Live From San Francisco: Affiliate Partners Are Key to E-Customer Acquisition
By 2002, 25% of all Internet sales will be the result of affiliate partnerships, author and Los Angeles Times columnist Jaclyn Easton, said yesterday at the 17th Annual Catalog Conference & Exhibition.
Establishing online partnerships was among several key strategies Easton focused on to drive more customers–more frequently–to the Web. Partnerships are also an effective way to get those customers to buy more each time they shop, she said during a keynote session titled, “Multiplying Your Dot-Com Profits.”
Partnerships, also called referring sites, bring in customers and are rapidly gaining strength as a key acquisition strategy, costing $1.67 per customer acquisition compared to $30 for a banner ad, she said. Mega online bookseller Amazon.com currently leads the pack with 400,000 affiliate partners. Barnes & Noble follows with 200,000.
Easton recommended “incentivizing” partners with a 20% commission–higher than the average 10% to 15%–to encourage partners to place button or banner links in the best and most desirable places on their site. “The more you give the more you get,” she said. Several online resources for affiliate partnerships include refer-it.com and cj.com.
She said that online marketers are missing a huge opportunity to increase sales at what she called the “magic moment,” or final screen the customer sees after hitting the order-submit button. Often what pops up following a final sale is a screen that simply reads, ‘thank you,’ Easton said. But that screen is the perfect place to offer complimentary links to other products or affiliate sites with special incentives such as discounts or special offers.
Other tips include:
* always have a few items on sale. Items marked with a sale price are 1.8 times more likely to be sold than those without.
* consider a site-wide policy of “buy another at xx% off”
* issue e-mail “alerts,” such as blow-out sales or free shipping offers, no more than once per quarter to achieve maximum response
* respond to e-mail immediately
* sell more by organizing products several ways such as by category, situation or psychographics. For example, DogToys.com organizes its product line by breed, dog size, brand, best selling, season and squeak.
Easton is also the author of StrikingItRich.com, her most recent book, which profiles 23 successful Web sites.
