In the world of marketing, word of mouth has always been a powerful tool. We want the recommendation of someone we know has the right idea about it, whether we are looking for some computer device or car mechanic or our favorite cuisine. The online influencer chooses an affiliate marketing program specifically for product promotion.
Businesses prefer influencer marketing and affiliate programs as the digital platforms are gaining more traffic. Also, influencers have millions of followers, with that comes a large audience for your product. For the basic understanding of affiliate marketing program, its working, its’ components, and how a person can become an affiliate marketer?
Affiliate marketing is one way to make money through the affiliate network by endorsing and branding the product of other people and having a commission on the sale. The main strategy for affiliates is to present the content in a way that they click on the connection given and are convinced to purchase the product.
When you have the basic idea about the affiliate marketing model it is now important to understand how it can help you transform your business.
Ways to use affiliate marketing to transform your e-commerce business
Niche:
The primary thing one wants to consider is their audience and then determines the elements of marketing. The affiliate program will help to build the niche and position the goods in front of the interested and dedicated prospects for the growth of an e-commerce website.
It is important to know about affiliates and their audience before partnering with them. One would be able to get an insight into their audience by measuring the affiliate’s performance.
Sales Team:
An affiliate marketing program can be a boon for entrepreneurs or small companies if they have a small sales team. Affiliate marketing will expand the digital marketing team immediately and will drive potential traffic to your site. You will be able to get more conversions with quality traffic, and more conversions will provide high profits that will provide an opportunity to grow the e-commerce business.
The mobile marketing channel is growing at the speed of light and it is expected to have 2 billion smartphone users worldwide.
Improves reputation:
The online company will use this promotion to gain credibility when the affiliate supports the product or service. Html, icons, or photographs may be used to publicize the sites where the brand has been checked or used. To get an initial understanding of the affiliate marketing program, you can also opt for digital marketing programs.
The organization wants to see where its future audience is in terms of geographical area, sales, hobbies, etc. through brand promotion. You can customize the target audience for affiliate marketing and only partner with affiliates who can help you meet your potential audience.
For instance, if your company manufactures protein supplements then your influencer should be some physical fitness trainer or a fitness enthusiast.
Tracking:
In the form of dashboards, this system provides simple tracking of impressions, clicks, leads, purchases, commissions, revenue drivers, etc. To control your conversion and all other statistics, there is plenty of Affiliate Marketing software available.
Multiple Conversion Paths:
With an affiliate marketing program, by manually setting the benefits, one would be able to select the preferred route to achieve a successful conversion. As a conversion, one can select email marketing, how-to guide download, product sale, or survey form. Whenever your conversion option is a success, you can give the reward to the affiliate.
Content:
There will be days when no content that can help promote your company or brand will be available to you. With affiliate marketing, since the affiliates can do it for you, you will not have to brainstorm about the best material that will assist in generating sales.
The content created by affiliates and influencers is read by all their followers and you can use your influencer’s content as marketing power.
Wrapping Up:
A good affiliate marketing strategy is expected to enhance the partnership and boost the relationship with the company’s customers. You need to collaborate with social influencers and businesses you respect. Like their larger, well-established peers, a new company or a young startup does not have deep pockets. Affiliate marketing can generate higher sales per dollar spent on marketing for companies working within a small budget.
Gamification is a term that has gain popularity recently. It is a common marketing strategy to promote interaction and to get people excited about otherwise boring tasks. Ok, and guess what? You can add gamification to an eCommerce website with ready-made plugins, thanks to the amazing modules.
For all its quality, modern marketing has a few shortcomings. In modern form, product advertisements can come across as trying too hard to persuade. And this is a costly and time-consuming mistake. An innovative way to get your users more engaged in your site and potentially keep them coming back well into the future is by using the concepts of gamification on an eCommerce website.
This article will revolve around Gamification and how it can help you improve sales with customer engagement. Then we’ll see how the gamification module can be used on various occasions and events. Let’s jump inside!
What is Gamification?
Since consumers have more locations and ways to shop than ever before, retailers must find ways to make online shopping fun and enjoyable to be successful. By integrating game elements into their business processes, they have started to boost the online consumer experience, making online shopping not only appealing to innovative goods and low prices but also enjoyable. This term in a business known as gamification, a trending subject, and is generally characterized as the use of game thinking and elements in non-game contexts.
How Gamification helps your business?
Link your games and your rewards to business goals. It’s fun to play games and compete with friends, but you don’t want to distract yourself from the reason you’re at work: to make money. Remember these points before implementing the Gamification tactics on your eCommerce store.
