Upgrade Your Affiliate Marketing Program

Many brands work with affiliates as a cost-effective way to promote their products. If you want to improve your sales, follow these tips to upgrade your affiliate marketing program.

It’s important for merchants to create a flourishing community of affiliates. If your community is engaged, it can attract more customers and even more affiliates. You may even gain access to new perspectives that will help you improve your product.

 

The most successful brands follow these five tips to build a thriving affiliate marketing community:

 

1. Experiment with new content formats.

The more you support your affiliates, the more committed they will be to helping your business thrive. That’s why most businesses offer ready-made brand assets, swipe copies, graphics, and product announcements to aid affiliates in their content creation efforts.

To stand out from the crowd, explore new creative formats such as videos, VR content, and podcasts. Provide access to your in-house subject matter experts for Q&As, video training, and webinars.

Offer real-life testimonials and products for review often so your brand advocates may push out more believable content to hook customers.

 

2. Target super affiliates.

It isn’t just the affiliates that need to jump through hoops to get in with brands. You will need to put in effort when it comes to reeling in super affiliates, who can single-handedly bring in 50 percent or more of affiliate revenue (remember Pareto’s principle?). Here are some ideas on how to secure those elusive super affiliates:

• Research the super affiliates and influencers in your market. Understand their niche, quirks, pet-peeves, interests, and existing clients and followers.
• Offer a unique and lucrative offer. It can be a mix of a killer conversion rate, commissions to your current traffic, access to personalized content, no-strings-attached program trial, and freebies.
• Once they are hooked, continuously seek out ways to keep them engaged and committed to your program.
• Delight them, resolve their issues, and manage their expectations. After all, affiliate programs are all about building trust in those relationships.

 

3. Keep affiliates up-to-date about current programs.

Most merchants send regular newsletters and social media updates to their affiliates with their launch details and offers. These tend to get lost in the abundance of emails they receive, so try to find other avenues that make it easier for publishers to access coupon codes and program details.

The solution: invite FMTC to your program within your affiliate network. FMTC connects merchants, online publishers, and affiliate networks, providing the world’s largest, most accurate deal database. We update affiliates with new deals and program changes so they don’t miss anything.

Affiliates also have access to FMTC’s Chrome Browser Extension, a tool that lets them easily view a merchant’s directory info, applicable restrictions, program status, and recent deals. If the merchant allows deep links, the extension allows affiliates to create them.

 

4. Reactivate latent affiliates.

In any given affiliate program, only a small portion of registered affiliates are actively promoting your products. The vast majority are dormant, waiting for a nudge in the right direction. Since you have their contact details, contact them directly and offer incentives that will revive their interest in promoting your products.

Commonly, brands offer increased commission for a limited time to restart conversations with latent affiliates. Try to get the assigned affiliate manager to ask these affiliates what made them pause their activity and use that information to improve your future engagement efforts.

 

5. Strategize for the long term.

Keeping track of ROI and individual campaign performance is useful, but it can quickly become all about reducing costs and maximizing profits. Customers and affiliates are forgotten in this process. Therefore, it’s important to shift your focus from marketing efficiency to long-term effectiveness. Instead of seeking out the low hanging fruit, we suggest that you work with affiliate marketing KPIs such as:

• Traffic from affiliates
• Percentage of active affiliates
• Incremental revenue from affiliates
• Contribution margin
• Customer lifetime value

Measuring these metrics can help you nurture your affiliate relationships and build a greater brand resonance. If that means spending more money on pampering your affiliates in the short term, then so be it!

 

Improve your affiliate earnings with FMTC

By implementing these tips to upgrade your affiliate marketing program, you’ll see an improvement in your sales. Amp up your affiliate marketing program and build loyal brand ambassadors with FMTC’s Merchant Services solutions. To help ensure your affiliate program’s success, FMTC:

• Cleans, verifies, and categorizes your offers
• Makes promotions easily available to your affiliates
• Offers exposure tools such as featured merchant, newsletter inclusion, and spotlight post (subscription required)
• Distributes deals to affiliates in less than an hour (subscription required)
• Increases your exposure to publishers via the FMTC Directory and/or the OPM Directory
• Provides access to an expert customer service agent to answer all your questions

To learn more about FMTC’s solutions for merchants, click here.