How to increase conversions & gain new customers on your e-shop. Affiliate can help-Marina Kostkova

In this talk, Marina Koskova discusses how affiliate marketing can significantly enhance conversion rates and customer acquisition for e-commerce businesses. She defines affiliate marketing as a commission-based cooperation in which e-shops pay affiliates a percentage of sales generated through their promotional efforts. Marina outlines essential strategies for managing an affiliate program, including setting up tracking mechanisms, defining commission structures, and effectively communicating with affiliate managers and publishers. She emphasizes the importance of protecting the brand and optimizing the affiliate program based on performance data. Additionally, she highlights the significant revenue potential of affiliate networks, citing over 389 million euros in revenue generated for clients through her network, CJ Affiliate.

Thank you dear e-commerce friends. So my name is Marina Koskova and I'm happy to present to you uh topic how to increase uh conversions and gain new customers uh for your ehop. This is always very hot topic for every shop and uh I'm sure that affiliate is a solution that can help you with this topic. Uh so first of all what is affiliate? I'm sure you already

heard about affiliate or maybe you already have affiliate program in your ehop. In this first sentence everything is said I'll give you 5% of the sale for every customer you bring to me. So it's commissionbased cooperation in which ehop defines commission and pays commission only if there is sale made thanks to affiliate promotion and this affiliate promotion is being done by publishers uh through affiliate links that

they are putting on their portals on which they are doing promotion. those affiliate links uh have tracking uh and thanks to this tracking this promotion um is um reported we precisely know which publisher is doing promotion and was there salemate thanks to this promotion uh main advantages of affiliate as I said um it's on commissionbased uh sales channel and only if there is sale then you pay

uh commission for this sale. So it's measurable cost is practically this commission that you define and it's transparent but because you can see the results in the report thanks to this uh track tracking uh and mostly corporations are long-term when uh they are in affiliate network. Uh I'm an employee in CJV networks affiliate network. Uh who are we? CJ is the largest affiliate network in the world

originally from the US market and Viv networks uh is um u from Prague from Czech Republic and uh we are part of CJ we represent CJ and in central and eastern part of Europe. So practically V networks is CJ in this part of the world. Uh and we are specialized in affiliate marketing. Uh in the last 12 months uh we achieved revenue for our clients uh more

than uh 389 million euros uh for ehops and service providers that have their affiliate programs in our network. And we right now have more than uh 1,800 uh ehops that have their affiliate programs in our network. And on the other side, we connect those ehops with publishers that are promoting uh ehops. Uh and uh we have more than 14,000 uh publishers in our network in central and

eastern part of Europe. uh for this cooperation between ehops and publishers to go smoothly. Um we have our local affiliate managers. Right now 45 of them are managing affiliate programs in our network. These are just examples of um affiliate programs in CJV networks affiliate network. So for example we are working with Nino about you answer store.bg BG uh food shops in serop mojito and so on. Uh

and today's topic is um about uh basic guidelines uh how to work in affiliate program and to have success in your affiliate program. So it's about our recommendation how you should think about your affiliate program to to set it properly. Those are five main steps which you have to think about when developing your affiliate program. First step is setting your affiliate tracking for affiliate program. Second is

defining commission. Third is inquiring uh publishers to your affiliate program. Uh fourth uh is uh communication with dedicated affiliate manager from the affiliate network in which you have your affiliate program and also with the publishers that are promoting you. And fifth uh very important point is protecting your brand. So let's start with all those uh points uh uh to to go through all of them. First point

is uh why it's so important to set properly affiliate tracking because without this point publisher will not promote you because then you will not see the results of affiliate promotion. So it's very important to set this tracking properly. So after setting the tracking then you can see which publisher was promoting you and then you can reward them properly. Second point is that you should define the commission

for this corporation. Uh when you think about affiliate sales channel, you have to have in mind that affiliate is practically um appearing everywhere dur uh during uh customer's journey. So it's omniresent during customer journey at the very beginning when some customer is getting to know your brand for example from some influencer campaign or maybe um some customer is checking products on c on um price comparison website

