We all want to maximize sales, and a great way to do that is by leveraging other people’s networks and influence to sell your products. But is it best to find influencers on your own or use an affiliate network? What platforms are best (and is it just social media)? And how do you even know when profit margins are ready?
In this episode, we break down how affiliate marketing per ecommerce can unlock scalable, performance-based growth for online brands. Today’s guest is Lauren Lee from ClickBank. She will discuss how exactly you can unlock ecommerce sales via their platform.
Lauren Lee is the Senior E-commerce Business Development Manager at ClickBank, a global e-commerce platform and affiliate marketplace. She is also a Buddhist meditation teacher who trains other teachers in a studio called The Path located in New York City.
Izach Porter, host of The Deal Closers Podcast, defines affiliate marketing:
“…when a person or a business or a publisher earns a commission by promoting a product, using an affiliate link. And if that link leads to a sale, the affiliate gets a commission.”
Lee adds to the definition, mentioning that you’re essentially “rewarding a company or a person for driving sales to your business.” She mentions that it’s an umbrella term that encapsulates strategies within affiliate marketing
So affiliate marketing is a big umbrella term. And underneath there, there are many different strategies within ecommerce affiliate marketing, SaaS affiliate marketing, and other performance-based programs.
Who is involved in affiliate marketing ecommerce? It can be influencers, ambassadors, select publishers, and partnerships with other businesses. Each affiliate network can also be considered a different method of affiliate marketing.
According to Lee, ClickBank focuses on a certain type of affiliate. They connect their clients to a type of affiliate called Performance Affiliates, which are also called media buyers.
Let’s say you’re currently strategizing affiliate marketing for ecommerce company. These affiliates work as an “extension of your acquisition efforts” to “…drive traffic.” They purchase media on your company’s behalf.
Affiliate marketing in ecommerce strategy can be when you find affiliates or partner with an influencer, Lee explains. In this method, she cites an example of a chef influencer promoting a cooking product of an online business. They work as an ecommerce store’s affiliate by sharing about a product that comes with a discount code.
ClickBank’s affiliate marketing programs work differently. They are partnered with media buyers who are purchasing “media from Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, TikTok, et cetera, and driving traffic to a very specific destination for that traffic to go to.”
Influencer marketing and affiliate networks via ClickBank provide an excellent overview of how strategies within affiliate marketing works.
Lee points out the efficiency of ClickBank’s model via Performance Affiliates. The ecommerce company owner only pays the affiliate when there’s an actual sale that came out of the effort.
To take a look at the economics of things, Porter shows how the process would potentially work. In his case, as a Performance Affiliate, he’s the one incurring advertising costs as he is on platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram and doing paid advertising to drive traffic to his brokerage firm. Since he already has an audience, he could use ClickBank and search for an offer relevant to his audience, and then use paid traffic to drive traffic or drive sales via an affiliate link. Others may even employ other strategies like email marketing or optimization for search engines.
Given that he can use this process as a ClickBank affiliate partner to increase sales for a company, he now steers the discussion toward how much affiliate commission an Performance Affiliate gets out of this effort.
According to Lee, Porter would be “paid out 60 to 85% of that order transaction.” The payout could get as high as she has mentioned for the affiliate model because he’s the one paying for the costs of the traffic. To provide a ballpark figure, Lee mentioned that she has seen ClickBank pay $125 per conversion and higher. There could be lower payouts too, depending on the offer. If you think about return on investment, these commission rates might seem high, but business owners who want to promote their products via ClickBank can look at them as lifetime customer value.
“We see a lot of success right now is in the consumables, health supplements. we also see, we also do digital products, so courses, eBooks, entertainment, like those kinds of things, you know, are still very, very profitable and, and work within this model,” Lee adds.
One thing Lee observes about ecommerce brands is that they drive traffic to an ecommerce store. And while it can be a good thing, in doing so, the experience feels fragmented because there are multiple touch points. Lee pointed out that users “can shop, they can sign up for your email, they can get distracted by your social media, maybe you have a video on there.”
But Performance Affiliates points to landing pages with a high intent to convert. In other words, you want this when you want to scale further because you’ll be targeting cold traffic. The process, Lee describes, is to “set up a funnel, like an actual landing page for your product.” She declares, “that’s a big distinction.”
It can be tedious to set up tracking links when you directly employ affiliate marketers. Fortunately, for ecommerce business owners using different marketing strategies, ClickBank makes everything easy.
When applying affiliate marketing on ecommerce sites via ClickBank, according to Lee, the platform hosts trackable links, hands all the payouts to all affiliates, deals with all the taxes, and handles everything that a business owner might not want to deal with. What’s also great about ClickBank is that they “set up the upsells and downsells and order bumps and some of those fancy things that happen within the payment processing side.”
According to Lee, her team sees “video becoming more and more something that people are using and leveraging.” She adds, “So, I think a few years ago it was really heavily on sales copy, right? It was creating copy around your sales page, and your campaigns, and your funnels. But now we’re seeing video being really top of mind, top and center.”
With the popularity of video, it’s always going to be the element on top of the landing page. What’s good about videos is that the traffic stays longer due to the video content. Lee believes that “it’s just the nature of how we ingest information today. So that is really creative. people come up with a lot of creative ideas around video content.”
When asked what statistically drives more traffic, Lee mentioned, “I don’t have any formal stats, but I know that Facebook is obviously a very, you know, a popular channel. TikTok, YouTube, those seem to be really where a lot of traffic sources are coming from. But I will say that video content is really important in terms of determining where the affiliate is driving traffic to.”
Joining ClickBank both as an affiliate and as a seller is free, according to Lee. You don’t have to worry about monthly fees and membership fees for joining a network too. “Where the investment in both time and financial investment is going to come on building that funnel,” she adds.
When asked about the best example of a successful company that went through ClickBank’s process, Lee mentions the brand Organifi, which is a health supplement.
After signing up, building your funnel and setting up affiliates on ClickBank come as your next steps:
Where does ClickBank work within the funnel? Lee explains: “…we as ClickBank, we act as the order form, right? So when somebody is ready to buy off of that funnel, they hit buy now. It comes to ClickBank’s order form. We collect all that customer data and that’s so we can pay out the affiliates and pay out you very quickly. And so yes, you get, as a brand owner, you get all that customer data you’re going to fulfill.
So we’re gonna pass along all that information. We also are integrated with Shopify, which makes it so much easier on the fulfillment side and getting the customer data over to your, your Shopify side. So all that is happening automatically, which is really great. So it makes it easy.”
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