9 Mindset Changes For Affiliates Starting eCommerce - Part 2 (3)
9 Mindset Changes For Affiliates Starting eCommerce - Part 2
Welcome to Part 2 of my guide to Thinking Differently as an affiliate transitioning into ecommerce.
In Part 1 we covered revenue and repeat customers - using lists, upsells, thinking about lifetime customer value, and more.
Now, let's get on to some more crucial areas where the ecommerce world is different to the being-an-affiliate world - sometimes in a bad way, sometimes in a good way...
Quality Matters
How to put this delicately?
As an affiliate, we often don't feel that the quality of the product we're advertising is ... our primary concern.
After all, we're only going to see our leads once, they don't know who we are (in fact, they probably believe we're the advertiser), and they're not even our customers. Our customer is the advertiser, and so the quality we care about is the quality of our leads.
That's probably the single biggest mindset change: who our actual customers are. They're no longer the advertiser who owns the product - instead, they're the people who use the product.
That means that you can't just worry about how good the product sounds any more: you've got to care about how good it is.
Get samples. Test. Thoroughly. Get the opinion of friends. Work your ass off to find not just a product that you think will sound good, but a product that's genuinely going to delight its users.
You can save tens thousands of dollars of test budget by spending a few more days on due dilligence with your products, and rejecting stuff that isn't up to scratch. It's the equivalent of vetting offers before running them.
The biggest advantage a business can have might be a hungry crowd, but having really great burgers to sell them is also pretty useful. Importantly, remember that quality above "just about acceptable" can really help you: great products can get you word of mouth referrals, loyal repeat customers, and great social proof, all of which can double, triple or more your lifetime lead value.
Customer Service Helps YOU
And perception of quality extends beyond just the product itself.
It's fairly obvious that ecommerce entails dealing with customer support. That's obvious enough it doesn't make this list.
But what's less obvious is that customer support isn't a burden - it's one of the biggest, fastest ways to grow your business, make more sales, and fix mistakes.
Why? Two reasons.
- It's a huge source of real-world data. We're used to the idea of buying data with which to optimise our campaigns. Well, customer support is a source of free, super-high-quality data that you can use to optimise. Customers will contact you with things you can do to improve your product! Often they'll be quite angry or otherwise pissy, and that can make them annoying to deal with, but never lose sight of the fact that if you've got someone on the line saying that they wanted a bigger, heavier flashlight, and you've had three of those people in the last week, that's data you can use to make money, and it would have cost you hundreds or thousands in split-testing ads before you stumbled on it the affiliate way.
- It's the fastest way to develop raving fans. Fans will promote your product for free. They'll do customer service for free (seriously, I have been out of office for a week in the past, and come back to discover that there was a serious problem with a product, but one of my fans jumped in and essentially did free customer support for me because they liked the company). And there is no more loyal fan than someone who was pissed off with your product, contacted you, and was amazed at how much you tried to help them. Read "48 Laws of Power" for more on this - there's a section about ex-enemies making the loyalest friends.
As a side note, this is why I'd strongly discourage you from hiring anyone to do customer service on a store that isn't already mature and stable. You need to be on the front lines hearing the problems for yourself in order to gather that data, and you are far more likely to impress people who are contacting you - just by dint of answering your own email rather than outsourcing it.
This is a WAY bigger world than the affiliate landscape.
Ecommerce encompasses literally all of business. Never lose sight of just how broad that makes your opportunities.
Sure, the default approach to ecommerce is to look for something from China you can sell for huge markups. But that's far from the only thing you can do.
There are millions of people making products, all over the world, including in your home country - and your home town. And most of them are terrible at marketing.
Got a friend who makes cute animal jewelery out of copper wire on the side? That's a product. You can take that and test it, and if it sells promote it, and potentially scale it. There are different challenges there, but it's an opportunity.
There's a local food producer who makes amazing chocolate / roasted coffee / charcuterie? That's an opportunity. Food sells.
Found an indie game that no-one's heard of? Opportunity.
Happen to know there's a demand for a stereo part X that's only available by import from country Y? Opportunity.
All of these have hurdles, and most of them are less plug-and-play than AliExpress, but they also have their own advantages: built-in communities, local sourcing for fast shipping, working with people you trust, in unsaturated or sometimes almost monopoly markets.
As an example: one of the biggest success stories we highlighted and interviewed at AWA this year was a guy who has entire pedal bikes made up from scratch, and sells them using the same ecommerce techniques you'd use to sell drop-shipped goods. He's doing pretty significant numbers, despite the fact that product has a lot more complexities to it.
Be aware of the opportunities out there to enter markets that most people will be too lazy to enter, because it requires more work than just plugging an AliExpress URL into a
Remember your conversion funnel goes all the way down
You're not just optimising ad->lander->offer page any more.
