CASE STUDY: Affiliate Marketing

THE BRAND

An e-commerce retailer selling men’s and women’s shoes and leather goods through their own website, Amazon and third-party retailers. They make consistent sales through wholesale, but wanted to scale their direct-to-consumer business (D2C) and hired us to handle their affiliate marketing and influencer marketing strategies to grow brand awareness for their D2C business.

CHALLENGES

Prior to working with us, the brand had done sporadic influencer gifting, but never seen a steady ROI or implemented a consistent influencer marketing strategy. They were interested in increasing product placements and wanted to invest conservatively until they saw a ROI. We recommended implementing an affiliate marketing program to primarily compensate influencers and affiliates on a commission-bases while building the brand.

STRATEGIES

• Determine best platform & set up affiliate program tracking on back end of brand’s website.
• Establish terms & conditions for a competitive affiliate marketing program.
• Identify influencers & affiliates that work as strategic partners for the campaign based on following, engagement, click-thru rate, and engagement.
• Leverage niche influencers & blogs for targeted placements.
• Strategic Content Creation
  • Create banners to be used by affiliates across social platforms.
  • Partner with affiliates & influencers to create user-generated content (UGC)
• Attract Sales with Coupons, Sales & Incentives
• Manage Link Outreach
• Oversee product gifting to affiliates / influencers to facilitate UGC
• Email marketing through affiliate program to keep affiliates updated, engaged and informed of new collections, coupons, and sales.

BY THE NUMBERS

Month 1

Web Traffic: 270 Revenue: $208

Month 8

Web Traffic: 15,800 Revenue: $460

Month 16

Web Traffic: 27,600 Revenue: $15,000

METRICS

• Follower Growth across Social Media Platforms
• Earnings per Click (EPC)
• Average Daily Sales
• Affiliate Conversion Rate
• Total Sales / Month
• Total Affiliates
• Active Affiliates

SUMMARY

Affiliate marketing is the process of earning commissions every time an affiliate promotes the company’s products or services in a way that drives a sale. Creating dynamic campaigns that incentivize strategic partners to sell the brand’s products allows all parties to reap the benefits of increased revenue through the brand’s site. The brand is then able to not only reinvest into the affiliate marketing program, but also increase ad spend for digital marketing strategy.

NOTE

Increases in organic traffic can result in a decreased quality of site traffic, meaning that conversion rates and average session lengths could decrease. Sales were increasing during this time even though conversions were declining. To combat the decreased conversion rate, we reinvested the increased revenue brought in from the affiliate program and executed a strong digital marketing campaign increasing the website’s conversion rate and further increasing monthly revenue for the brand.

The metrics provided above reflect only the click-thru rate and sales from tracked affiliate & influencer campaigns we managed and are not the brand’s total monthly revenue figures.