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Common Publisher Types

Coupon
 

A coupon publisher needs coupons, promotions, or value propositions to post on their site. These are the types of offerings that attract customers to their site. Coupons should be viewed as a tool with which a merchant can broaden and enrich publisher relationships, attract new customers and retain those loyal to the brand. It is crucial to establish a strategy for releasing coupons and working with discount-focused publishers in the affiliate space.
 

Loyalty
 

Loyalty or cash back publishers pass along a portion of their commission to the consumer. By offering the consumer cash back, this draws that consumer back to the loyalty site to make future purchases. For a new brand or small- to medium-sized retailers, there are certainly benefits to working with loyalty sites. There is exposure to a large, established audience of consumers. eBates, alone, has over eight million members. And when you launch on these loyalty sites, oftentimes you’re included in an email that goes out to their member base, which can generate quite a bit of traffic. If you don’t have the technology to manage coupon codes or discounts, a cash-back offer from a loyalty site could help convert undecided shoppers.
 

Niche
 

Niche publishers have websites that promote a specific vertical. For example, a site about gourmet foods that list recipes and product reviews and offer discounts for gourmet food retailers. With 32% of consumers valuing the opinion of a stranger, an influencer strategy could be a crucial piece of your affiliate program. By generating a competitive influencer strategy, targeting on-brand bloggers and content partners and executing the plan per timeline, both the influencer and the merchant are bound to classify the partnership a success.
 

Cart Abandonment
 

Cart abandonment publishers address cart abandonment through methods such as Email remarketing, lead capture, and chat features. The typical shopping cart abandonment rate for online retailers varies between 60% and 80%, with an average of 67.91%. That means that only roughly 1 in every 4 customers finish the purchase.
 

These publishers address cart abandonment though methods such as Email Remarketing, Lead Capture, and Chat features.
 

Sub-Affiliate Networks
 

A sub-affiliate network is a company that offers services to bloggers and website owners that can make it easier for them to monetize their blog/website. Sub-affiliate networks can drive significant traffic and sales for brands and can be a great resource for bloggers who aren’t very tech savvy or just don’t want to deal with manually inputting affiliate links into their copy. By working with sub-affiliate networks, retailers are able to share their offers with numerous small blogs and sites without having to have a direct relationship with them. Sub-affiliate networks can provide helpful tools that make it easier for bloggers to promote brands.
 

Search
 

These are publishers that create PPC (Pay Per Click) campaigns in Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines for your affiliate program. Most paid search programs have a Coupons campaign solely focused on bidding on coupon-related terms. For example, “Brand Coupons”, “Brand Promo Codes”, and “Brand Coupon Codes” would be terms included in this campaign. Publishers tend to see higher traffic and conversion rates than the brands’ PPC coupon campaigns. There is also a cost-savings for the paid search channel when publishers are permitted to bid on these terms, as the retailer does not pay per click in the affiliate channel, but rather only per conversion.