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You Want To Reward A Particular Affiliate, But Can Your Software Do It Easily?
With affiliate marketing, the 80/20 rule often applies and you can find tha a few affiliates are the top performers. The question becomes whether you should compensate these top performers at the same level as the others? It's your choice of course, but if you decide to make this type of change, your affiliate software program needs to be able to execute this without tampering with the general rules you've set up for the entire program. Plus you may need even more flexibility in adjusting individual commissions, such as having it apply only to a particular item. This is where the value of an UltraCart style shopping cart with extensiive affiliate software flexibility comes in.
Affiliate software found in a typical shopping cart may not have the flexibility to set individual affiliate commissions in order to compensate a top performer. UltraCart allows you to set commissions by individual item for a particular affiliate.
Why You May Not Want Your Afilliate Software To Treat All Affiliates The Same
There's no magic to running a successful affiliate program. It takes effort to find and recruit the type of affiliates that have alignment with your product line, and who are motivate to provide the internal visibility and promotion to move your products within their sites. Most eCommerce website owners who go this route, know they can have many more disappointments in affiliate performance than successes. However, when there is a particular affiliate that performs well, or one that requires a different compensation level to get on board, your affiliate software should be flexbile enough to make the change. Here are some areas to look for:
- When setting up your commission for the rest of the group, consider that level to be a baseline commission in your affiliate software program, then adjust individual high potential affiliates up from there
- If possible, try to make groups of affiliate commission "exceptions" with the same level of commision, products or other similar features for easier management within your affiliate software
- Make sure to document your commission arrangement with the affiliate and look for affiliate software that can record and publish these commission "deals" as part of the affiliate software dashboard and/or reporting