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Affiliate Software Buyer's Guide
Table of Contents
- What is Affiliate Software?
- Is It Worth Investing Money in Affiliate Software?
- How Does Affiliate Software Work?
- Before Choosing Any Affiliate Software
- How to Choose the Best Affiliate Software?
- What Are The Features Of Affiliate Software?
- What Are The Benefits Of Affiliate Software?
- How Much Does an Affiliate Software Cost?
- Conclusion
Affiliate Marketing is a performance-based profit-earning system where one gets a commission for selling a product or service for a company through affiliate links. The affiliates earn commissions on every full sale that happens through their shared links. However, when you run an e-commerce company, managing multiple affiliate marketing campaigns becomes a tedious process. To ease the process, marketers use Affiliate Software to run numerous campaigns under a single time frame.
What is Affiliate Software?
It is a software application that helps you set up and run multiple affiliate marketing campaigns simultaneously without any hassle. The use of hashtag URLs to track individual performance will help you distribute profits accordingly. The software caters to increasing the traffic on your website, thereby directly working towards SEO optimization. The affiliate software also improves the conversation rate by drawing more footprints toward your business from different affiliate links. The entire process runs automatically without requiring you to brainstorm on the critical individual process on a frequent basis. Moreover, as the software is mobile compatible, it becomes easy to manage the work remotely from any place at any time.
Is It Worth Investing Money in Affiliate Software?
Those who are running individual campaigns know the pain of managing the burden daily. First of all, authenticating successful conversions becomes a dull affair on a daily basis. Secondly, it certainly becomes impossible to do more than one campaign at the same time without any additional helping hand. Lastly, when it comes to distributing the profits, it takes a significant amount of working hours on a daily or weekly basis. Taking into consideration the above-said factors, it is worth investing money in this software. Also, you will get to know the usability of the software through a free trial period thereby enabling you for an easy decision-making process. Thus, the bottom line is it is worth investing your money in any affiliate software application to reap the best benefits.
How Does Affiliate Software Work?
The affiliate software works in 4 steps – Creating offers, Signing up new affiliate users, Drawing more sales and traffic for the business, and Paying successful conversions. Through the software, you can create proposals without having any prior technical knowledge. Once the offers are created, the software does its part of adding interested affiliates to its channel. They will be provided with hashtag and URLs to attached affiliate links to promote your products or services. When people click on those links and complete a purchase, the software will count that as a successful conversion and will let you know about the same on the dashboard. Thus, it will be easy for you to pay only for successful conversions through the software. All you have to do is choose the ideal software to meet your demands with ease.
Before Choosing Any Affiliate Software
Before you decide to go for any affiliate software, it is imperative to determine your budget beforehand. Without finalizing your budget, if you let yourself into the marketing gimmicks of the sellers, you will end up making a big purchase. Instead, sit with your management team and come up with a budget with minimum and maximum limits that will help you remain grounded during the selection process.
How to Choose the Best Affiliate Software?
Though there are many affiliate management software available in the market, it takes an eagle’s eye to separate the wheat from the chaff. To help you make a smart decision, here are a few tips worth taking into consideration.
› No long-term contracts:
If the software is imposing a long-term contract, then it’s better to avoid that for sure because in case the software fails to meet your expectations, you would still be forced to stick with it till the term gets over. Instead, go for the one that charges you under the “pay-as-you-go” scheme so that you can cancel the subscription at any time you want.
› Use of own domain:
The software should give you the option of using your preferred domains. Some affiliate tracking software has its domain, and thus like to use that for affiliate programs. The software can give that option to the sellers with little modifications in its setting. Also, there are few affiliate software available in the market that help affiliates in purchasing a new domain without hassling on other websites.
› Free Trial period:
If you have never used any software like this before or don’t want to rush into a final decision, it is better to go for a trial period. Even a 7-day trial period will allow you to understand the usability of the software well and will enable you to make a quick decision. Though that may require your card information to be locked for auto purchase post-trial period, you should definitely go for it, as you can withdraw yourself from the deal at any moment.
› Easy to get started with:
The first thing that is important is the ease of setting up. The software should be easy to install without requiring any tool or plug-in to work. The ideal software will have all the necessary tools integrated into it so that you will not need any HTML knowledge to get started with.
› No need for any additional helping hand:
You should be self-sufficient to install and run the affiliate management software by yourself. In case, the software needs the additional support of the developer or any third party software (that is payable), it is better to cut it loose from your list. Otherwise, every time you want to make some small changes in campaigns, you have to look for a helping hand to get the job done.
› Should be able to run multiple campaigns:
Often there would be situations when you have to run more than one campaign under a single time frame. It can be for different products or services or any special occasion. Unless your software allows running more than one program at a time, you have to again look for alternatives. Therefore, always go for the software that allows unlimited affiliate programs to run in one installation.
