Many companies spend time and resources to expand their market reach and actively promote their product in an effort to increase annual revenue. But all too often the behind-the-scenes mechanics are overlooked and frequently neglected.
The ways in which an affiliate can promote your product can be diverse and include many channels from social media to free sites, content promotion to banner and text link placements. As long as the affiliate complies with the affiliate program’s terms of service and rules and regulations, the opportunities for promoting a product are endless.
By localizing the user experience, ensuring an optimal interaction with your content and products, and by offering alternative international payment solutions, you will broaden the spectrum of what traffic your affiliate can send to your site and make it easier for customers to make a purchase when the traffic accesses your website.
Affiliates are a vital contribution to the traffic source of a website, as they provide traffic that the affiliate program may not already have access to. As an affiliate program owner it is important to offer every possible tool for an affiliate to market your product.
There are several factors that can come into play to convert affiliate traffic including, but not limited to:
- Having a product in the correct language for the affiliate to promote;
- Promoting the product to the right demographic audience;
- Providing a responsive platform that is user friendly and ensures a positive user experience on any device; and,
- Ensuring that the audience have the most convenient payment solution available to enable purchasing.
Translation
While it is difficult to translate a website with tens of thousands of web pages, translation of tour pages and general navigations appropriate to the customer’s locality increases conversions and profitability. This can be automated with geo-IP technology.
Avoid using online translation tools and invest money into hiring a company whose sole purpose is translation. When it comes to appealing to the native speakers of an origin, it is important not to butcher a culture with poor translation.
Demographics
Using sufficient tracking tools, both affiliate and program owner should be familiar with what traffic they have and how that traffic can be converted. There is no point in pushing German traffic to a predominantly Spanish-orientated website, but to be able to know these boundaries one must first gather and analyze the relevant data.
Targeting the right audience does require time to review statistics, but the end result is higher sale conversions and less traffic being flushed out. In the early stages of promotion this may require some trial-and-error as sometimes the activity of the traffic can be surprising or disappointing, but the only way to discover these results is to test the waters.
Responsive Designs
As the global tipping point of desktop users vs. mobile device users was reached in mid-2013, it has become a necessity to have a sufficiently responsive design in place to enable viewers’ enjoyment and provide a user friendly experience which will in turn entice the viewer to make a purchase. A responsive website design can help you tap into the fast-growing market of mobile device users and make it easier for your affiliates to attract and convert that market.
Companies such as Affil4you.com focus purely on monetizing mobile traffic from numerous resources and optimize it so that greater conversions take place. Tools such as Google-friendly redirects, Android applications and auto optimizing banners are just a few of the solutions that can be provided for mobile device traffic sent by your affiliates.
And as mobile device growth continues to soar, so will the capabilities of being able to convert mobile traffic. All these solutions should be available to your affiliates so that they have the best possible opportunity to make a profit while generating a profit for you.
Payment Processing
There is an abundance of payment solutions available to process your website sales, but are you sufficiently covering every possible solution to monetize the traffic that your affiliates are sending?
While in North America the most commonly used payment method is credit cards, this solution isn’t so frequently used throughout the rest of the world.
EuroDebit/SEPA, direct bank payments, eWallets, prepaid cards are just a few of the alternative payment options preferred locally in countries such as Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland, Australia, Brazil, Czech Republic, Netherlands, France and Hungary.
When you provide the end user the comfort of paying with a local solution that they are familiar with, you and your affiliates can tap into a market you otherwise could not convert with only traditional payment methods. This will not only increase your sales but also earn the trust of your new customer. Payment service providers such as 2000Charge.com can provide all these payment solutions with no commitment or upfront cost to implement.
By localizing the user experience, ensuring an optimal interaction with your content and products, and by offering alternative international payment solutions, you will broaden the spectrum of what traffic your affiliate can send to your site and make it easier for customers to make a purchase when the traffic accesses your website. Having these in place would make an affiliate more likely to promote your product because of the diversity of which is offered in the affiliate program, and the higher potential for actual conversions.
Ines Kring is COO of 2000Charge, which provides a simple, secure and flexible global payment solution that covers cross-border, multicurrency and multilingual purchasing environments.
