How Affiliate Marketing Can Transform Your E-Commerce Business on a Tight Budget

How can you grow your e-commerce business without spending more money? Rising inflation, slower economic growth and slashed budgets mean there's less cash available to invest in marketing activities, but a greater need to gain new customers and increase sales.

A brand’s various marketing efforts tend to focus on one part of the consumer purchase journey. That could be the pre-purchase phase (also known as the traditional marketing funnel), and all the interactions potential customers make with your brand before a sale. Or the purchase phase, where you focus on optimizing your e-commerce website experiences to convert more traffic. Or the post-purchase phase, employing tactics that drive repeat purchases and build customer loyalty after a transaction occurs.

And while, in a perfect world, you can appropriately invest in all three of these phases for maximum results, with constant pressure on spend you're often forced to make sacrifices in one or more of these areas.

Affiliate marketing is the answer to this dilemma. With its diverse range of partnership opportunities, promotional spaces and plug-and-play technologies, you can discover solutions that drive more sales and revenue for your business and be confident in what you’re spending as affiliate marketing operates on a low risk, pay-for-performance only model. Better still, with this activity consolidated into a single channel, you can easily measure and benchmark the effectiveness of your campaigns from start to finish and back again.

Ultimately affiliate marketing offers a safe approach to business growth that scales alongside your successes, without upfront costs or risky investment.

Innovative Solutions You Can Plug and Play

In recent years, the affiliate channel has seen a massive influx of these innovative technology partners, bringing more ability for you to connect with customers across every conceivable media touchpoint.

Taking advantage of these technologies on your own often involves significant resources, both financially and in time, as they require the expertise to either implement them to your existing tech stack or to replicate the solution in-house. However, a key benefit of affiliate marketing is its plug-and-play nature. Many of its most cutting-edge technologies come already integrated into partner marketing platforms, allowing brands to quickly switch on and test these types of partnerships and technologies without lengthy development work or the risk of technology partner campaigns overwriting the early funnel involvement of other partners.

This is a major draw of affiliate marketing for all businesses, but especially smaller retailers and startups that have experienced high barriers to entry when accessing these advanced marketing solutions in the past. By removing the upfront commitment, through both easy implementation and investment as brands only pay for delivered results, affiliate marketing has made these technologies accessible to brands of all sizes.

Ultimately, when faced with tighter budgets and increasing costs, affiliate marketing offers you ways to not only maintain sustainable growth by targeting new audiences and each phase of the customer journey, but also accelerate to new heights via groundbreaking technologies. All on a low-risk, high-reward model that’s achievable for businesses of any type and size.

Paul Stewart is the group strategic partnerships director at Awin, a global affiliate marketing network.