How to Drive Sales with Amazon Affiliate Marketing

As demonstrated by the data presented in Amazing Amazon Statistics, Amazon has emerged as the world's largest online retailer. Presently, it commands 37.8% of the US eCommerce market, far surpassing industry heavyweights like eBay (3.5%), Apple (3.9%), and Walmart (6.3%). It can be challenging to understand that in just one quarter (Q2 2022). Amazon generated total net sales of about $121.2 billion. However, many "Amazon sales" are made by other companies. During the same quarter, 68% of merchants relied on Amazon's fulfillment services (FBA), while third-party sellers accounted for 57% of all units sold on the platform.

While some marketing is expected of Amazon sellers (having their products appear in searches on the platform can benefit any business), you shouldn't count on Amazon to advertise your products as heavily as they do. Furthermore, Amazon will likely want to designate you as an Amazon Vendor, purchasing and reselling your products independently if you are a big, well-known company or sell a famous product line.

According to Marketplace Pulse research, approximately two million distinct brands can be found on Amazon instead of tens of thousands of products in traditional retail establishments. Furthermore, Amazon will only purchase a tiny percentage of these goods to resell. The fact that just 10% of brands selling on Amazon rank among the top 100 in any of the tens of thousands of categories on the platform can be intimidating. Put differently, 90% of the brands that sell on Amazon are buried deep in the search results.

Using Amazon affiliate marketing is one method to increase sales on the platform. Remember that this is not the same as signing up to be an Amazon Associate; for more details on how to do this, see our Ultimate Guide to Becoming an Amazon Associate. You want to avoid becoming an affiliate for someone else and promote their goods in the same way that Amazon Associates do. Working with affiliate marketers to promote the goods you list and sell on Amazon is what you should do instead.

Consider Using Affiliate Marketing Software to Make Your Life Easier

Refersion and Helium 10 have teamed up to create Amazon Affiliate Marketing by Refersion, an affiliate marketing platform that offers Amazon integration. Refersion asserts this is an innovative affiliate marketing solution for Amazon Marketplace eCommerce brands. Merchants create a default product-level commission for affiliates and publishers by importing their Amazon product catalog into the platform. Refersion's network of affiliates, publishers, and influencers submits applications to collaborate with the merchant on marketing campaigns for particular products, contingent on the quality of the offer.

How to Build Traffic to Your Amazon Listings

We'll look at a few different strategies to increase sales to your Amazon listings before delving deeper into Amazon affiliate marketing for Amazon sellers. Those who have already started an Amazon product search will be disregarded. They are an added "bonus" of using Amazon as a marketplace because Amazon will draw users to the platform who may purchase your goods if they satisfy their immediate needs.

But you can't depend on Amazon's advertising to drive traffic to your listings. It would help if you made an effort to generate relevant external traffic on your own (or, in the case of affiliate and influencer marketing, in collaboration with others). There are several ways to accomplish this.

1. Ensure Your Amazon Listing Follows Good SEO Practices

With 2 million brands on Amazon, you'll encounter fierce competition if you sell a unique product. Therefore, much of the information we discuss in our eCommerce SEO Guide also applies to your Amazon listings, even though it focuses more on non-Amazon marketplaces.

If customers can't find your products on Amazon after they arrive, there needs to be more use in sending them there. Remember that almost all of the companies on Amazon—including Amazon itself—are rivals. Therefore, it's critical that customers can quickly locate your products and the solutions to any queries they might have.

You can use a variety of Amazon SEO Tools and Services to refine your listings so that users can see that you are offering what they want and find out what searches people are making.

Furthermore, Amazon appreciates it when you direct users to the website because they might make additional purchases there.