Put in place the right technologies
To improve competitiveness, leverage a leaderboard
Provide useful benefits that are worth fighting for
Using it as an opportunity to boost the integrity of sales data
Key Benefits of Gamification on eCommerce
Customer Engagement
Gamification Improves customer engagement by keeping your customers invested in the fun element and the acquisitiveness of winning a reward adds more to it.
More email subscribers
The gamification modules increase engagement and the rewards or the coupons won by the customer goes to their Inbox. Hence, to claim the reward, they have to put their email address.
Better Customer Experience
The gamification added to the website improves the overall layout and UX of the store. Various Gamified modules add a fun element on the home page itself. It increases the customer experience of every type of eCommerce customer coming to the store.
Customer Loyalty
To take customer loyalty to the next level and improve interaction, it is possible and even recommended to add game elements to your website. Reward points and loyalty programs increase customer retention rates.
With improved customer engagement and customer experience, you can see higher growth in the conversion rate. It also adds more subscribers to your email integration software that you can use email marketing.
How to add Gamification to eCommerce Website?
Add interactive modules to your web-store
You may want to start by experimenting with smaller ‘gamified’ elements that do not affect your entire site if you are new to gamification. There are, luckily, several such modules that you can easily add.
You can build them manually (if you know how to code) if you want to add interactive modules to your website. Alternatively, a dedicated module may be used.
You can add a Spin-to-Win module, puzzles, sliders, quizzes, or run contests and giveaways on your store. The Spin and Win module by KnowBand is highly recommended as it has several themes for every occasion, from Valentine’s to Halloween.
Establish a system of points and give incentives
Do you know that you can convert your complete website into a Game? By designing an overall rewards system, you can turn your entire site into a game. This generally means, in practical terms, rewarding users with ‘points’ for completing different tasks and interactions.
You can incentivize users for dropping a product review, blogging, reading posts, participating in one-time activities, or offer loyalty points on every purchase they make. They will be given fixed incentives or be able to spend them on the benefits of their own choice as users gain more points. The sky is also the limit here.
Scratch Coupons as Exit Pop-up
Digital scratch-off coupons are perfect for increasing consumer engagement and improving the number of transactions. Scratch-offs have become increasingly common to win coupons and or prizes.
Everyone loves anything to win.
Mobile scratch-off coupons allow companies on their websites to generate excitement among the visitors. You can add scratch coupons developed by KnowBand to your eCommerce store. The Scratch-off Coupon module is available for PrestaShop, Magento, and OpenCart store.
Wrapping Up: Gamification is an exciting approach to improve the interest and involvement of customers and visitors on your website. If you are searching for a way to turn passive viewers and readers into active users, the response might be to add game-like elements to your site. You can make visiting and using your website a lot more enjoyable with a little experimentation.
Big brands like Amazon offers an affiliate marketing program and people are earning thousands of dollars with referral and affiliate marketing. It is proven to be a good source of passive income these days.
You might have heard terms like ‘refer and earn’ and came across the links on YouTube videos or blogs dominating a specific category promoting a product. People are making money by influencing others through good content and captivating tactics.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is an opportunity to make passive income. It can work well and do magic if you know how exactly it works. Affiliate marketing is a type of revenue sharing technique. There are many tools available for affiliate marketing. One of the affiliate marketing tools is the ‘Affiliate and Referral Program‘ for your PrestaShop Store.
A person registers himself with an existing product selling website and gets a link for promoting the product. If that link works well and the product gets sold with that particular link, the person who promoted it will get a cookie. Yes, he will get some amount of money on behalf of that purchase. Yay! This is how it works.
Knowband developed a perfect solution for PrestaShop eCommerce store owners, an affiliate marketing tool named PrestaShop Affiliate and Referral Program. What is PrestaShop Affiliate and Referral Program? How you can grow brand awareness and acquire new customers with this affiliate marketing tool? What are the main features of the PrestaShop Affiliate and Referral Program?
We’ll answer all those questions in this blog. If you are interested in affiliate marketing for your store then you must know what ‘Affiliate and Referral Program’ is offering.
Features of ‘Affiliate and Referral Program’- an affiliate marketing tool
1. Several types of referral
The affiliate marketing tool ‘Affiliate and Referral Program’ module allows the affiliate partners to invite new users through various means into your store. The affiliate partners can bring in new customers by sharing a referral code or a referral link with them.
Affiliate marketing and referral programs also allow the affiliate to generate voucher code. Besides that, affiliate partners can share the reference link on various social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, right from their affiliate account.
