Building a Winning Affiliate Program: Avoiding Common Pitfalls and Maximizing Your Profits

The recipe to a successful affiliate program may require some tweaking, but there are some ingredients you don’t want to butcher.

Affiliate marketing has taken the e-commerce world by storm and will only continue to grow steadily across just about every industry. There are thousands of partnerships (and no shortage of money) to be made — but that also leaves room for error. Not every affiliate program will be successful, but we’re here to help make sure yours is.

At FMTC, we know a thing or two about affiliate marketing, and our tools help thousands of affiliates and merchants every day. Here are five common pitfalls an affiliate program might face and actionable strategies to make sure yours doesn’t.

1. Lack of Proper Planning and Strategy

There’s a common misconception that affiliate programs just need links to be successful. Considering that 95% of affiliates quit within their first year, it’s not that simple. As a merchant, there are many careful planning steps to take, both before and after launching your affiliate program. In other words, define clear goals, identify your target audience and affiliates that will help you reach them, and do what you do best as a marketer: developing a comprehensive marketing strategy. A well-defined plan will attract affiliates and customers alike and provide a roadmap for your program’s success.

Key Tips: Conduct thorough research, identify valuable partners, define KPIs, and keep making tweaks to your marketing plan to help you reach your goals.

Additionally, leverage FMTC’s Merchant Services to enhance your planning and strategy. FMTC offers valuable merchant services that can help you streamline your program’s operations, optimize your affiliate partnerships, and maximize your program’s success. By partnering with FMTC, you can benefit from our expertise and industry knowledge to ensure your program is strategically planned and executed effectively.

2. Insufficient Affiliate Support and Communication

Never underestimate the power of relationships in affiliate marketing. Many affiliate program failures stem from insufficient support and communication with their affiliates. Keep your affiliates engaged (and bringing revenue) with timely assistance, helpful resources, and regular communication. Many successful programs offer direct support lines, exclusive tools, and dedicated in-house account managers. And don’t forget about communication channels for prospective affiliates — one out of four will find you through your website directly.

Key Tips: Keep lines of communication with your affiliates open — and that goes both ways: Reach out to them often with offers, to inform them of new products, or just to check in, and implement a robust support system if they need to contact you.

Add your affiliate program to FMTC via your affiliate network to ensure your program is integrating in FMTC’s Deal Feed. FMTC’s Deal Feed provides affiliates with a comprehensive and up-to-date collection of deals and promotions.

3. Unsatisfactory Commission Structure

Your commission structure plays a crucial role in motivating affiliates and driving their performance. If the commission rates are too low, not aligned with market standards, or complex to understand, affiliates may lose interest in promoting the program, resulting in limited participation and weak sales. Offering competitive compensation to your affiliates will help you attract and retain a valuable base of partnerships. Design a commission structure that aligns with market standards, offers fair compensation, and includes performance-based incentives or bonuses.

Key Tips: Research industry benchmarks, establish a competitive commission structure, and consider incorporating performance-based incentives or bonuses to motivate your affiliates. To stand out even further among other merchants, engage your affiliates directly in the compensation conversation — have intentional, detailed, and regular discussions with affiliates to arrange attractive commission rates and offers.

4. Low-Quality or Irrelevant Products or Services

Of course, customers only want to buy what you’re selling if it’s valuable to them, in terms of meeting both needs and quality expectations. The same goes for affiliates wanting to work with you. Affiliates are business people too, so they want to partner with merchants who can bring them value, and at least 18% of publishers consider relevancy the most important part of establishing new partnerships. If the products or services offered through the affiliate program are of poor quality, lacking value, or do not meet customers’ needs, affiliates will struggle to generate sales and maintain credibility. It is vital to ensure that the offerings are compelling and competitive within the market.

Key Tips: Regularly assess and improve the quality of your products or services, conduct market research to understand customer preferences, and stay ahead of the competition by continually innovating.

Additionally, refer to FMTC’s Best Practices one-pager for managing deals, offers, and coupons. This comprehensive guide provides valuable insights and tips on effectively managing your affiliate program’s deal attributes, deal restrictions, deal updates, and more. By following the best practices outlined in the FMTC one-pager, you can ensure your deals and offers are attractive to the market, properly integrated in the FMTC feed, and used by a wide range of publishers.

5. Ineffective Tracking and Attribution

For any marketing strategy to be successful, it must be measurable, and affiliate programs are no exception. There are many moving parts in an affiliate program — deals and coupons, networks, publishers and contracts, sales, clicks, and more — so you must ensure your affiliate program has robust and accurate ways of tracking data and capturing attribution (the “credit” for affiliates who effectively generate a sale). Considering that cost-per-action is the most common and successful payout method in affiliate, accurately assigning CPA to publishers is key. Reliable tracking and attribution are crucial for building trust and fostering long-term relationships with affiliates; without them, publishers may not receive proper credit for their referrals, leading to disputes and demotivation.

Key Tips: Use reputable affiliate tracking software or networks, establish transparent reporting mechanisms, and provide timely commission payouts to maintain strong relationships and foster trust with your affiliates.

Remember, a thriving affiliate program not only benefits your business but also cultivates mutually beneficial partnerships with your affiliates.

In summary, a successful affiliate program is a well-planned and maintained one. To ensure the success of your affiliate program, allocate sufficient time for planning and strategy (and keep tweaking as you see results), offer excellent support and communication, implement an appropriate commission structure, provide valuable products or services, and leverage effective tracking and attribution systems.

FMTC can help streamline your affiliate program — big or small, new or established — with our Premium Merchant Services. Get your deals in front of thousands of publishers faster, leverage our established connections, and receive same-day support from our team. We work with over 18,000 merchants on hundreds of thousands of deals across 20+ networks every day, and we’d love to work with you. Contact us today to see how we can help your affiliate program succeed.