or blogs with an important number of visitors. It follows that for each product sold by the affiliate, the company will recognize a commission established in advance, which may be fixed or variable based on its sales performance. This commission is nothing more than a percentage of the total price of the product or service sold.
For example, imagine a company that sells food products online and decides to integrate an affiliate program on its e-commerce site (we will see it later). At this point, anyone can apply and sign up for the affiliate program in order to start promoting the company's products or services on their online channels. Obviously, the company will be able to accept or reject requests for registration to its affiliate program. Now suppose that an affiliate, after joining the affiliate program, sold a product by promoting it through their blog. This sale will result to the company thanks to specific links or tracking codes and the affiliate will get a percentage on the sale of that product.
In this way, it will be in the interest of affiliates to promote the company's products or services. In this case, we have seen the example of a company with an e-commerce site. However, affiliate programs can also be created by freelancers, such as consultants, who would like to promote their services not so much for sales objectives as for lead generation objectives, such as filling in contact forms and so on.
Software to integrate and manage an affiliate program
As mentioned previously, to create an effective and successful affiliate program, it is recommended to use special affiliate software through which the management of affiliations at all levels is greatly simplified. Through some software, it is, in fact, possible to generate unique links or reference codes for each affiliate in order to track the sales generated by them. Moreover, using an affiliate software it will be much easier to collect and accept requests to join the affiliate program, make and monitor payments for affiliates, view and export reports, and statistics on the results obtained by each affiliate, automate the calculation processes on commissions, and much more.
Examples are iDevAffiliate and OSI Affiliate, two effective and easy-to-use affiliate software, which boast the possibility of being installed, thanks to their compatibility, on the main e-commerce platforms, so as to facilitate the entire process of the sale.