The full discipline of Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) is pretty scary complex: but as a product owner you're going to have to get into that. Thoroughly optimising all parts of your funnel is one of the surest routes to massively increased profits.
That means:
- Look at pricing and its effect on conversion rates and eventual profit. Split-test. Don't assume "cheaper" means "more sales".
- Look at upsell conversions. Optimising your second conversion on the same customer at the same time is often easier and more profitable.
- Look at cart abandonment rates. How many people are hitting "buy" then backing out? Why?
- Look at your mailing list conversion rates - not just signups, but how, when and how much people are spending as a result of the mailing list.
- Look at cross-device sales. This one's tricky, but Google and other companies are developing ways to track people who initially visit your site on their phone, then buy on their desktop, for example.
- Look at return rates- but don't panic about them. It's easy to get really upset about returns, but they're just a cost of doing business - and if your product is good, they should be a very low cost. One tip: more generous return policies often lead to less returns, because people feel less urgency to return, and then forget.
- Look at activation rates. That means "how many people actively use the product?". Why do you care about that? Because people who use the product are more likely to become repeat customers, more likely to recommend your product to other people, more likely to become fans. Find out if people are actually using what they bought, and what you can do to increase that number.
Finally, Remember: Dude, You're Legit!
Affiliate marketing is hard to explain, techie, has a bad reputation in many places, and generally isn't the kind of thing that gets you invited to the Chamber Of Commerce award ceremonies. As a result, as affiliates we're used to flying under the radar.
When moving to ecommerce, fight that instinct. You are now a Proper Legit Businessperson, just like Richard Branson, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs - whoever.
What does that mean? It means you have a whole raft of options for free marketing and other Good, Free Stuff.
- The Press are actually likely to be interested in hearing from you. PR is a huge topic in and of itself, but to quote Woody Allen, "90% of success is showing up". So when you launch a new product, call your local press. Call your national press. (Don't email: CALL.) Call industry press.Often much, much bigger fish than you'd expect will be interested. From practical experience, I can tell you that having an entire profile piece written on you by the New York Times is not out of reach.
- Social Media can now work in your favour straight-up. Make sure you're participating in relevant Facebook groups, Reddit groups, etc. Ask the mods nicely if they mind you mentioning your new product - if they know you're a genuine member of the community, they'll probably give you the go-ahead. Don't underestimate the power of this stuff.
- Bloggers love free stuff, and they love doing reviews. So contact prominent bloggers in your sphere. Again, the power of a good blogger is huge - I've seen single blogger connections make meaningful impact on overall annual sales before.
- Awards! You can now win awards for your bold new business - so find out what's out there, and apply. If you're younger than 26 or so, there are likely to be a whole raft of "young entrepreneur" things: those are great free publicity. Apply to national business awards, apply to "best product in X industry awards" - etc.
- Grant Funding / Loans / Etc. There is a whole world of funding out there for conventional businesses in many countries. Look into R&D tax credits, new business credits, Tech/internet startup grants/loans/tax credits, and export/import support in particular. Chambers of Commerce or similar will also often organise things like trips to supplier countries to meet with new potential suppliers.
All of this also has knock-on effects on things like hiring: if you're getting lots of positive press, it's easy to hire top-flight candidates.
So revel in the fact that your ecommerce business is something that "normies" can understand, and milk it for all it's worth!
And that's it! Any other tips, tricks, suggestions, things I've missed or things you have found particularly key? Post 'em below!
@caurmen really solid post here.
For those who have read it, please go back and read this section again "This is a WAY bigger world than the affiliate landscape"
It seems like a lot of people think that dropshipping +
There's way more than that.
Sure, some stuff looks harder, but you know what's really harder? Defending your business when all that seperates you from the competition is that you fed those same products to your product feed plugin just a little bit earlier.
And the reason dropshipping is even feasible is because of subsidised shipping cost from China. Who knows how long this will last.
Not saying it's not something you shouldn't do, but think first of what you are trying to build. Why do ecommerce in the first place in stead of what you currently do?
Skill gaps, as caurmen pointed out, exist in many markets. As an affiliate, you have a particular skillset. One that many people and businesses in the production business don't have.
Exploit that.
Haven't seen the videos here: http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...light=speeches
Go there and look at Alex Willemsen's talk again.
Ecommerce doesn't have to be that difficult. Build the platform (
You'll be making money from selling, but in the meantime building up a platform that's an asset you can sell.
Want more control? Buy stock yourself and resell it through your site.
Be creative - there are loads of opportunities
Couldn't agree more.
There's nothing wrong with doing the mainstream thing - particularly when you're learning a new skillset - but there are so many opportunities out there.
(Also, don't underestimate the value of working with suppliers who are local enough to you that you can drive to their offices. Often that's worth a non-trivial margin cut just to have the added ability to sort out problems.)
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