2. Defined referral rate for the affiliates
a global referral rate can be set by PrestaShop store admin for the affiliate partners for the user registration and the order placement.
3. Custom commission for each affiliate
Although the Affiliate marketing tool for PrestaShop the ‘Affiliate and Referral Program’ allows the store administrator to set a fixed global reference rate for the affiliate partners, they can customize this for every different affiliate.
4. A voucher for affiliates on registration
PrestaShop Affiliate Marketing Module allows traders to assign a coupon on the successful user registration of the affiliates. The store administrator can set the value of the voucher and offer it in the form of a fixed discount or a percentage basis. There’s also the option to define the total quantity of vouchers and the limit of vouchers per user.
5. Set validity for your referral program
The Affiliate marketing and Referral Marketing addon provide the option to run the specific referral program for a given time interval. If you define a time period, after the specified period, the reference code will get expire.
6. Keep an eye on registered affiliates
With the Affiliate and Referral Marketing module, you can insight into registered affiliates and look into the details under the ‘Affiliate Customer’ section.
7. Obtain details of the clients referred
“Referral Listing” displays details of the customers who have done the registration via the affiliate link.
8. Check the incentives the affiliates earn
In the “Commission History” tab, the PrestaShop Referral tool allows the store admin to view the incentives earned by the affiliate partners.
9. Check for payout requests from affiliates
The affiliate marketing and referral marketing module allow the affiliate partner to obtain their payout/commission in the form of a voucher or cash.
The affiliate customer must raise a request to withdraw the commission earned from his/her account, which will then be reflected in “Payout Requests.”
Benefits of Referral and Affiliate Marketing Tool
Affiliate marketing increases brand awareness
Increase your brand’s popularity by arranging a multi-level affiliate program in the eCommerce website store.
The program gives refer and earn opportunity
Offer your customers a unique earning opportunity by displaying on the website an option to register an affiliate.
Gather email subscribers
With more registration, you can get more email subscribers. The data can be further used for email marketing strategies. The Affiliate and Referral Program is a boon to the cost of advertising.
Improved conversion
When the referent makes a purchase using the voucher code you can drive more conversions and hence more sales. Giving the affiliates exciting incentives can encourage them to bring more customers to you.
Final Words: People are looking for sources to build up the capital and earn more. This is a chance for eCommerce store owners to bring new customers to their store with the ‘Refer and Earn’ program. Affiliate marketing and a referral program can help you grow your PrestaShop business to the next level. Knowband presents the ‘PrestaShop Affiliate and Referral Program’ addon which helps PrestaShop store owners build brand awareness and effectively increase their user base.
For e-retailers, the holiday season signifies only thing- more sales. It is that time of the year when there is maximum participation of the online shoppers in the eCommerce websites, and eCommerce merchants use this opportunity to maximize their sales.
Though the holiday season is all about increasing the sales graph, for the e-retailers, it requires tons of efforts to achieve it. You need to prepare a roadmap for the entire season, create effective marketing strategies, focus on your competitors, and a lot more to stand out from the rest.
While all these points are imperative to achieve holiday sales, nothing holds more importance than providing customers with a seamless and hassle-free shopping experience. The final quarter of the year captures a large number of visitors and it is your responsibility to convert them into regular customers.
For that matter, you need to focus on a few aspects like customer engagement, customer retention, user experience, etc. In this article, I will be presenting the list of our Top 10 modules that will help you cover every aspect and grab conversions better than ever in the coming holiday season.
The holiday season commences from Halloween and ends at the arrival of the New Year.
For Checkout optimization
1. One Page Checkout (PrestaShop, OpenCart, Magento and Magento 2)
Our One Page Checkout module helps you optimize your checkout page, to allow your customers with a hassle-free checkout experience.
Unlike the multi-step checkout process, it displays all the checkout elements on a single page and reduces the checkout friction.
To make the checkout path convenient for customers, our One Page Checkout offers Social Login, Guest Checkout, Inline Validation, Google Auto-address fill and supports nearly all the payment methods and shipping services.
Find the complete features and benefits of the checkout module for the respective platforms:
2. Spin and Win (PrestaShop, OpenCart, Magento, Magento 2, WooCommerce and Shopify)
Increase customer engagement on your website by adding a Gamification element to it. The Spin and Win gamified popup draws the attention of your customers towards the eye-catching spin-win wheel and engages them in a fun activity.
Visitors are asked to try their luck by spinning the wheel and grab some exciting offers. But, in order to spin, a user needs to provide his/her details like name and email address.
