Affiliate Marketing Has The Potential To Make People Earn Big Money

Affiliate marketing will play a pivotal role in the next generation growth of ecommerce and other sectors such as BFSI in India. Speakers at the 1st Affiliate Marketing Summit organized by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) were unanimous on their views that Affiliate Marketing in India, though an integral part of digital marketing campaigns is yet to gain the recognition it deserves.

According to Anurag Gupta, Founder & MD, DGM India, 70-80% of the business happens due to performance campaigns but people mostly talk about brands. This needs to change now. In fact, experts were of the view that Affiliate Marketing, if done right, has the potential to make people earn big money through the medium of Internet.

Parul Bhargava, Co-Founder & CEO, vCommission added, “Affiliate marketing has seen immense growth and acceptance in last two years. At the international level also the acceptance for the affiliate market in India has gone up and people are inquisitive about the propositions in India. Affiliate marketing being ROI driven, the e-commerce companies are also using this to boost the transactions. In the years to come as all businesses are moving towards profitability, affiliate marketing will get most advantage as this is by far the most ROI driven digital marketing channel.”

Industry leaders however rued the fact that while Affiliate Marketing has witnessed steady growth yet it is not clear in consumer mindset. If industry trends are anything to go by, Affiliates contribute to around 15% of the sales happening on online retail sites in India, as per estimates. This is a phenomenally large number given that IAMAI – IMRB’ Digital Commerce Report has pegged e-commerce sales in India to grow at about Rs. 100,000 crore by 2015. According to Swati Bhargava, Co-Founder, CashKaro.com, “The first ever Affiliate Summit brought forth performance based models to light and highlighted the growing contribution of this India’s fast growing ecommerce industry.”

She further said, “According to reports, India is poised to become a $100 Billion ecommerce industry by the year 2020 and we can expect a similar growth in the Affiliate Marketing sector. Performance based models drive high ROI to marketers and contribute to 15-20% of total e-commerce sales in India for many sites. In the West, affiliate businesses likes Ebates, Fanli, Retailmenot have crossed the Billion dollar mark. These sites have set a precedent for affiliate sites in India and we are seeing great investor interest in this sector as well.” 

Participating in a panel discussion titled, Importance of Affiliate Marketing For Lead Based Marketing Campaigns, Radhika Binani, Head Online Marketing, Policybazaar.com, said, “Affiliate marketing has evolved as a go-to channel for building scale for organisations especially the newer ones. The future of affiliate marketing is all about being a partner to marketers in their journey to create better brand experiences at scale for their customers in a data-driven manner." Hospitality industry has greatly benefitted from lead based marketing campaigns.

Speaking at the 1st India Affiliate Summit, L D Sharma, Founder and Managing Director – Optimize, said, “India is such a big emerging market for digital marketing and affiliate marketing is a very important part of every merchant.  Even after 9 years when the first proper affiliate network in India was launched, we find it very difficult to make every client understand what exactly "Affiliate Marketing” is and how to best leverage on the power of hundreds and thousands of potential “Affiliates”.”

He added, “The concept is not being appreciated and still most of the merchants are not aware what Affiliate Marketing is and how this works and a very simple reason for this is about their running their affiliate programs with all networks together without having proper tracking / reduplication technologies in place.”