Health and Wellness Marketers Grow Sales Through Affiliate Marketing

During Q4, most people are focused on buying gifts for others in their lives to celebrate the holidays. After the holidays pass, however, many are going to be seeking out health and wellness brands in an effort to help them lose a couple of pounds or achieve other health-related goals. The fourth quarter is the perfect time for health and wellness marketers to grow sales through affiliate marketing.

The good news – Rakuten Marketing’s Affiliate Network is helping clients in the space grow their online sales. On average, health and wellness brands on the Rakuten Marketing Affiliate Network have already seen a 27% year-over-year growth in their 2019 sales.

Here are some tips that can help marketers start to sell more health and wellness-focused products online to through affiliate marketing:

Refine your message

Before embarking on an affiliate program, it’s important to figure out what message you want to communicate with your publisher partners and how you want to get it out there. Identify your target audience and analyze your internal data to determine which types of offers tend to resonate best with your ideal buyer before exploring different types of affiliate offers and partnerships. For instance, have “New Year, New You” campaigns historically worked for you or do you want to focus on promoting a specific product that separates you from others who are trying to reach the same audience?

Learn the ins and outs of each type of partner

Around here, we refer to October as the start of “Pub Season,” an opportunity for digital marketers to identify publishers that best align with their brand values that will get them in front of shoppers who are most likely to convert. Right now is a fantastic time to explore our Placements Marketplace to find best-fit publishers that have available inventory that fits within your budget during the post New Year rush.

Rakuten Marketing experts say major players in the deals and coupons space tend to be successful at driving traffic to health and wellness partners. If going down this route, analyze past data to see which types of coupons have been successful at converting your existing customer base and work with your account manager to identify publishers in a network that can help you get the word out about those types of offers.

Affiliate marketing isn’t a one size fits all solution. Types of publishers in an affiliate network can range from cashback publishers, which incentivize shoppers to buy from a brand by offering a small percentage of the purchase as a cash back reward, to cause loyalty publishers, which will donate a certain percentage of a purchase to a particular charitable cause. All can be beneficial and help increase your overall audience for different reasons. Figure out which types of publishers make the most sense for your brand in terms of what you’re trying to say and who you’re trying to say it to.

Start slowly

Once you decide to embark on an affiliate marketing program, start slowly and monitor results from each of your partners closely. Learn more about which types of publishers are driving more traffic, which ones are driving less, and then work with your Rakuten Marketing network specialist to build upon both.

Rakuten Marketing experts recommend working with commission increases with top partners and looking to content partners for gifting opportunities. Our account managers look for promotions that align with the brand and the products that a brand is trying to sell when it comes to helping advertisers in the health and wellness space stand out during the busy January month.

Be flexible, and keep your partners engaged

Setting an agreeable commission rate is essential to a productive relationship with a publisher, whether that’s a flat fee per order or a certain percentage off each order. One way of doing this is negotiating a rate with your publisher partner that fits within your budget and is enough to keep them engaged but still allows room for special promotions or placements wherein you can offer them a higher rate to promote certain products during certain times.

A successful affiliate marketing strategy gives health and wellness product marketers an opportunity to expand their audience quickly while potentially reducing customer acquisition costs. The key lies in analyzing data and partnering with the right publishers who will get you in front of the right audience.