Software Business Blog

5 years of successful online sales through affiliates worldwide. It’s rather vague, but I’ll let the figures on the right speak for us. We’re in the celebration mood here at Avangate, remembering how it all started and looking at where we are today. And it looks pretty nice :)

Why is the Avangate Affiliate Network so special?

We believe that we have an extensive knowledge of the online software vertical and its sales channels. We started doing this in 1992, so you might say we’re more than 5 years old if talking about our experience.
The most important thing is we bring together strong software specialized affiliates (download portals, niche sites, coupon websites, personal sites) and award-winning software titles from top merchants worldwide. It’s like mixing all the good things – nothing can go wrong :)

Celebrate with us

We prepared some exciting contests for the Avangate affiliates in order to share the joy of being 5 years old. Creativity and sales skills will be rewarded in this series of contest, which can bring you up to $450 in cash, gift cards plus the opportunity of receiving a special commission from 5 of our best converting advertisers: BitDefender, VSO Software, DVDFab, IObit and Movavi.

We’ve come a long way to where we are today with our affiliate network: many of platform developments, support, feedback and of course, millions of affiliate referred customers. And there will be more to come, since we aim to grow at least in the same pace in which we did so far.

Not using the Avangate Affiliate Network already?

Become an affiliate today and start monetizing a great online sales channel.

Drop us a line at info@avangate.com to see how you can increase your online sales using our software affiliate network – we’ve got some great opportunities for you. ;)

Affiliate Marketing is not “as easy as 1,2,3″. But I guess you know that by now. It needs constant efforts and taking advantage of all the opportunities in order to succeed in a significant manner.

You may have already done some of the things we will talk about here or not; the important thing is to try to use these resources for your benefit in 2011. They can bring you a lot of business:

1. Customize your shopping template – build up trust for your visitors by personalizing your shopping cart in order to have the look’n'feel of your website. This will reduce the shopping cart abandons and will increase your visitor-to-customer conversion rate.
   As an Avangate affiliate, you can easily customize your template from the special section in the admin interface.
2. Use automatic tools to populate your site – this is especially important if you have large volumes of information on your website (you have a download portal, a coupon website etc.). Most of the affiliate networks provide data feeds with all product details you need in various formats that you can easily import on your website. This way, you can be sure the information is constantly updated with the latest changes.
   Here at Avangate you can also create custom XML data feeds according to your requirements by using filters to narrow the results (e.g. create a data feed with the discount coupons offered by our software vendors).
3. Create and use discount coupons – convince your customers to buy from you by throwing in an incentive in form of a discount coupon. But don’t think that if you’ve done this, all the customers will flock to your website – you also have to bring some unique value along with that coupon (e.g. a product comparison sheet, a review etc.)
   You can generate discount coupons yourself or you can use the ones supplied by the vendors if you’re a member of the Avangate Affiliate Network.
4. Promote your business via social media – Facebook and Twitter are a must. Promote your deals via social media channels and see the feedback you get from the market. Reach out to millions with a simple tweet / post and create a community around your website. Tell your audience about special deals you have on your website (exclusive bundles, promotions) or about new published reviews.
5. Take part in affiliate events – this is the best chance you get for creating new business opportunities with vendors across the globe. Nothing compares to a face-to-face meeting where you can discuss about new partnerships and arrange future deals.  Affiliate Summit and A4U Expo are two major events in the affiliate industry that are worth going to.

As a bonus, if you’re an Avangate affiliate, just take a consultation with our Affiliate Doctor – he can offer a few pointers to you for optimizing your affiliate business. Use the live chat feature from the Avangate Control Panel for Affiliates.

So, to wrap this up, first of all be sure your website is attractive to visitors and generates sales; after that, you can go ahead and find new opportunities for it. And don’t forget to constantly test and improve your business.

Both 2010 and 2011 have been called Year of Conversion Rate Optimization. And there certainly isn’t any mistake in that, given the burst of both knowledge and tools out there on the topic. And the best part of it is that most online businesses now have access to all they need to increase their sales, newsletter subscribers, followers etc. (and no more excuses if they don’t).

When it comes to selling software online, conversion rate is probably the metric with the highest impact on sales. So, to get you started I want to share with you  a list of 5 tools that I have tested both with the Avangate team, as well as during my recent period as software vendor.

Landing Page Platform: Unbounce

Unbounce is a landing page platform that makes creating, publishing and optimizing of landing pages really easy. It’s a great tool for marketing departments as they can roll out landing page after landing page without help from the IT department.

Landing pages often prove decisive when it comes to optimize conversion rates and sales. Different segments of your traffic have different expectations or needs from your website. Greeting each segment of traffic with a specific landing page for their needs can only help that segment of traffic reach the goal faster and in greater numbers. In other words: give a user what he is looking for and he will take it.

