11 May

How to create a successful affiliate program: Planner 5D case study

Affiliate marketing is considered one of the most beneficial internet marketing tools. Although it’s surrounded by many myths and scepticism, it’s advantages are pretty clear – increased traffic and generated sales leads. It is a safe way to acquire new customers through a referral partnership as you only have to pay a referral fee.

There are plenty of different ways to set up your own affiliate marketing program. But remember, the interest in your program will strongly depend on the uniqueness of proposition. So how does one get to stand out among the myriad of existing affiliate programs?

The discovery of your ideal program

Affiliate programs are perfect for small businesses but they ain’t easy to develop, as you have to establish long-term relationships, identify the right affiliates, make an outstanding and easy implementation process. The smoothest way to succeed is to focus on your niche and not to try to cover everything what’s in the market. Affiliate program arrangement has to be not only attractive but also very well adapted to a particular product and can be chosen from diverse options, such as cost-per-sale, cost-per-click, cost-per-lead etc.

Planner 5D, the superior platform for interior design, has created a specially designed affiliate program available for it’s partners within interior, architecture, real estate and design industries. The program contains the possibility to advertise banners linking to Planner 5D website and, more importantly, the widget that can be integrated on any affiliate website. The widget lets you use Planner 5D at it’s full capacity as a white-label solution. The real worth of this widget for partners comes out of the prolonged visitors’ time spent on affiliate’s website, the possibility to attract more users, and, of course, the opportunity to earn from the paid users of Planner 5D, that were acquired through a certain affiliate partner.

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In short, the ideal program is the one, which adds measurable value to 3 different parties – the merchandiser, the affiliate and affiliate’s visitors. Therefore, you must stay in your own niche and capture your most wanted partners’ attention.

Tapping into your own niche

Planner 5D’s experience has been great so far. It has revealed that a positive effect of such partnership comes out of the carefully selected partners. One of the successful partnerships has been established with a major home interior news site Home Stratosphere. It has integrated Planner 5D widget on their website, among the list of online interior design software options. Amazingly, since Home Stratosphere’s registration to the affiliate program in January 2015, it generated more than 12,000 registrations and brought over 20,000 hits to Planner 5D. And it’s only from one partner in 3 months period! Looking at the analytics, the traffic of Home Stratosphere’s monthly visitors since January has risen notably. Success of the affiliate program – check!

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Source: similarweb.com

Once you’ve got your first partners, keep searching for the new ones. In fact, always look for the new ones. Promote your affiliate program by advertising it on your web site or mobile app, listing it on affiliate directories, or by contacting potential partners directly.

So when choosing your affiliate program partners, make sure you select those who have hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors and have a potential to deliver brilliant results. Obviously, the quality wins against the quantity. It’s no secret, that the minority of the affiliates usually generates the biggest revenue. However, don’t just sit back and wait until money starts coming in – work on your product to magnify conversions.

Simplicity and transparency – bring’em on

The affiliate program has to be mutually advantageous for you and your partners. Once you’ve figured out your program’s structure and target websites which can deliver heavy traffic of your product’s potential users, approach them with your offer. Make it as easy for them as it can be – provide all the necessary marketing material and easy monitoring tools, measuring success of the partnership.

In Planner 5D case, affiliates can easily register their partnership within the product. It is based on a basic do-it-yourself principle, so that anyone interested in the program could join “the affiliate gang” anytime. There are two possible partnership statuses offering 25% or 50% of the revenue brought by affiliate. They simply have to create an account to be able to monitor the leads and payments that they generated at any time through their personal administrative panel.

Optimized tracking of the results and transparency of statistics are crucial for your affiliate program’s credibility. Make your affiliate marketing easily manageable. Let it be open and available for everyone who wants to contribute to your business. And remember, it has to be absolutely painless and effortless to make everyone happy and willing to collaborate.

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