Among the most crucial actions you should take to improve your product listings are:

• Carry out keyword research so you know the terms people search for on Amazon.
• Please make the most out of your product title; it should be between 60 and 80 characters extended and correspond to the actual product packaging information. Don't use all caps. Avoid stuffing your title with as many keywords as you can. Product titles should only include the minimum information required to identify the items. There are better places for sales speak or exaggeration.
• Improve your product descriptions by adding thorough details about the features and advantages of your offerings. Add anything that a prospective buyer might find essential to know when deciding. Even if your brand name appears in the description, remember to enter it in the Brand field. This is crucial for prospective buyers who filter by brand.
• Organize the product's salient features and list them in five bullet points. Use the keywords you've chosen here, but only if they make sense. Emphasize the five components that persuade a potential customer to buy your offering.
• Optimize your product photos by including a variety of shots that showcase the item from various perspectives. Ideally, you should have one video and six excellent images for every product.
• Optimize your product search terms; buyers won't see them because they are stored in the backend of your listing. When naming your product, stick to generic terms such as synonyms, abbreviations, and alternate names. The maximum length is 250 bytes, so keep it short and free of duplicate characters.
• Optimize the price of your product by making sure it is priced for similar products on Amazon. If your product doesn't compete well with other comparable (or identical) items on the platform, your top affiliates may still struggle to market it.

Working with affiliates can help eCommerce brands that use Amazon Affiliate Marketing by Refersion improve their organic page rankings in Amazon's search results. Your products will rank higher on Amazon if they drive more outside traffic to their listings. Nevertheless, you will still need to implement effective SEO on your page to increase the likelihood that customers will find your Amazon-listed products.

2. Target the Right People for Your Products

In many respects, this is the most important guideline for any marketing initiative. Determine your potential clients' likely demographics and ensure that EVERY dollar you spend on marketing is focused on them. This implies that you only market your product to the "right" types of people. You engage with them solely on the same social media networks. Those individuals favor any influencers you collaborate with, and affiliate marketers you work with also focus on them. If an influencer or affiliate doesn't have the right audience for your product, it doesn't matter how good they are, how popular a social platform is, or how alluring an advertising deal may be.

For this reason, you should choose influencers for any influencer campaign and affiliates for an affiliate marketing campaign very carefully. Refersion's user-friendly platform allows you to find and recruit affiliates more quickly and efficiently while fostering direct relationships with high-performing affiliates. Look into the kinds of people that potential affiliates tend to attract. Refersion offers a wealth of information about potential affiliates. Please make sure they are the appropriate customers for your offerings.

3. Marketing Outside Amazon

Similar to how you market your other products and services, you can do the same with Amazon.com. You may be already advertising these same products; you're keeping prospective buyers in the dark about Amazon's availability. If so, make it a point to modify your marketing materials to emphasize how simple it is for customers to purchase them from your Amazon store.

It's common for the affiliates you select to collaborate with to promote your goods outside of Amazon. They have an incentive to promote your products to people they think will purchase because they get paid each time you sell a product to a customer they have recommended. You can segregate these customers' sales using Refersion's Amazon Affiliate Marketing dashboard. Conversions can be easily tracked, allowing you to determine who has the right to take credit for any increases in product sales.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

We went into greater detail about this in our All-Inclusive Affiliate Marketing Guide. A contemporary take on commission selling is affiliate marketing. Companies pay affiliate marketers a percentage of each sale made by those willing to promote their products. Affiliate marketers use a unique link to the brand's website (or, for Amazon sellers, Amazon) to advertise the products. The seller rewards the relevant affiliate marketer with a predetermined percentage of the sales revenue when a customer clicks on one of the affiliate links and purchases the product.

Why Use Affiliate Marketing for Your Amazon Store?

Although utilizing PPC advertisements on Amazon might boost your sales there, success is not guaranteed. This is because each time a user clicks on your advertisement, you have to pay whether or not they purchase your goods. However, if you use affiliate marketing, you will only be required to pay affiliates when a customer they refer to Amazon purchases one of your goods. Furthermore, based on your product category, Amazon pays a 10% Brand Referral Bonus for each sale you generate through non-Amazon marketing.

With Amazon, you can increase sales quickly and effectively while paying less for conversions if you choose your affiliates carefully. Furthermore, you save money by not having to pay for views that result in conversions.

