Every affiliate has a potential to become a good contributor to your brand, but some affiliates, particularly long tail partners often need more assistance to get started. In this article, I will discuss my five top tips for brands looking to revitalise lower performing partners to get the most return from their affiliate programme.
1. Welcome newsletter
When you first accept an affiliate to join your programme be sure to send them a detailed welcome newsletter filled with tips and tricks to ensure they get off to the best start. A good welcome newsletter should include how to grab creatives with their correct tracking links. Insight on your best-selling products will guide partners on what to push on their site and be sure to reiterate the commission structure, average order value and conversion rate. This information will help affiliates to get started working with your brand and welcomes them to the programme.
2. Ongoing communications and strategy by business models
When sending newsletters, be sure to group partners into similar categories to allow you to tailor your messaging. For example, content specific sites might need more information on a product for them to write a review. Being able to speak to the partner in a way that they understand is important. In your communication make it as easy as possible for them to find the information they need by providing tracking links so they can simply copy and paste with a simple edit to swap out their tracking ID. This will help affiliates become more active in your programme. Communication is key and sending regular newsletters shows that you are actively engaging with the programme.
3. Surveys to click active partners
A survey is a great way to gain valuable insight on how you can make your programme more attractive to partners. Using clever open-ended questions with a hook for the affiliates to fill out the survey creates greater engagement with affiliates e.g. an increased commission for a limited time period will help you gain insight on what you could be doing better with your programme. You may find that the product feed is hard to implement on site as there are no specific descriptions of the fields contained within the feed. Asking for feedback continually will help grow your programme as the struggles that affiliates may have could be a simple fix.
4. Potential to earn more commission
Click active partners sometimes need a little nudge to get them actively involved in your programme. They often have limited time dedicated to their site so providing an incentive like a bonus if they hit x amount sales in a month, or first x number of partners to promote the brand on the homepage above the fold could be entered in a competition to win a prize, can really increase programme engagement.
5. Personalised outreach
Using a two-touch approach to communicate to your partners is a good way to engage with them. If you have a tool that allows you to send an email on mass and then provides insight to what partners showed an interest in the email, use that as an opportunity to send these partners a personalised email giving them insight or recommendations on where they could improve their performance. If the partner sees that you have spent the time to provide useful and personalised feedback you are far more likely to get a response and future engagement on your programme.
To summarise. To convert those, click active partners into performing partners requires persistence. Long tail partners need more guidance on how to perform better and communicating with these partners on a personal level, regularly, will help you achieve better results.