Besides the product, the Unbounce blog is a great resource for starting with landing page optimization.

Remote User Testing: Verify

Verify is a great set of remote user testing tools to help you determine how well a design will perform, before publishing it on your website. The tools will make it easy for you to decide what to keep in a design and what to take out or what to change in order to make sure the design will actually increase conversions on your website.

When developing consumer driven products, feedback is crucial. Getting feedback before launching a new page or feature can prove to be a gold mine by not wasting developing resources on things you don’t know if will work or not.

Email Marketing: PadiAct

(Disclaimer: I am co-founder of the company)

PadiAct is a neat tool that helps you optimize your email subscription rate. When it comes to increase the number of your email subscribers, there aren’t many methods out there. One method is to ask users to give their email address when they download your software. Jason Cohen shared some tips on how to ask for user information before the trial starts in his 5-part series: How to convert more software trials to purchases. But this method can also be seen as blackmailing: you give me your email address, I give you a trial – definitely not permission marketing.

This tool allows you to define a segment of traffic whom to ask, in a friendly manner, to subscribe to your newsletter.  Here is an example you could start with: all new visitors that have already downloaded your product. You accomplish 2 things by using targeting to increase subscription lists:

• you don’t interrupt users already within a conversion funnel (downloads, sales);
• you collect good quality email addresses from users that didn’t convert so you get a second chance with them.

A/B Testing: Visual Website Optimizer

Visual Website Optimizer is an easy to use A/B testing tool. These days you can’t really talk about increasing conversion rates and sales without talking about A/B and multivariate testing. There are many tools out there to help put in place a testing strategy, but Visual Website Optimizer makes it so much easier. No IT departments or programming skills needed to get started.

Another cool thing about Visual Website Optimizer is their blog with tons of great info and case studies on A/B testing. Now there’s no excuse for not testing.

For shopping cart testing, you can of course use the A/B testing module from Avangate platform. If you never made a test – share with us your ideas about increasing your shopping cart conversion rates and the most creative ones may be tested in your Avangate account.

User Feedback: KISSinsights

KISSinsights gives your customers a way to tell you what they need. It’s an user feedback platform, really easy to integrate on any website. The best thing about it is that it’s contextual. You can ask your users on your pricing page if there is anything they don’t understand about the pricing or you can ask them on your blog if there is anything else they would like you to write about.

What we love most about KISSinsights it’s that it is not intrusive. After starting collecting feedback with it, most users get the “Aha” moment which usually leads to ideas of better optimizing the website, therefore increasing conversion rate and in the end, sales.

See it in action on this blog and on our website. While you are at it, let us know what topics you would like us to cover more. :)

How will you increase conversion rate in 2011?

In the end it all comes up to provide better experiences to your online visitors in directing them towards the conversion point. What are you plans for improving your conversion rate in 2011?

I hope your office/home/coffee place is also filled with a pleasant pine and freshly peeled oranges scent and you feel the slowing rhythm of everybody and everything around you.
We are also enjoying this time of the year and are spending most of our time on summing up and drawing conclusions for 2010 and deciding on our future actions for 2011. Of course, I want to share with you here some of the milestones of Avangate in 2010 :).

Continuing our first article on this series, in which you found out how to make sure your affiliate partnership request is approved by the vendors, let’s see some tips on how to promote software products online and the ways in which vendors motivate affiliates to sell more (we hope this post is also helpful to software vendors who are starting to use affiliate marketing).

A big thanks, once again, to the people we got the answers from:

• Claire Waledisch, Commercial Manager at VSO-Software,
• Frank Chang, Marketing Manager at DVDFab,
• Keros Tudos, Relationship Manager at IObit and
• Alex Lamba, CEO at RSJoomla!

Shanghai, here we come! And it should be both business and pleasure, since this is one of the most fascinating cities in China.

Alexandra, Adriana, Florentina and Andy will welcome all of you software professionals at the conference. If you want to meet software experts, develop new business partnerships or just schmooze with key people from software & eCommerce industry, then don’t plan anything on Saturday, December 4th and join us in the beautiful Everbright International Hotel.

We’re going to talk about selling software in Europe and the US and see what the trends are for 2011. Also, speaking of international sales, there will also be an interactive panel where DVDFab and WinXDVD will share their best practices on this subject.

On top of this, you will learn how to optimize your conversion rate via practical tips from our experts.

And if you don’t know the Avangate platform and what it can do – don’t worry. We’ll have a live solution demo over there.

So, we’re looking forward to meeting and chatting to you there! See you in Shanghai!