Get the Most Out of Your Affiliates

At this point, you’ve done your research, created a compelling and competitive offer, and started outreaching to affiliates. So, now that your program is gaining traction and you have some affiliates on board, what’s next?

First and foremost, never lose sight of the fact that affiliate marketing is all about relationships. Always review affiliate applications within 48 hours of receipt. Once an affiliate applies to your program, it means that they are excited to get the ball rolling – don’t halt that momentum by letting them sit idle. Be sure to engage your affiliates from the get-go. A nice touch is sending a personal welcome email. The bigger the affiliate, the further you can go, from a phone call to complimentary access to your product or service. Your motto when dealing with affiliates should be “what can I do for you?” because a happy affiliate is a productive affiliate.

Even after an affiliate has joined your program, it is important to keep in touch with them both through your affiliate resources page as well as through a monthly newsletter. Additionally, for top affiliates, don’t be scared to pick up the phone or schedule bi-weekly conference calls to stay connected. Share with your affiliates what’s selling best on your site. Keep them abreast of your top-selling items list – which may range from 5 to 100 items depending on your business. The more you educate your affiliates on your business’ products, services, seasonality, and customers, the better positioned they are to make sales.

Contests & Promotions

A great way to generate some excitement within your program is to offer a contest or promotion among your affiliates. The goal can be anything you choose, such as rewarding the largest percentage of sales or revenue increases. In creating a contest or promotion, there are a few criteria to consider. Make the prizes attainable and, when choosing the prizes, make sure they are truly something your affiliates would want. It also shouldn’t be an all or nothing experience. Once the winners are determined, make sure to give recognition. A chunk of the reward for your affiliates will come just from seeing their own name atop a leader board.

Recruitment & Optimization

Routinely do recruitment and optimization in order to maintain a highly productive affiliate base. Recruitment focuses on bringing in new affiliates and can be done with searches around terms related to your product or service. Optimization focuses on enhancing your existing affiliates and is done by seeing who has promoted for you in the past but dropped off. If your #1 affiliate has fallen off the map, don’t you want to know why? Maybe they went out of business, maybe your latest payment didn’t reach them in a timely manner, or perhaps your conversion rate wasn’t what they needed to see. Whatever the reason, you owe it to your program’s success to find out why and what you can do to get them back on track. Conversely, if you have a new #1 affiliate out of the blue, wouldn’t you want to know what they did to get there? As an added bonus, this can also help stop bogus traffic if they were doing something they shouldn’t have been.

Affiliate Maintenance

Now that we’ve addressed some pointers on engaging your affiliates and keeping them happy and productive, let’s take a look behind the scenes at the maintenance of your affiliate program. Avoid staleness by keeping your program fresh, particularly in regards to your creative and your payouts. Review the performance statistics of your creative. Start to weed out the underperforming aspects of your creative and begin to mold “Franken-creative.” This is done by combining elements of creative that has started to show promise. This doesn’t have to stop with affiliate traffic. Seek out elements from offline, email, SEM campaigns, etc. You can also keep creative fresh and relevant by aligning it with seasonal trends and current events.

While you may not be able to outperform every competitor’s payout, don’t fret. Increase commissions for items where your margins may be greater. This is called “item-based commissions.” With this strategy, you should be able to maintain the most competitive of payouts. Additionally you can choose to offer tiered payouts which help incentivize affiliates, or exclusive/customized payouts which help reward and encourage top performing affiliates.

Survey Your Affiliates

Your program should be continually evolving, and when making changes and improvements you’ll want to keep in mind the needs of your affiliates. But what do your affiliates want? You don’t need to be a mind reader, just ask them! A handy tool is Survey Monkey. Survey Monkey’s free membership allows you to easily create customized 10-question surveys and collect and analyze responses. You can ask anything from what kinds of promotions affiliates would like to see to what method of communication they prefer and what suggestions they have for overall improvements.

Maintain your competitive edge by keeping your program fresh and making sure it is aligned with the needs of your affiliates. After all, your affiliates are your extended sales force, so keeping them happy and building and maintaining a solid relationship with them is ultimately the key to your success.

Action Steps
- Maintain open lines of communication with your affiliates.
- Offer your affiliates contests or promotions.
- Regularly recruit and optimize your affiliate base.
- Survey your affiliates to find out what they’re thinking.