How to start with affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is an effective tool to increase turnover of an online store with low expense and effort if managed properly. Read our tips, recommendations and manual for working with the system and get the most out of affiliate marketing.
Who will promote you
You will often come across the term affiliate publisher in the manual. It is a partner that promotes not only advertisers, but also their online store, brand and products. More than 3,500 affiliate publishers with a diverse focus now work with the Affiliate Port. The largest and most important include coupon sites, cashback portals, search engines and comparators. Another category of publishers are product review sites, blogs, and other content sites.
Effective affiliate marketing
Effective work with affiliate marketing and achieving the expected results consists of three basic points:
– creating suitable conditions for affiliate publishers
– regular communication
– proactivity
Suitable conditions for affiliate publishers
When deciding who to promote, the publisher usually focuses on:
- brand
- the affiliate commission
- commission approval period
- promotional materials
- exclusive events
- online store category
Brand
It is mainly about the strength and familiarity of the online store, products and brand representation. The better known the online store, the greater the probability of success. A well-known and strong brand is often supported by other marketing channels (advertising on TV, in the media, etc.). Affiliate publishers value these attributes. Brand is a strong prerequisite for success, but not the only one. If your online store is smaller or less known, it doesn’t matter, it still has its potential. Focus on other suitable conditions to increase the success of the program.
Affiliate commission
The commission is the reward that the affiliate publisher receives for the conversion. The higher the commission, the higher the motivation of the affiliate publisher to promote. If you have the opportunity to divide your assortment into categories with different levels of commission, do so. The higher the maximum achievable commission, the more attractive the program will be. We are able to reflect a change in the amount of the commission or the addition of a category with a different commission structure, whenever during the cooperation it is possible to change these values.
Commission approval period
The big advantage is the shortest possible time to comment on the status of conversions (approval / rejection). Learn how to approve your conversion below. It is now necessary to realize that a long period of commenting on commissions can have a negative impact on the further promotion of the program. By reacting flexibly and quickly to the commissions generated, you signal to the affiliate publisher that both the promotion of your program and the subsequent crediting of commissions is problem-free. The affiliate publisher sees that the commissions are credited within an adequate period of time, which motivates them to further promotion.
Promotional materials
Promotional materials include graphic elements, banners, product XML feeds, mailing templates and other materials that affiliate publishers use in their promotion. If publishers always have up-to-date promotional materials, the whole promotion will become easier and more accessible for them.
Many affiliate publishers use only XML feeds for their promotion. If you have created a feed, make sure that it is recorded in the detail of your program, otherwise you will lose a number of promotion options with quality partners. You can also learn how to upload and manage these materials for your account below.
Exclusive events
Exclusive events are a popular tool to support promotion. Exclusive promotions include discount coupons, free shipping coupons, a gift to order, contests, reviews, an increase in commission for a certain period of time and other events. The most successful advertisers regularly provide us with an exclusive coupon, which we communicate to affiliate publishers and increase the popularity of the program.
Online store category
The affiliate publisher also chooses programs based on the focus of his site. If you are interested in expanding the circle of your affiiate publishers, we will be happy to find suitable potential partners for you and contact them with an offer to promote your program.
Regular communication
The advantage of our affiliate network is communication, which we take as one of the building blocks of good and functional cooperation. Our goal is to have working programs and communicate their benefits and events to affiliate publishers. To do this, we ask you for your cooperation, for sending special offers, seasonal products, bestsellers, competitive advantages, news and other information that we can pass on to affiliate partners.
Proactivity
Approach affiliate marketing proactively, upload promotional materials regularly, which publishers will download from the details of your program. We will also be happy to agree with you on individual promotion or together we will come up with other forms of non-standard promotion. We are open to opportunities that will increase conversions, increase sales, and lead to happy collaboration.
Involvement of all websites / language versions
If you have more sites, tell us about them. We will add all your pages to the promotion on favorable terms. The same applies to multiple language versions of the site. Although the Affiliate Port is the strongest on the Czech and Slovak markets, we can cover any market. Tell us about all your projects, websites and e-shops, we will advise you on suitable tailor-made affiliate marketing.
Program interface
Login
We’ve already sent you login information to manage your account. Within the program it is possible to generate more user accounts. If you are interested in another, please contact us. Check-in takes place here, after logging in you will see a basic menu where you will find all the important information. The bar on the left contains the Snapshot, Offers, Reports, Account and Support fields.
Snapshot
This is a basic overview of the performance of your program. The Snapshot also includes graphs with an overview of the number of conversions and costs, by selecting above you can filter by period: today, yesterday, last 7 days, this month, last month, last six months and the entire period of cooperation.
Offers
In the Offers menu, you get an overview of your program.
