Affiliate marketing benefits everyone involved. It’s almost amazing what a perfect exchange the whole arrangement represents. The merchant or affiliate program steps up and develops a product and membership system, they design promotional web pages for use by their affiliates, provide customer support and accounting for both the affiliate and the affiliate’s referrals, and pay commissions to boot! What the merchant gets is that with the help of his affiliates, he will produce sales without spending a lot of money for advertising and promotion.
It seems entirely appropriate that the program charge a reasonable membership fee and that each time the affiliate refers a visitor to the website, the merchant will earn income. Of course the affiliate will earn money for the referral without having invested much. The commission may not seem huge, but the point is when you have not had to invest a lot of time and money into product development, etc., it is easier to realize a profit.
With the goal always being to earn as much money as possible, both the affiliate and the merchant should be considering the practice of back end selling in their business. Back-End selling is a very productive mechanism and the truth is it can even represent the majority of the profit made from the sale. Back-End selling is the ‘optional’ offer that is proposed either at the tail end or after the initial sale. This might be, a ‘Wait, don’t go! There is More!’ message – even a ‘P.S.’ to offer something maybe with the premise that because you bought A we are offering you a special deal for B if you take advantage of it right now.
Or just fine also if the initial sales transaction is completed entirely and you follow-up with an email to confirm everything went well with the transaction and P.S. by-the-way, you might want to take advantage of this offer, too.
Back-End selling is said sometimes to be easier than the initial sale! This is because the customer will already be acquainted with the merchant or affiliate, and that there is already a level of trust (the first transaction went off seamlessly). As well if the customer is happy with what they got in the initial sale they are feeling confidence that whatever else they buy will be good too.
For many years Back-End selling has helped boost sales for online businesses, and there is yet another way to see it in addition to the above-mentioned. Just the fact that now the customer is on your ‘List’ you can send them promotional mailings periodically. If they are happy with the initial purchase they made and/or the back-end product, then they will probably be open to seeing what else you have to offer in the future.
Again this does not have any of the obstacles that a ‘cold call’ sale has as you have already passed several of the hurdles. If the customer is happy with the initial product that was purchased, he’ll logically assume that the online company is offering quality products and will come back again.
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