or this customer is part of loyalty program and has some benefits from bank um in regard for example not has some special uh code uh in this loyalty program. So in every stage of customers journey there are affiliate publishers and when you are thinking about um how to define the commission for uh affiliate publishers it's very important that you know publishers traffic including referrals. It's important to

know on which promotional properties this publisher is doing promotion and at what stage uh of uh customer journey this publisher will appear. So uh according to all these points then you can have some some kind of uh information what this cooperation can bring you in the future. Uh to work properly in affiliate it's very important that you know which publishers are part of your affiliate program. If

every in every stage of development of your affiliate program, you have to have the list of publishers with which you are cooperating with transparent list in which you can check every publisher uh on which portals they are active uh from which country this publisher is, in which country they have most of the conversions. So that you can uh according to this information decide what is the proper

commission for this exact publisher. And of course to have um contact to this publisher so that you can get in touch with this publisher and communicate some further optimization of the corporation. Very important is to have at your disposal uh transparent reports in which you can check uh what are the sales that were brought to exact publisher and uh what is the cost of this promotion. So

uh in absolute value uh what do you are paying to this publisher and uh is this publisher bringing you new clients or the existing clients and also uh more detailed reports in which you can compare uh different periods according to um for example commission uh revenue clicks. So all the parameters that are very very important for the optimization of your affiliate program and sorry and when you

have the data at your disposal then you can decide about the commission about the cost of sale uh in your marketing strategy according to your business plans. What is important for you? new customers, larger basket value and so on. And according to different um um situations that will happen during conversion and different publisher types, you can have different final commission for publishers. So depending on what is

happening during conversion, this commission can be different. If the code was used, then the commission can be lower. Uh if this is existing uh customer then commission can be higher because uh sorry uh lower because existing customer is not that pricey for you like uh uh the new one. Uh so when you have commission set for your affiliate program then you should invite And in affiliate uh

sales channel there are four big groups of affiliate publishers and you can imagine your ehop as this happily growing child um which stands on the chair and this chair has to be stable. So uh those are legs like four uh groups of publishers which should promote you and make your ehop stable. content publishers, coupon cashback publishers and loyalty programs are in in this group. Third group are

catalog and price comparisons and fourth group are technology publishers. So uh from our point of view as we are affiliate network and we uh have a lot of experience with different kinds of ehops and different kinds of publishers we know that uh it's always better to use all groups of publishers. Uh it's nonsense to cut off one of the legs because by doing this uh your eShop

will be less stable. So uh our recommendation is to use all the publishers you have at your disposal. Of course at some point uh some publisher uh some publisher groups are less valuable for you some some are more available but you can divide commission according to this and uh give higher commission for those publishers that are more important for you. Fourth point is communication with uh dedicated

affiliate manager from uh the affiliate network and with it's uh very important that you let your dedicated affiliate manager know about your actual sales uh campaigns that you are running on your ehop because without this uh really um publishers that are part of affiliate network will not have the actual information what you are doing at on your eShop. So it's very important to to let affiliate manager

know and uh the publishers and affiliate manager is the person that will help you develop your affiliate program. This person is sharing our knowhow with you. This person knows local uh e-commerce market knows local publishers uh knows local language. Uh this person will invite publishers to your affiliate program and also um arrange some special cooperations with uh publishers that can give you more visibility visibility and then

of course to have um more potential for having conversions from this promotion and also affiliate manager is doing uh analyszis of your uh results of affiliate program. So after the those analyszis uh you can optimize your affiliate program properly. All this work of affiliate manager and you together with the affiliate manager uh are very uh is very very important because uh it it is used also for

this uh fifth point uh in your affiliate program uh protecting the brand. uh for protecting the brand first most important step is setting um program uh terms including bidding policy. So uh according to which terms you will cooperate with some publisher and also um uh you should decide which publisher you will have in your affiliate program and which not and you can do it by yourself uh