› Mobile compatible:
Mobile devices are in more use these days than PCs. So, you can think of catering to more affiliates through mobile compatible affiliate tracking software than the other. It will help you manage the campaigns, check the commission reports and take care of other aspects even if you are not in your office.
› Securely hosted:
Make sure the software does not need any separate server for hosting. It should have its server to take care of the same. It will guarantee you the best security and reliability. Also, it will eliminate the need to look after other periodic aspects related to software such as backup, update and upgrade.
› Easy to Integrate:
The software should provide a natural means to integrate it with other systems such as a merchant site or a payment gateway system. Enquire about the same beforehand. Most people do not know about such requirements and end up paying more to the software makers as add-ons.
› Total Management Control:
Unless you can have full control on your campaign starting from running multiple sessions to managing back-office stuff, the software can hardly fetch you a good ROA. No matter whatever your purpose is, the software should be providing total management control in terms of bringing tech support, integrating it with other software systems, sending email newsletters etc.
› Full tracking even without cookies:
Usually, the cookies of the software help in identifying the successful affiliate links and thereby enable the software to do third-partyHowever, if the buyer clears the cookies, the software fails to guarantee on authenticating the same with surety. Thus that creates a big loophole in the system. Most affiliate software provides cookies for a certain period of time. However an ideal software program uses more than one type of cookie to track the referrals, in case one fails, the other gets the job done.
› Phone and ticket Support:
As you would have invested in the software, you certainly would not be able to afford downtimes due to technical glitches as you may lose business for that period. Thus, make sure that the software has a 24/7 support system through phone and chat to handle any type of downtime almost immediately.
What Are The Features Of Affiliate Software?
Affiliate Software comes with features and benefits that vary from one to another. However, make sure, to cross check the followings for sure:
› Social Share widget:
It helps your business to remain a buzz word on social platforms through easy link sharing options.
› Easy reward system:
You can easily reward the successful conversions as the software does that for you through trackers.
› Free email templates and Thank You pages:
It enables you to land your buyers on custom thank you pages to feel overwhelmed with your business courtesy. Also, it offers you pre-written customizable email newsletters for your affiliates to draw more customers from their contact list.
› Auto Sign up:
Some software also has this feature of auto signup where they turn customers into affiliates through an easy sign-up process.
› Contest Manager:
It creates content for your referral programs to draw more affiliates thereby increasing your business directly.
What Are The Benefits Of Affiliate Software?
There are a number of benefits to having Affiliate Marketing software by your side. Some of the top benefits have been described below:
› Running Multi-tier marketing:
The software enables you to run affiliate programs in multiple tiers. It can create multiple levels inside a marketing campaign for creating additional revenues for the merchant. Thus, it comes as one of the best ways to run a successful affiliate program.
› Improved Google Rankings:
The software helps to improve the rank of the website in Google search results. It does so by attaching a separate hashtag URL to each affiliate link. The URL contains the tracking information of each affiliate user thereby making it easy for tracking them on a daily basis. The recent search engine algorithms are advising to use hash URLs to improve ranks and the software can do that for you with ease.
› Increase in conversion rate:
The affiliate software helps in increasing the traffic of your website through various affiliate links. That ultimately results in an increased conversion rate. That’s because the audience that comes to your website has already been influenced through the affiliates and just need a little push from your on page marketing to get converted into permanent clients.
› Option to rebrand:
One of the major benefits of having an affiliate software is that it gives you a rebrand option. Basically, by the use of this option, you can sell the products as your own under your own brand name and charge your customers on a periodic basis for the same.
› Auto Translator:
If your affiliate marketing campaign is targeting an international audience, then this is another good reason to have the software by your side. The software offers an in-built language translator plug-in to promote your products in any country in their native language. With a little modification of a file, you can enable the language translator on.
› Free resources to boost business:
Many software applications give you access to elite articles and notes on boosting your business through easy tricks. You may find those useful and may certainly implement them at no additional fees. Some also provide free weekly webinars and individual guidance sessions to help their buyers stick with them forever.
How Much Does an Affiliate Software Cost?
Taking into consideration all the necessary features required to run a successful affiliate campaign, an ideal affiliate marketing software application may cost you as low as $50 per month. Though some have basic plans starting at $15 per month as well they will have very little features. The pricing varies with increasing numbers of tracking requests, and affiliate users. Also, very few software charge extra on the basis of monthly SEO support through add-ons. Almost all software gives you free set up advice, help you in listing directories and charge almost nothing on transactions.
Conclusion
The affiliate program software can certainly help anyone to set up and manage multiple campaigns under a single time frame to boost their customer base. However, it is your responsibility to choose the best from a group of average to get quick returns on your investment. In case you need more guidance to arrive at any certain decision, take help of social forums, your friends and other public networks to be able to figure out the best affiliate marketing software ideal for your business.