In the flood of bad news associated with the pandemy, there is some good news for the affiliate marketing. Why is the affiliate on the rise and taking the place of other paid advertising? Why do affiliate partners earn more? And finally, what’s the good news for VIVnetworks.com and their business?
The first question is – why is affiliate marketing on the rise? The online retailers who already have a network of trusted long-term partners, are now benefiting from the growth of e-commerce – but only in some categories. We are using the chart our colleagues from Cognito made, the data in which is very similar to the results of our advertisers.
(source: https://www.cognito.cz/business/jak-pripravit-firmu-na-digitalni-dobu-po-krizi)
The online stores with the biggest turnover – and some report 100% higher sales than on Christmas – are reducing their marketing activities, since they couldn't manage the higher number of orders. Fortunately, Affiliate is the last paid channel to be deactivated. And the deactivation lasted for only about two weeks – now these programs are going full speed again. In general, these days the Affiliate marketing is growing by about 80% each year.
The online stores who didn't have Affiliate programs, are quickly launching ones, in order to catch the wave of interest from partners, who are now investing in projects from the categories of the upper right quadrant of the chart. Today we are seeing an increased interest in our network – this is a great opportunity for the online stores, that may never repeat again.
The second question is why partners now earn more than ever. In general, the products from the categories of the right upper quadrant are more desirable and the shoppers have simply moved to online shopping. So people are buying as always, but only the online stores are available. We are seeing a huge growth of first purchases. Depending on the experience these new shoppers have is whether they will continue to shop online. We will know more within a month after the the brick-and-mortar stores open again. A partner who have been investing in SEO and know how to buy traffic, for example on Facebook, how to evaluate each visitor (to whom a dynamic ID is assigned) and reads in CJ's reports what purchases they are making, can increase their income by more than 250%.
Let me give you an example. There are advertisers who offer almost double for a new customer (sometimes defined as anyone who haven't made a purchase in the last six months) and due to the fact that many new customers are shopping for the first time, now we can see the effects of this kind of traffic. A partner who owns a couple of review sites, promoted the products of two online stores from the Beauty category (NOTINO and Lekarna.cz). In 14 days his income increased by 165% with only 41% increase in traffic. The jump in his income came when he found out where the first time customers were coming from, and strengthened this source. His usual income from the two online stores was 1 500 Eur and today he earns around 4 000 – 4 200 Eur per month (we don't yet know the results from the whole lockdown month).
The great news, especially for VIVnetworks.com and our partners and advertisers is that on April 1, 2020 (…and this isn't an April fools' joke), CJ by Conversant, the world's largest affiliate network, decided to straighten our partnership and signed an exclusive contract for another ten years with us. This means our company will continue using the best affiliate technology, which has no comparison in the CEE region, and also guarantees the transparency of Affiliate in the countries where we operate. As is well known, these values are rooted in our DNA. We can be a transparent arbiter between the partner and the advertiser, as we don't own any affiliate projects, and we don't compete with them. These are our values we have been promoting in the CEE region for over ten years.
This year CJ is coming up with many technological innovations in the areas of precise measurement, analytics and new forms of cooperation between the partner and the advertiser. We and our advertisers are the "early adopters" who are eager to raise the bar of technical excellence as soon as possible.
