Affiliate Marketing For Vape Shops

If you’re looking for a way to increase your visibility online, SEO, and ROI, affiliate marketing might be the solution you’re looking for. By tapping in, experienced vape enthusiasts that will promote your brand in their blogs or websites you can leverage their visitors and turn them into customers, thanks to affiliate marketing programs. But how does it work and how can you start your own affiliate program? Read on to find out more.

Table of Contents

1. What is Affiliate Marketing?
2. Benefits of Affiliate Marketing for Your Online Vape Shop
3. What to Take into Account When Implementing an Affiliate Marketing Program
4. What To Look For in Affiliate Software
5. How to Recruit Affiliates Marketers
6. Conclusion

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is when a blogger or website promotes your products or e-commerce vape shop on their website. In turn, the blogger or website receives a percentage of the revenue created from their promotion efforts. The impressions, leads, and sales are tracked via an affiliate link, hence the name affiliate marketing.

How Affiliate Marketing Works

Affiliate marketing works by uniting three different parties. First, the consumer, second the blogger, publisher, or influencer, and third the seller (or in our case the eCommerce vape shop).These three parties are all interconnected in affiliate marketing and here’s how they interact with each other:

1. The seller contacts the blogger, publisher, or influencer and gives them a code or affiliate link they can use in their content or social media.
2. The blogger, influencer, or publisher publishes his or her content advertising your vaping goods or services with the affiliate marketing links.
3. The customers who are followers of the influencer, blog, or publisher are exposed to the affiliate link or affiliate code and use it to buy the vaping goods or services from the seller.
4. The seller makes a profit on all the goods sold and gives a percentage to the blogger, influencer, or publisher. The process begins again.

Benefits of Affiliate Marketing for Your Online Vape Shop

There are many benefits to using affiliate marketing but some of the strongest benefits include a great ROI, trackability, increases your SEO, broadens your audience, and enhances credibility.

Has Great ROI

Affiliate marketing is a great advertising strategy because it has a great return on investment since everything is based on performance and you only have to pay per action taken by the customers. For example, you can pay per click, per lead, or per sale generated by the affiliate marketer.

It Has Great Trackability

Most affiliate marketers work with software where you can track impressions, clicks, sales, and leads and this is a great advantage because you can measure every post or campaign and see what is working and what is lagging behind. 

Increases SEO

Another great benefit of affiliate marketing is that it will do wonders for your SEO. By creating inbound links that lead to your eCommerce vape shop you will raise the authority of your website driving more traffic, creating more leads, and generating more conversions. 

Broadens Your Audience

Another awesome benefit of affiliate marketing is that it can introduce your vape shop to a new audience, and audience not necessarily out of your niche, but a new audience that might not have known that you existed. 

Enhances Credibility

It comes as no surprise that letting an influencer or publisher recommend your vape shop quickly enhances your credibility. This is because people are more likely to trust someone outside of your organization since there is no perceived ulterior motive. 

What to Take into Account When Implementing an Affiliate Marketing Program

There are many things you have to take into account before creating an Affiliate program. Here are some of them:

• Know your objectives and KPIs
• Analyze the competition
• Have a Commission Strategy Set in Place

 Know Your Objectives 

Before beginning your affiliate marketing program you should know the objectives you want your affiliate program to reach. For example:

• Increase the conversion rate to 15% year per year
• Increase overall revenue by 20,000 at the end of the year
• Increase website traffic by 10% month per month
• Increase affiliate sales by 20% month per month

Analyze the Competition

Another important thing to do before starting you own affiliate marketing program is to check out what the competition is doing. The first step to do this is to find how your competitors do their affiliate marketing.

If possible try to see if you can join the affiliate program and check out how they have structured their payments. This way you can copy the same model or offer more to affiliates. A good rule of thumb according to Big Commerce is to offer between 8% and 15% on commission for each sale the affiliate brings in (however this all depends on the industry).

For the vape industry check out vape reviews sites and try to see if you can find out how much it costs for them to review your products or to add you as an affiliate when recommending where products can be purchased. This should give you an idea on what you can offer.

Have a Commission Strategy Set in Place

This ties back to checking on your competition. Even if you find out how much the competition is offering in their affiliate program their model might not work for you so you must figure out your cost per acquisition or CPA.

If it costs you $100 to get a customer you should make more than $100. A good rule of thumb is that if you’re going to spend $100 acquiring that customer you should make three times (or $300) that amount to cover expenses and not break even.

What To Look For in Affiliate Software

When looking for a software or app to manage your affiliate program you should look for the following features:

• An affiliate portal where affiliates can check on their earnings, where they can create referral links and coupons, and where they can connect their payment methods to cash out their earnings.
• Must be mobile-friendly, so you and the affiliate so you and the affiliate can access the app or software anywhere.
• A robust KPI system that can create reports and track performance to offer insight into how the program is doing.
• A way to share brand assets like pictures, content, product descriptions, etc. This is crucial so the affiliate can better pitch your products and services.

How to Recruit Affiliates Marketers

There are many things you need to consider before recruiting the right affiliates but here are some of the most important ones:

• Website traffic: A very important metric, it represents how many people are visiting the website daily, the more the better.
• Presentation: Does the affiliate website look presentable? Remember you want to align your brand with a page that supports your brand and your values.
• Landing pages: Another important thing to revise, is how certain pages are performing. remember that a website that generates a lot of traffic might only be able to send a couple of hundred visitors your way, while a niche website with a thousand visitors might be able to generate more conversions. Remember to use a program like SEMRush to check on the top-performing pages and even ask the affiliate from their experience how many conversions they generate.

Conclusion

An affiliate program might be the thing your e-commerce vape shop might be missing to take it to that next level. Just remember to keep in mind that an affiliate program should never cost more than the sales it generates and you should be ready to reap the benefits an affiliate program generates.