Yesterday I talked about how to affiliate commissions percentage. Whereas Clickbank limits you to a ceiling of offering a maximum 75% commission share for your affiliates, DigiResults goes on step further and enables merchants to give 100%, that’s right the ENTIRE commission to the affiliate. Why would you want to offer 100% commissions on your product, effectively ensuring that you don’t see a dime of the sale as the merchant behind the program?
Affiliate Support
Let’s get the first and most obvious reason out of the way – affiliate support. Offering 100% commissions can be used as a temporary measure for attracting new affiliates. You can first extend this to all affiliates for a time period (like when you launch your product) in order to get everyone’s attention. Secondly, you can either offer it to all new affiliates for their first few sales or you can offer 100% commissions as a reward/prize for all affiliates who reach a certain number of sales. For example, you can offer 100% commissions on all sales an affiliate makes after their 100th sale in a month in order to motivate affiliates to work harder to get to that level.
This requires a bit more work to ensure they get the full commission as you have to credit your percentage of the commission to their accounts manually, or basically most affiliate networks don’t have a method of paying affiliates at different commission levels; still it’s an effective method for gaining loyal and motivated affiliates.
List Building
If you’re not concerned with making money but instead in building your email list in size, you can require all new customers to sign up for your email list before they can get their product, then offer 100% commissions to your affiliates as an effective way to build your list for free.
You might think about doing this especially with lower priced products because you wouldn’t be making much money with a cheaper product but at the same time that 100% commission share can motivate affiliates to promote even an inexpensive product so long as they know they’re getting the entire sale for themselves. Most affiliate networks like DigiResults enable you to put in your autoresponder code from your email list service of choice like Aweber, so new customers will get automatically added to your list as they go through the affiliate network’s checkout proecss.
When you have an army of affiliates building your list for you, you’ll quickly gain access to a sprawling list of not just subscribers, but real life CUSTOMERS who have just made a purchase from you. To demonstrate why this is important, let’s get to reason #3.
Backend Sales/Sales Funnel
Offering 100% commissions is actually a tactic which the biggest affiliate marketers use to make the biggest paydays for themselves. If you have a backend product, likely a much more substantial and expensive product, you can make a great deal of money in hitting your new customer at just the right time after they’ve purchased your initial product. To explain this, let me direct you to my post on backend sales.
And if you’ve been paying attention to what I’ve been talking about (see my sales funnel analysis), you’d know that existing customers are statistically much MUCH more likely to make a future purchase from you then someone who hasn’t purchased anything else from you yet.