So, this Spin and Win module not just builds customer engagement but also provides you with a nice way to obtain customer data and grow your email list, which you can use for your email marketing campaigns, and thus boost your conversions.
The module provides merchants with tons of customization ranging from designing the look of the popup to setting up the time for the popup appearance. Check out
3. Loyalty Points (PrestaShop, OpenCart and Magento)
Encourage repeat purchases by rewarding your customers with loyalty points on every purchase. Our Loyalty Points module ensures customer retention as well as customer acquisition.
The module lets you provide loyalty points to every new user who performs a sign-up on your store and triggers impulse buying, followed by more loyalty points on the successful purchase.
It converts visitors into potential buyers and makes them stick to your store in the long run. It also enhances brand loyalty to a great extent.
The Loyalty Points module lets merchants set up their terms and conditions for users in order to gain loyalty points. It can include offering loyalty points based on the total cart value, product quantity, product price, selected payment methods, etc.
The loyalty points earned by a user can be used as a discount voucher on the checkout page. Check out
Our Mobile App Builder lets you transform your eCommerce website into an Android and iOS Mobile App conveniently, without any requirement of coding or technical knowledge, and helps you develop a rich, user-friendly, and a smartphone and tablet responsive mobile app for your business.
Since users nowadays demand an app for easy browsing experience, the Mobile App Builder module makes it the best fit to provide amazing user experience.
The holiday season is coming close, now is the best time to introduce your mobile app and delight your users, and grab huge holiday sales.
The Mobile App Builder offers Easy customization, Social login, Fingerprint and OTP login, WhatsApp and Zopim Chat support, Real-time synchronization of Website into App, supports multiple payment and shipping methods, etc. Check out
We are currently running an exclusive offer for the PrestaShop website owners where they can purchase a combo of PrestaShop Spin and Win and PrestaShop Mobile App Builder for just $225.
The individual cost of both these addons is $299 and $49.99 respectively. But with our combo pack, you will get a heavy discount of $125 and can get it for just $225.
All you need to do is apply the coupon code “SAVE125” during the checkout.
For improved site speed on mobile devices
5. AMP- Accelerated Mobile Pages (PrestaShop and OpenCart)
Our AMP module tackles the slow loading of your website on mobile devices and increases the page load speed to a great extent.
Did you know m-commerce accounted for 40% of the total sales in the US in 2018, as per Statista? If we talk about global m-commerce stats, it has already surpassed eCommerce. The numbers speak about the importance of smooth site functionality on mobile devices.
The AMP module, thus, ensures that your mobile users do not find any troublesome experience with your website and are offered a faster and smoother loading. Faster loading not only helps you reduce the bounce rate but also benefits in improved mobile rankings on the search engine.
Talking about its features, you can enable the AMP functionality for multiple pages on your website like Home page, Category page, Product page, etc. You can also customize these pages as per your requirements. Check out
6. Abandoned Cart (PrestaShop, OpenCart, Magento and Magento 2)
The Abandoned Cart module helps you recover your lost sales by sending regular follow-up emails to the abandoned cart users. The module reminds users about the incomplete purchase and allows you to convert them into customers by including exclusive offers in your emails.
It lets you define a period after which the cart is automatically assumed to be abandoned. You can, thereafter, track those users and send them the abandoned cart reminder through your emails. The email content can be personalized.
The Abandoned Cart module can boost your conversions significantly. Check out
The Return Manager module helps you manage your eCommerce returns conveniently and enhances customer loyalty by making the return process way too easy for the customers.
Since the holiday season captures a huge number of orders, there will be returns for sure. Our Return Manager module ensures that you do not lose out on customers due to a poor return process.
The module provides 3 return choices to the customers in the form of Credits, Refund and Replacement, and allows them to highlight the defect by uploading the image of the defective/damaged product. One interesting feature of the module is that the admin can create the return request on the customer’s behalf. Check out
PrestaShop Booking and Rental system addon provides your customers with a hassle-free online booking experience and makes it a simple task for the merchants to manage their online bookings.
This PrestaShop addon offers appointment booking facility, hotel booking facility and rental booking facility. It lets you adjust your booking days and time slots as per the availability, and you can adjust the price for different days and timing. There is much more it offers for every booking type.
9. Web Push Notifications (PrestaShop, Magento and Magento 2)
Knowband’s Web Push Notifications module lets merchants alert their users about the abandoned cart, drop in the product price, product availability (when back in stock) and the order status. For each of them, the user can decide whether he or she wants to receive updates regarding them.
For the Web Push Notifications to work, the visitor needs to click on approve when the notification popup appears. This welcome popup can be customized as per your desire.