The Conversion Approval field allows you to manually comment on the status of each conversion. Here you can approve, reject, or change the value of conversions as needed. After each adjustment, it is necessary to confirm by clicking on Confirm and Save – at the top right. The All Offers field contains an overview of all your programs (if you have more or more language versions of the e-shop, you can see an overview of individual programs here). The Create Offer field allows you to create a new program, but for the correct procedure, please contact us to create a new program. The Creative Files field offers the possibility to add materials for promotion (graphic creatives, banners, XML feeds, mailing templates and other materials). Uploading is done via the Add Creative Files button at the top right. We recommend using this option regularly and fulfilling the program’s materials on an ongoing basis; affiliate publishers have access to this part of your folder, so they can easily and at any time download the necessary materials, which will significantly support the entire promotion of your program. It is not possible to set the validity period of individual materials in the system, if you upload action banners, we recommend deleting them from the system after the action for clarity or deactivating them. The Insertion Orders field is an option to request a special event, we handle events of this type in person, if you are interested in setting up an exclusive event, please contact us directly.
Reports
All reports are available in the Reports menu. Here you’ll find a daily, hourly, and overall conversion report. Working here is very simple, just click on the required report, expand the Options menu, select the information that interests you, set the required time span at the very bottom and click Run Report to view the report. The report can be easily exported to a clear CSV table by clicking on Export to CSV. You can also save the created custom report using the Save Report option so that you do not have to set it again next time.
Account
In the Account menu, you will find information about the current credit status, information about the program and your user account.
How the promotion works
Promotion of a newly added program
- blog article
- newsletter
- personal communication
- social networks
Blog article
The newly active program is presented in the article. Just send us a presentation of your e-shop together with information on why affiliate partners should promote your program, we will write an article and publish it on our blog. We also recommend adding a list of competitive advantages, customer reviews, an overview of the best-selling products, news and other interesting information to the text. Examples of such articles can be found here.
Newsletter
Each new program is added to a regular newsletter, which we send to a complete database of affiliate publishers. The performance includes a short text, a highlight of the benefits that the e-shop offers, the amount of commission and information on whether the program has XML feeds.
Personal communication
We communicate directly with TOP publishers. As part of this communication, we will make sure that they have registered the newly added program and will once again present the benefits of promotion.
Social networks
- Facebook – Affiliate Port
- Affiliate Port – Facebook Forum
- Twitter – Affiliate Port
For maximum support, we recommend supporting the initial promotion with an exclusive event (discount code, free shipping, gift to order, etc.)
Promotion during cooperation
The promotion of the program does not end at the establishment. We continue to communicate benefits, special offers, seasonal products and other recommendations throughout the cooperation. This communication again takes place through blog articles, social networks, mass newsletters, personal communication and we also regularly and continuously communicate information through our own action XML feed.
Discount XML feed
The Affiliate Port has its own special XML feed, on which we continuously deploy events, seasonal products and other advantageous offers from advertisers. Through this feed, events are automatically copied to the sites of affiliate publishers who have this feed deployed. The automatic update takes place every 12 minutes. In turn, we can expand each event and the affiliate publisher will not lose any information.
Tomáš Hanzl (hanzl@5dm.cz) is in charge of deploying this, and he actively browses advertisers’ websites and processes information. For 100% certainty that no event will escape us, we ask you for continuous communication.
Continuous upload of promotional materials
The procedure for managing your account and filling it with promotional materials is explained above. After uploading the materials, we ask you for information in our direction. We will also inform affiliate publishers about the newly uploaded materials and call for promotion again.
Promotion via Full Wallet
The Affilite Port is run by 5DM, which runs a number of successful online projects. One of them is also the largest cashback with its 670,000 users ranked number one in the market. Marketing communication for full wallet is provided by Hanka Bujková (bujkova@5dm.cz), who will be happy to advise you and guide you in marketing as part of the promotion for Full Wallet. It is possible to arrange events, competitions, reviews and other user-friendly events. Each event is maximally supported through e-mailing, social networks and other channels. This will give your e-shop a great opportunity to introduce yourself, make yourself visible and achieve even better results.
Important information
Methods of approving commissions
Conversions can be approved manually in the system (see above), based on a monthly report, which we always send to you by e-mail at the beginning of the month, or via the API.
Commission approval period
To ensure the proper payment of commissions to affiliate publishers, the contract sets a time for the approval of the conversion. Please respond in a timely manner to commissions. After the specified time, the resulting conversions will be considered approved and will be paid to affiliate partners. If a special event occurs, just let us know and we will agree on an individual solution.
Contacts
If necessary, do not hesitate to contact us at any time. We are here for you.
Good luck,
Director of the AffiliatePort – Josef Drobílek, drobilek@5dm.cz
Key Account Manager – Iveta Janoušková, janouskova@5dm.cz
Communication with e-shops – Tereza Veselá, vesela@5dm.cz
Communication with publishers and special offers – Frantisek Hadrava, hadrava@5dm.cz
Trade and communication for Full Wallet – Jana Bartoletti, bartoletti@5dm.cz
Technical support and development – Petr Pomezný, pomezny@5dm.cz
