Capturing the attention of today’s shoppers and satisfying their ever-growing demands is increasingly more difficult by the day. To add to that, online shoppers have a seemingly infinite number of brands and offers to choose from at the touch of their fingertips, making them extremely price-conscious.
More and more of today’s shoppers are choosing to allocate their discretionary spending online instead of in traditional brick-and-mortar stores of yesterday. Today’s consumers demand the whole nine yards from online stores, and at the best price. Even the least tech-savvy of today’s online shoppers are experts at comparing prices when they shop, utilizing search engines and coupon apps and sites to hunt down the best deals.
According to a recent study by Hawk Incentives, a staggering 97% of the shoppers surveyed said they look for deals when they shop, while an equally staggering 92% of shoppers surveyed said they are “always looking” for the best deals. Hunting down the best deals online isn’t only limited to shoppers on a budget either, as the study found that a mind-boggling 86% of surveyors that reported an annual income of $200,000 or more said that they seek out deals when they shop.
Bargain hunting is prevalent across many income groups, therefore brands that do not implement an effective coupon publisher strategy in their affiliate program aren’t fully tapping into their target audience market.
Below, we’ll go through the top reasons why brands running affiliate marketing programs need to start partnering with coupon publishers ASAP to effectively scale their affiliate marketing efforts.
Reason #1: Control Over Your Promotions
By utilizing coupon publishers, brands can scale their affiliate revenue by increasing their reach. At the same time, they have the power to precisely control the types of promotions they want to offer on coupon publisher sites and for how long.
The goal of working with coupon publishers as a brand is to establish a mutually beneficial and engaging relationship. By actively collaborating with coupon publisher sites, you can order them to only promote deals that are approved by your brand to run on the publisher site, while ordering them to take out any ones that aren’t.
This is ideal in cases where certain codes may have expired, or if specific promotions are only available for specific partners like influencers. By having your terms clearly stated in your terms and conditions, you have the added safety net of not paying out any commissions to publisher sites that don’t comply and abide by your directions.
If a publisher site is not in compliance with your terms and directions, then you won’t have to pay out commissions on sales made by promotions that you did not approve to run on the publisher sites. You also have the added option of terminating your relationship with repeat violators of terms for your brand.
Reason #2: Keep Your Friends Close and Your Competitors Closer
At Refersion, we understand today’s shoppers and how to keep them satisfied and that’s why we help brands across all industries partner with the top coupon publishers to fully scale their affiliate marketing efforts.
We’ve done our due diligence to seek out the top coupon publishers, carefully vetting each one to ensure brands that they are partnering with coupon publishers with a proven track record of delivering results.
We want to highlight three coupon publishers that brands all over are partnering with: SlickDeals, Hip2Save, and Couponology. Your competitors are more likely than not already partnering with them, and that is precisely why you need to as well to keep your competitors close by.
There’s a wide variety of coupon publishers, each offering consumers with unique ways to save when they shop online. Some of the most common are:
- Coupon publishers – Sites that specialize in offering shoppers coupons and offers across all categories and verticals
- Deal publishers – Sites that seek to offer shoppers with the best deals with or without coupons
- Product-specific publishers – Sites that focus on product-specific discounts and deals, such as laptop or TV deals
Reason #3: Strategic Commissioning
If you’re a brand that offers commonly-available products online, as a vast majority of brands tend to, then you are competing on only a few factors such as brand loyalty, price, and shipping. This is where the power of the coupon comes in to close the sale. Without coupons, potential customers are only a few clicks away from making a purchase somewhere else: your competitor.
By partnering with coupon publishers, brands can entice purchases from online shoppers who otherwise wouldn’t buy from them. When pairing the coupons with a limited-time window, they can even encourage more impulse buys.
Brands can also benefit by utilizing strategic commissioning practices. Some brands may have a more strategic focus and goal on acquiring new customers, in which case, they can offer higher commissions to the publisher sites for new customers as opposed to returning ones.
Strategic commissioning offers brands the flexibility they need when running promotions on coupon publisher sites. If brands are not receiving the returns they’ve expected, they have the flexibility of adjusting their commissions that won’t come at a significant cost to their margins.
When partnering with Refersion to run your promotions on coupon publisher sites, all the terms for working with coupon publishers should be on your Refersion terms and conditions page. By continuously reviewing your data, you will be able to gain meaningful insights into your strategic commissioning plan and you will get a better understanding of what commission rates you should be offering to your coupon publishers.
By partnering with coupon publishers, brands can also effectively increase average order size by offering special discounts for multiple items purchased. Brands looking to maximize their average order values can offer strategic commissions here as well.
The Bottom Line
With many tools at their disposal, more and more of today’s shoppers are becoming masters of online shopping. Online shoppers across a variety of income groups are all seeking deals when they shop, and brands not partnering with coupon publishers are missing out on a huge chunk of the market. It’s always a good strategy to diversify your affiliate mix for publisher types for your affiliate program in order to not be heavily reliant on any single publisher type.
This strategy will provide you with the safety net you need should you encounter any poor-performing publisher types. By continuously reviewing your data, you will gain valuable insight as to what commission rates to offer what publisher types.
Getting started with coupon publishers is fast and simple with Refersion. Brands looking to take advantage of untapped markets and scale their affiliate marketing efforts should contact a Refersion expert today.