The module allows you to fix a time for the notification delivery. You can either send the notifications immediately or schedule them for a fixed time. Check out
10. Affiliate and Referral Program (PrestaShop, Magento and Magento 2)
The Affiliate and Referral Program module allows users to register as an Affiliate partner on your store and earn commissions for every successful referral.
The user can refer your store to his/her friends, family, relatives, etc. by sharing with them the affiliate link or the referral code. They can send it over email and also share the link on the social media directly from their affiliate account.
You can assign the commission to the affiliate partner for every new signup via their referral and also provide incentives when the referred user places an order. The commission rate can be set under the configurations of the module. Check out
Did you know 81% of the marketers and 84% of the publishers leverage the power of affiliate marketing? (Source: Web Market Support) Also, according to Business Insider, 15% of the total digital media advertising revenue is attributed to Affiliate Marketing. Consumers trust referrals from people they know 92% of the time. Consumers who have been suggested by a friend are four times more likely to make a purchase.
People have a 37 percent greater retention rate when they are suggested by other customers. Leads from referrals convert at a 30% higher rate than leads from any other source. 65% of new business is generated through referrals. B2B enterprises that receive referrals have a 70% greater conversion rate.
Talking about the referral programs, a report by Nielsen says that 92% of the consumers trust referrals from people they know and 77% of the consumers are likely to buy a new product if they hear about it from their friends or families.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
When an online retailer pays some commission to its affiliate for promoting their products/brand and bringing traffic or sales through their affiliate link, the marketing is said to be affiliate marketing.
Affiliate programs have proved to be very effective for marketers as well as retailers. It helps e-retailers in customer acquisition and boosting sales. This can do wonders if marketed properly during the holiday season.
How do Affiliate Programs work?
Affiliates promote the link of your store products on their website, blog, or YouTube channel, etc. When the visitors/followers of the affiliate use that link to make a purchase on your store, you pay a small commission of the product amount to the affiliate for generating sales for you.
Why you should use Affiliate Marketing for your online business?
The affiliate and referral programs benefit your business in multiple ways. If you consider this during holiday season sales, there are chances that you end up getting huge conversions and a lot of new leads.
Boost sales
The main motive of any online business is to drive sales and to keep the sales graph always high. Affiliate Marketing ensures increased sales by driving more potential customers towards your website.
Enhance product visibility
Make your products reach a wider audience with Affiliate Marketing. If your affiliate gets a handsome amount of traffic on his website, the visibility of your product enhances. When more and more new visitors use the affiliate link to get some discount on your products, you capture more sales.
Increase Brand Awareness
Affiliates highlight your brand in front of a new audience. This creates brand awareness and brings more traffic to your store.
What is Referral Marketing?
Referral marketing or Referral Programs are considered amongst the most successful marketing tools. With this type of marketing, you encourage people to refer your products or services to their friends, family, associates, etc. in exchange for some rewards. Rewards can be gift vouchers, discounts on products or cash. It is also known as word-of-mouth marketing. You can promote your brand with discount vouchers during holiday season.
How do Referral Programs work?
In this type of marketing program, a visitor or customer shares your products to their people and when the people referred by the customers make a purchase from your store, you provide them some kind of referral reward. A customer can choose to share the product link or voucher code.
Why you should use Referral Marketing for your online business for Holiday Season Sale?
People trust referrals
When a customer recommends a product to his/her friends, a sense of trust develops among the referred persons. It creates more chances for sales than conventional advertising.
Improves customer acquisition and customer retention
The referred persons already get a positive response about your brand/products when they are being recommended by someone. This makes them loyal to your brand, increasing customer retention. When new visitors come to your store through referrals, you improve customer acquisition.
Increases user engagement
Referral Marketing can bring you high user engagement on your website. When your product gets circulated among people through referrals, the visits to your online shop increase significantly. You get more engagement, which could lead to increased sales.
Is there any difference between Affiliate and Referral Marketing?
There’s not much difference. For an e-retailer, both Affiliate Marketing and Referral Marketing are a way to promote their brand and get sales by offering some incentives to the affiliates, it is just the process that varies. The key difference between both is that Affiliate Marketing requires third-party websites to promote your business on their channel whereas Referral Marketing focuses on providing rewards to your existing customers for referring your products to others.
Both Affiliate and Referral Programs are effective at inflating sales and growing brand awareness. You can try out the Affiliate and Referral program module by Knowband if you run a store on Prestashop or Magento platform. This module incorporates the Affiliate and Referral program on your store and helps you manage both programs quite comfortably.
