Affiliate marketing is an incredibly lucrative opportunity for business owners to expand their customer reach. A program is created to incentivize influencers with large online audiences to exchange commissions for website traffic or generate sales based on referrals.
Affiliate programs are great ways to increase the value of your company if you ever decide to sell your business. Valuations can determine how profitable your affiliate marketing programs are – in turn, generating more interest from other investors or buyers.
But maybe your business decided to jump on the affiliate bandwagon and hasn’t seen much of a return. Don’t worry – we’re going to cover several key ways to help improve and revamp your affiliate marketing program.
1. Do an Audit of Your Affiliate Program
You can’t fix something if you don’t know what’s broken. Before you start making an overhaul to your affiliate program, you’ll want to perform a full audit. Evaluate the program’s pain points. Ask questions like:f
- What does the onboarding process look like?
- How many affiliates within our funnel actually make conversions?
- Do people actively log in to their dashboard to track their metrics?
- When was the last time our department spoke with our top-performing affiliates?
- Who are the most underperforming affiliates in the program?
- How are we tracking the success of our affiliates?
At Growth Hackers we treat an affiliate program audit like a health checkup: only by examining every metric can you identify weaknesses and prescribe the right improvements. Once you know the areas that need improvement, you’ll be able to start making a plan to turn the program around and get it moving in the right direction.
2. Focus on Quality, Not Quantity
When businesses finally open their affiliate marketing program to the public, they typically want to try and gain as many partners as possible. They focus less on the quality of their affiliates and simply want to raise the numbers.
But your affiliate program should be more about finding quality candidates for the program that are going to add value to your business. These people are talking about your brand and sharing it with their audience.
You need to be able to nurture these relationships and you can’t do so if you’re sifting through a pool of 2,000 affiliates. At Growth Hackers we’ve helped a B2B SaaS client increase affiliate-driven revenue by 43% by prioritizing high-quality affiliates over sheer numbers, focusing on partners who truly align with the brand.
Instead, create criteria around who can apply to be an affiliate. Specifications could include a certain number of followers or traffic to their website, which also correlates with what your brand is all about.
For example, if you’re a company that sells camping equipment, you may want to focus on finding affiliates who create quality content about travel, hiking, or other outdoor-related content.
Seek out candidates that fit these criteria and who you’d want to be a positive representative of your company. The higher quality your candidates are, the more likely they’re going to actively pursue opportunities to generate revenue for your business.
3. Create an Affiliate Lifecycle
Just as you would create a life cycle for a customer, you want to do the same for your affiliates as well. It’s very easy once someone joins the program to forget about you.
But it’s your department’s job to ensure that they have everything they need to be successful.
This starts with having a solid onboarding process. Providing them with a quality dashboard to track their earnings is just the start. They’ll also need a set of tools and resources they can use to jumpstart their earnings.
Include things such as creative assets, banners, and of course their affiliate links. Provide best practices on how they can make their first $50 to $100 in commission.
Then, throughout their lifecycle, figure out an affiliate marketing strategy to slowly introduce them to the different products and services your business offers.
When one of our Fintech clients’ affiliates dropped off after initial signup, Growth Hackers implemented a full lifecycle strategy with dashboards, creative assets, and onboarding guidance, resulting in higher engagement and first commissions earned faster.
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4. Be Accessible to Your Affiliates
One of the biggest complaints many affiliates share about programs they’ve invested their time and energy into is that there is a substantial lack of support. There is nothing that can cause an affiliate program to fail if no one is on the other end helping them.
You have to stay engaged with your affiliates throughout their entire partnership with you. Again, this is why it’s better to focus on the quality of affiliates rather than quantity.
Provide opportunities for affiliates to reach out to an affiliate manager. This could be in terms of technical support or even for brainstorming new ways to gain traction on their affiliate links.
On the flip side, make an effort to connect and engage with your top-performing affiliates. This doesn’t mean taking creative control over what their strategies are. It’s about being a sounding board and providing motivation for them to continue their efforts in promoting your company.
The more support you’re able to provide to your team of affiliates, the more money they’ll be able to generate for both themselves and your business.
5. Provide One-On-One Support From the Beginning
Engaging with your affiliates can be done in several different ways, such as through webinars or monthly newsletters. But there is something to be said about providing affiliates with individual attention.
Every affiliate program should have a designated manager whose sole job is to keep the program running and engaging with its affiliates. The manager can provide new affiliates that are added to the program an opportunity to schedule one-on-one sessions with them.
