3 ways that you can grow your revenues as an affiliate marketer

This article helps affiliate marketers to understand how they can grow their revenues. A recent Forrester Consulting report estimates that the affiliate marketing sector will enjoy a compound annual growth rate of 10% through to 2020, and this article explores how this growth in revenue can be achieved by exploiting Comparison Shopping Engines. Lastly we provide our top tips on the tools available through RevGlue to help you create these new capabilities quickly and easily.

What does the behavioural science tell us?

The science behind “retail therapy” is based on the psychology that consumers buy items when advertising and marketing manage to make them feel a certain way. For example the way that trendy clothes are supposed to make the person feel "cool". A 2017 survey from Hawk Incentives of 2,000 consumers found that an equally strong reason was the desire to save money because it made the customer feel smart. In that survey nearly all (97 percent) respondents answered yes when asked if they were looking for deals when shopping and 92 percent said they are always looking.

When people say they are bargain hunting, the psychology at play is also very revealing. Part of what makes hunting or fishing so engaging is the search. Finding that great camping spot or the best stretch of river to catch fish makes people feel good. The same is true for shopping. The Hawk survey found that 40 percent of respondents said they "feel smart" when they can find the best deals.

So how do affiliate marketers tap into that deal seeking behaviour?

The answer is the smart phone. Given that shoppers are developing an emotional and habitual propensity to save money, smart phones and tablets give them instant access to deals via a simple thumb swipe or mouse click. This has the impact of perpetuating that deal-seeking behaviour for all types of purchase. Retailers have also recognised this by offering a range of different ways to help consumers save money – cashback, coupons, discounts etc.

Most money saving discounts work on the principle of urgency, as the offers are only available for a specific period of time. If people don’t buy the product now, at the discounted price, they’re likely to miss out on saving some money. The psychology is that people not only seek pleasure and also like to avoid pain. The risk of missing out on a discount is definitely a pain people will want to avoid, which is the reason why discounts work.

Deal seeking behaviour is a primary weapon to use when retailers are looking to attract new customers. Giving people a discounted offer is the premise behind price comparison websites which are frequently being used when consumers come to the end period of any subscription based service. This is true for mobile phone contracts, broadband contracts and many annual based financial service products.

It’s now estimated that more than 11 million people in the UK use a price comparison sites each year and this has fuelled the development of more niche sectors offering price comparison services. There is now a host of other types of cover that can be searched for including private healthcare, estate agencies and small business services.

The development of Comparison Shopping Engines

E-Commerce vendors have been able to tap into this price comparison market phenomenon through the development of Comparison Shopping Engines (CSEs). These are systems for collecting product information – including pricing – from participating retailers and then displaying that collective information on a single results page in response to a shopper's search query. In this way, consumers can compare offers from multiple retailers on a single page and choose the merchant that offers them the best overall value.

And through the development of CSEs affiliate marketers have been able to create new capabilities as the merchants who market their products through these platforms all offer CPA and CPL type incentives to drive traffic to their sites.

This is one of the core reasons why Forrester Consulting predicts the growth in affiliate marketing, when by 2020, it will be responsible for 16% of total e-commerce sales, putting it on par with email marketing and ahead of both social commerce and display advertising as a driver of e-commerce transactions.

So where do you start?

Top tip 1 – use structured data to setup a new comparison website

RevGlue provides easy to use and manageable tools to affiliates that can help grow revenue through new website and mobile apps capabilities quickly and cost effectively. It all starts with having access to structured data.

We have the most comprehensive set of data types (links to https://www.revglue.com/blog-detail/7-revglue-data-sets-explained) on the market meaning that you can setup new affiliate capabilities across any of the following:

• Stores - Setup UK shopping directory with leading 5000 ecommerce stores
• Coupons - Get latest discount coupons and offers and setup your coupons website or apps.
• Cashback - create UK cashback website or app with structured cashback data set.
• Banners - populate latest banners in your websites and apps with affiliate deeplinks.
• Daily Deals - setup daily deals website with discounted deals data obtained from UK retailers.
• Mobile Compare - setup dynamic mobile comparison website with advance data structure.
• Broadband & TV- create a UK broadband, tv and phones comparison website or app in minutes.
• Product Feeds – setup niche product websites using product feeds available from all leading UK stores

Top tip 2 – use WordPress templates to quickly create a unique look and feel

With the affiliate network data easily available, the next step in creating a new site is to develop the design. Whilst you could hire website developers and design consultants to do this, the bill will very quickly reach several thousand pounds, so to overcome this RevGlue has created a comprehensive range of site specific templates that you can access for under 100 pounds each.

This includes templates for stores directory, coupons, cashback, product feeds, mobile comparison, daily deals, broadband & TV price comparison websites. And the beauty of using WordPress is that the CMS does not require additional HTML editing software (such as Adobe Contribute or Dreamweaver) where the affiliate can exploit the templated design creating new pages, uploading images, documents and videos quickly and easily.

Top tip 3 – use plugins to link the comparison data to the site

When designing these templates, RevGlue has kept in mind that it will be used by affiliates with all levels of development experience. As a result, our templates come with lots of built-in functionality, widgets, and options which will make the job of setting up the site much easier.

Each RevGlue plugin comes with full un-encrypted code, free responsive template and is fully compatible with RevGlue data sets. For example, if you want to setup a coupon website then you can download our WordPress plugin for UK COUPONS and it will fetch the coupon data for you from the RevGlue data section. And best of all the RevGlue WordPress plugins are free to use.

New affiliate marketing revenue streams the easy way

The outcome will be that the affiliate will now have a brand new CSE capability that:

• Looks professional – exploiting the fact that the RevGlue plugins and templates have been developed by technical experts
• Has less glitches – as a result of the comprehensive testing that RevGlue has performed on each of its plugins and templates meaning your site operation will be both functional and stable (saving you money on technical support as well)
• Can be launched quickly – given that you are using something ready-made for your job.

You can trust that all the RevGlue data sets, templates and plugins are coded correctly and well maintained by our developers, meaning that it can make your life easy in managing additional sites that each bring their own incremental revenue streams to you. Take that first step and sign up to a free RevGlue account today.