Affiliate Marketing

Retailers can’t just decide not to pay Google for the people who clicked on their search ads because they don’t feel like it. The same goes for affiliate marketing relationships. Just because they’re paid based on performance, it doesn’t mean they only require seconds of your time and a few dollars every quarter. Like any other…

Any small business working with a limited budget or staff knows the challenges that come with gaining traffic, traction and sales. Unlike retail giants that can drop millions on advertising and marketing initiatives, smaller e-tailers need to be crafty and use inexpensive (or even free) tools to connect with consumers. Here are three tips on how to accomplish that:

Making sure that your affiliate program is prepared for the holiday season is critical to making the most of this high-traffic time. Follow these 12 rules to make sure your affiliates are taking part in the happiest time of the year for e-commerce:

● Office Depot launched an augmented reality/mobile campaign earlier this year with rock band R5 that targets millennial back-to-school shoppers with the hopes of bringing them into its stores.

It's springtime in Texas. The weather is warming up and the air is thick and humid as students count down the days until summer break, but inside one Houston-area high school, a group of students isn't exactly tied to their desks. They aren't in the gym, in home economics class or studying math. These students are inside Scarborough High School's mock Wal-Mart store. The store is a lab of sorts, set up and paid for by the retail giant, complete with a cash register, shelves of inventory and those familiar "rollback" pricing signs on each display.

The secondary market is all too often a secondary thought for many retailers and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). However, in the new retail supply chain, what you don't know can hurt you. Without intending to, organizations can be negatively impacted by a number of factors in their reverse supply chain — from lost margins to brand distortion — simply by missing how they're managing their returned and overstock product flows. By applying the old paradigms for managing the return-to-vendor (RTV) process, you put yourself behind in the race against your competitors.

In a session yesterday at the Affiliate Summit East in Philadelphia, three affiliate marketing managers shared their insights on how online marketers can optimize their day-to-day affiliate marketing efforts. Karen McMahon, affiliate marketing strategist known as the Affiliate Whisperer; Amy Ely, e-commerce acquisition manager at Under Armour; and Kim Salvino, director of publisher development at Chateau 20, a provider of performance marketing solutions, led the session. Here are their 10 tips:

When the initial announcement was made on Tuesday, April 16, the innocuous headline gave no hint of the size of the news to come. It read: "An Update on Google Affiliate Network." But the news was huge. Google Affiliate Network (GAN), at the time the fourth largest affiliate network in the industry, would be shutting down in a few months.

Helzberg Diamonds is now the exclusive national jewelry retail partner of David's Bridal, a bridal store chain with hundreds of locations in the U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico. The new partnership creates a "unique, one-stop resource for brides-to-be," Helzberg Diamonds said, and will generate additional channels of consumer communication for both companies. Marketing efforts underway include Helzberg Diamonds' in-store signage at David's Bridal and product features on the David's Bridal website. Catalog and email marketing also will come into play.

HSN announced a complete relaunch of the company's digital channels, elevating the customer experience by making the retailer's platforms faster, more efficient and even more social. The relaunch is part of a comprehensive, multiplatform digital redesign that's been in development for more than a year. It enhances the customer experience, not just on the top 10 most trafficked e-commerce site HSN.com, but across all mobile devices, including tablets, android and Windows 8.