The idea that promoting your product outside of Amazon will raise its ranks there may seem illogical. Still, when Amazon's algorithm compiles product search results, it weights external traffic. Thus, it considers your products more popular and moves them up the search results if it detects that the effects of your affiliates increase traffic to your products.

Managing Your Amazon Marketplace Affiliate Marketing with Amazon Affiliate Marketing by Refersion

As we've already covered, Refersion, an affiliate marketing platform, integrates with Amazon. You can also link there if you run a store on Shopify, Shopify Plus, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, WooCommerce, or BigCommerce. However, you must first register for Amazon's Brand Registry program.

After registering for Refersion's platform and the Brand Registry Program, you must link your Amazon account under Refersion's Settings. Next, pick the Amazon icon by clicking the Add Tracking button. To connect your Amazon store, import your Amazon product catalog, and establish a default commission offer, follow the instructions on the platform.

Refersion advises you to offer a commission of at least 10%. Choosing the products you want to promote on the Refersion Marketplace—which links brands and merchants with content creators (possible affiliates)—is your last task at this stage.

Refersion advises establishing a commission rate of at least 10% to draw in the top candidates to become Amazon affiliates. You must pay marginally higher than what Amazon pays affiliate marketers participating in its Amazon Associates program. Affiliates wouldn't be motivated to work with you if you spent less money.

After completing this initial step, prospective affiliates will see your offers in search lists. If your offer piques someone's curiosity, they can apply to collaborate with you. Upon choosing individuals to participate in your campaign as affiliates, they can access your direct link for upcoming campaigns, saving them the trouble of completing the application process each time.

Merchants can use Affiliate Discovery to find qualified affiliates in addition to the Marketplace for finding affiliates. Additionally, Refersion connects retailers with a range of publishers of premium content.

Refersion integrates with your Amazon store to handle many of your campaigns on your behalf, including affiliate relationships, promotional campaigns, obtaining tracking links for Amazon product listings, tracking conversions, and paying affiliates once you have chosen qualified affiliates to help with your Amazon marketing.

Advantages of Software Such as Amazon Affiliate Marketing by Referral

Using specialized Amazon affiliate marketing software to identify high-achieving affiliates who can increase product sales has several advantages for brands.

1. A Higher ROI on Advertising Spend

While purchasing PPC advertisements on Amazon can occasionally be very profitable, there is no assurance that your advertising expenditure will be repaid. You could pay for Amazon advertising and still make very few, if any, sales, especially if other people are selling comparable or identical products to yours.

Nevertheless, you only pay affiliates for conversions when you use Amazon Affiliate Marketing by Refersion, the only affiliate program integrated with Amazon. If they decide to use paid advertising, they must pay the advertising bills and handle your marketing. As opposed to Amazon's 3x ROAS, Refersion claims that users of their affiliate marketing platform typically see a 5x ROI.

2. Increased Organic Visibility

A product's ranking on Amazon improves with the amount of external traffic it generates for the website. Accordingly, if your product pages receive a lot of traffic from high-performing affiliates, Amazon will notice and increase the visibility of your pages for customers who look for your product categories on Amazon.

3. Clear Analytics to Assist with Accountability

Platforms for affiliate marketing are great at offering all the information you need about your affiliates' performance. Each affiliate's success will be readily visible to you, along with a wealth of information about how well they performed as your representatives in sales. You can quickly identify which of your affiliates are performing at the highest level and which are not and who is bringing in the most revenue from your product pages. This information can help you select the ideal partners for upcoming campaigns.

4. You Can Set and Forget Many Automated Affiliate Marketing Processes

Ultimately, you can streamline much of the routine administrative work in collaborating with affiliates by utilizing specialized software for Amazon affiliate marketing. You don't have to double-enter crucial data because onboarding affiliates, managing their performance, expediting commission calculation and payment, and integrating with a large portion of your current software is simple. With Refersion, your influencer and ambassador marketing can be managed from the same dashboard.