Strategize on Growing your Affiliate Program – don’t just sit there and kind of let it happen, you know, every month you should be putting a new strategy together…”what are we going to be doing in August”, what are we doing in September, what are we doing for Q4 to maximize this our affiliate channel? Are we going to pay out a little more or are we going to do a recruiting campaign? Are we going to run new promotions? So you really have to strategize pretty heavily and leverage experts. Leverage people who you decide can really help you in this endeavour and they are out there, you just have to find them and meet them and talk to them.
These are some basic concepts in affiliate marketing and growing your performance marketing channel. Only through a tremendous amount of hard work, competent affiliate management, and dedication to growing the channel, will your affiliate program reach its full potential. Affiliate programs grow on an annual basis and you have to keep your expectations in check. The better your website “converts” or performs, the quicker your affiliate program will grow and prosper. So make sure you have done a great job on your website and work to improve your conversion rate over time if you want to have a truly productive affiliate program.
So you have your affiliate program up and running and you’ve seen it grow in terms of sales volume and revenue generated. But the big question is, how do you maintain and continue this growth year on year? Here are five top tips to help you do just that.
- Proactive Recruitment
It is important to constantly breathe new life into your program and recruitment is a great way to do this. There are always new affiliates joining the industry so you can easily vary your affiliate base. This will not only help you reduce over reliance on particular affiliate segments, it will also dramatically increase your exposure. Key to growing your affiliate program.
- Data Analysis
A deeper understanding of your affiliate base is essential to program growth as it will identify potential opportunities, illustrate successes and weaknesses that can help shape the program strategy going forward. Data analysis will enable you to:
- Segment the existing base – who and what are your key traffic sources?
- Prioritise and assign tiers based on revenue
- Monitor product and offer performance in relation to affiliate segments
- Target communications based on segments and offer performance
- Affiliate engagement
Pick up the phone and speak to your affiliates! Understand their strategy and share your goals with them. The success with which they promote you can be greatly influenced by the content, knowledge and information you share with them.
Regular affiliate meetings and workshops are key to building strong relationships and set your emails apart from the 1000s they receive daily. It’s also the key to fully understanding your affiliates, how they work, what motivates them and to identifying those vital new opportunities. The more engaged and proactive your affiliates are, the better your program will perform.
- Be open and share your strategy
Being clear about your goals and objectives is key to the success of your affiliates. Work together with key selected partners to shape your strategy and program to ensure you are both relevant and competitive. What’s more, affiliates can be an excellent resource for testing new channels and technologies. They tend to be ahead of the curve and can be a great means to test new areas to gain insight before investing financially.
- Performance Incentives
Incentives are definitely the ‘quick wins’ for program growth:
Introduce activation bonuses – improve the active to inactive affiliate ratio and increase the contribution of the long tail. This can also greatly improve recruitment and turnaround from sign up to activation and sales driving.
Reward your top performers – everybody wants to feel loved. If you take care of your key affiliates it will encourage and increase loyalty to your brand.
Tier your commission structure – an achievable tiered commission structure provides affiliates with goals to work towards and rewards them for their performance. Essential to growing your affiliate program.