in the platform and you should control the results in the transparent reports and if there is um a lot of uh cancellation uh from from some exact publisher or uh if there are large basket values that are at the end cancelled. It's uh this is very bad. So uh we have to control these kinds of activities of publishers and um you know cut this corporation off uh

and with this uh network quality team in um CJ network which I am working for uh is helping with this to have uh this cooperation smoothly going and to cut off the publishers that are not properly doing their uh promotion. uh ve what is very very uh important to say is that CJ has uh AI technology uh implemented uh in the platform. Uh CJ noticed that this

is how uh the it can be uh more efficiently um used in the fraud and anomaly dete detection. So AI like a new thing also in CJ is used and uh mostly e shops are developing their affiliate programs in um affiliate networks and this is what affiliate networks should provide you with. So wide uh network of publishers, transparent reports, uh also um support from local affiliate manager,

tech support with uh setting affiliate tracking. uh then also to set properly commission based on your business plan to practically copy your business plan to your affiliate program and uh also if you would like to expand to other markets it's very important that you are working with network that uh covers uh whole Europe or worldwide or um bigger region on which you want to concentrate and with

expansion to other markets um affiliate uh platform can help you with from our experience from the data that we have from our clients affiliates should bring you to to your eShop in average 8 to 14.5% of e-commerce result and um this result is different uh in different markets depending on the e-commerce growth of uh this uh uh market but also it depends how uh your brand is

well known on some market and from everything said before what is the key for growth in affiliate sales channel. First of all you have to define your goals. So new customers larger basket value. Um you want to concentrate on products that have um higher margins and so on. And then you define your goals. Then you select affiliate publishers with which you would would like to work with.

and uh you uh practically uh establish cooperation with them. They start uh promoting you. You check the results in the reports and decide after that about the optimization of your whole affiliate program or you can pick just some of the publishers to optimize cooperation with the best ones with the publishers that have uh the highest potential of uh increasing results. And after this optimization then uh leave

for some time to to uh see what this will bring you and after that check the results and optimize again. So uh the conclusion here is that affiliate is really not an event but it's really a process optimization process and we know from our experience successful ehops that are running uh affiliate programs in our network they are doing uh this optimization process several times a year. So

uh this is what we recommend you also to do because the more uh the more you are dedicated to uh affiliate development then affiliate uh uh grows faster. CJ has very interesting study uh that was done in the US and Western European markets and uh when Eshop is doing all this step as I mentioned from my uh previous slides. So wellestablished affiliate program uh that it is

always better to have affiliate program in uh your eShop than not to have uh not to having this affiliate program because it brings um um higher conversion rate and also higher average order value and mostly ehops are working with CJ affiliate network which is the largest affiliate network and they at first define their commission for um the publishers with which they would like to work with and

when the program is start started in uh CJ when it's live then we connect publishers with um ehop and the big advantage of working with CJ is wide network of international but also we are working with local publishers so it's a combination of all kinds of publishers and uh in CJ you are in control of your affiliate program. So you pick with which publishers you would like

to work with and which publishers you would like to decline uh just not to accept in your affiliate program and uh after there is established cooperation with the publishers you can check the results of this cooperation in transparent reports in CJ and also uh you have the help of uh experienced affiliate managers that are working locally. So if you are working just in Bulgaria, we have Bulgarian

affiliate managers. If you work uh in more markets, we have affiliate managers for all European markets. And if you would like to work in US, you can also develop your affiliate program in the US. Two minutes. the the goal is that uh you grow with uh having affiliate program in your um c uh your um ehop and uh you pay just commission if there is conversion on

your ehop. That's it from my side. Uh thank you very much uh for your attention. Uh I would like to kindly invite you uh to visit our stand CJV networks and uh meet part of our balcon team there from Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia uh all over the Europe as well. Uh so we can we can discuss further possibilities of developing your affiliate program. You can contact me on

these contacts or scan this uh QR code so we can get in touch. Uh, if you have some questions, I'm here to answer. Thank you very much.