This will allow them to work together on creative and new ideas on their user-generated content on social media or their website to promote the company’s products. In turn, this will help them become more successful at achieving their commission goals.
6. Create Incentives for your Affiliates
The first few months after an affiliate is onboarded into the program, they’re filled with excitement. They’ll put in most of the effort towards initial progress but eventually will need some kind of incentive to keep pushing forward.
This is an opportunity for affiliate programs to add incentives into their affiliate lifecycle. Some incentive ideas could include:
- Bonuses on commission for conversions made within a certain period of time (i.e. for a special promotion your company is running)
- Tiered commissions (providing higher commissions as an affiliate generates a certain amount of revenue)
- Free gifts or swag from your company for achieving certain affiliate goals to share with their audience
- Create contests for affiliates that offer an additional monetary incentive for the winner
Before Growth Hackers added structured incentives for one of our B2B clients’ affiliate program, their affiliates often lost interest after the first months; after introducing bonuses and contests, engagement surged, and revenue from affiliates grew steadily.
7. Diversify your Affiliate Types
When people think about being an affiliate for a company, they usually associate it with the idea that they’re a social media influencer. But that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Affiliates come in many different types such as bloggers, vloggers, or podcast hosts.
If you’ve only been focusing on gaining social media influencers into your program, you could be missing out. Diversify your affiliate types. At Growth Hackers we view affiliate diversification like planting different crops: relying on just one type limits growth, but a mix brings richer harvests and new opportunities.
This will gain your business access to new types of audiences you may not have had before. The more people within your niche you can reach, the better your affiliate program will perform.
8. Focus More Time on your Recruitment Efforts
Some affiliate programs become stagnant because you’re waiting for affiliates to come and find you. If you want to get the right people applying for your program, you need to be actively working on your recruitment efforts.
This could be through personally reaching out to individuals you think would be a good fit for the program. Or you can let the internet do the work for you. When one of our B2C clients’ affiliate program plateaued, Growth Hackers implemented proactive outreach and leveraged top affiliate lists, resulting in a surge of qualified, motivated partners.
A great recruiting tip is to get your program on top-ranking affiliate lists. Blogs will share content about the best affiliate programs within a certain niche. Reach out to those blogs and ask to add your program to them.
When affiliates are searching for quality programs to join, they’ll more likely find your program from a list than they will from a landing page on your website.
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9. Monitor Affiliates for Fraudulent Activity
There are some cases when affiliates like to try and cut corners. They can usually get away with fraudulent activity when they know program coordinators or managers aren’t paying close enough attention.
Affiliates will engage in this type of activity as a way to generate more sales to have the company pay them higher commission rates. Some fraudulent activity may include:
- Submitting fake leads through their affiliate links or landing pages
- Placing orders through their affiliate links with incorrect credit card information
- Excessive link clicks through different IP addresses
- Cookie stuffing
The first thing your program should do to alleviate these behaviors is to update your terms and conditions for the affiliate program. This gives a clear depiction of what is and isn’t allowed as an affiliate for your company.
Next, you need to closely monitor and perform regular check-ins on your reporting. Any affiliate performance that seems suspicious such as random spikes in page views or link clicks should be audited.
Takeaways About Improving Your Affiliate Marketing Program
To make your program a success, there are many do’s and don’ts of affiliate marketing that you need to take into consideration. Improving your affiliate program isn’t a quick fix. It takes time to learn about where the program is underperforming and how to curate solutions through well-thought-out affiliate and referral marketing strategies.
The most important thing you can do to enhance your affiliate program is to focus on the quality of your candidates and nurture those relationships. Provide them with the tools and resources they need to be successful and always be available to give them support when they need it.
Growth Hackers is an award-winning affiliate marketing agency helping businesses from all over the world grow. There is no fluff with Growth Hackers. We help entrepreneurs and business owners improve their affiliate marketing program to generate significant online revenue, apply growth hacking tips for affiliate marketing websites, increase their productivity, generate qualified leads, optimize their conversion rate, gather and analyze data analytics, acquire and retain users and increase sales.
We go further than brand awareness and exposure. We make sure that the strategies we implement move the needle so your business grow, strive and succeed. If you too want your business to reach new heights, contact Growth Hackers today so we can discuss about your brand and create a custom growth plan for you. You’re just one click away to skyrocket your business.
