One of the best ways to increase brand awareness, traffic and sales, is to work with other sites that will promote your products and services to their client base in return for a commission. This is partner marketing.
This could be achieved on a Cost Per Lead, Cost Per Sale or Cost Per Click basis. The choice is yours.
The key to all of this is to make sure it is easy to track and also attributable to ensure those that send you the business get correctly rewarded.
The ideas below are based on the premise that you may want to have a small number of high quality introducers – that said, these ideas can also be used to manage all of your marketing activity to allow you to see what is or isn’t working.
Cost Per Lead
With certain products that cannot be bought online you might have enquiry or quote forms that visitors complete. These either come in the form of an email or get dumped into a backend CRM (customer relationship management) system.
In this instance, it could be easy to get your web developer to add separate pages with forms for each introducer and get them to add a different subject line in the email. Or, add a hidden field so in your CRM you can see where the lead has come from.
Cost Per Click
If you are not using Google Analytics – start now! In order to track clicks from different introducers you can use the Google Campaign builder to create trackable links without the need to replicate the whole site for each partner or introducer you work with.
To use the Google Campaign Builder or to check it out visit:
https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/campaign-url-builder/
Or you can read more about it here:
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033863?hl=en-GB
Cost Per Sale
The best way of being able to use Cost Per Sale remuneration for introducers is determined by how easily the sales can be tracked. With so many different platforms and some not having the ability to add tracking code, you may find this option is not viable or is cost prohibitive.
In this case, it might be best to speak to your software house to see what they can do.
Summary
Hopefully this will give you some idea on how to start working with partners or at least start tracking the activity you do online to see what is effective and what isn’t. It should be said that these will work best with up to say 20 – 30 introducers – more than that and it will become a bit more of an admin headache and you might need to look at specialist software.
If you do end up having specialist software, the plus side is that you can start to build up an introducer network without the large costs associated with joining and working with an affiliate network.