Affiliate Partners' acquisition funnel

When it comes to running an affiliate program effectively, it is critical to build an efficient partner acquisition funnel to ensure continuous discovery, proactive outreach, and efficient onboarding of affiliate partners. Assessing product and brand fit with the prospective publisher should also be part of this process.

There are two main reasons that explain why this is so critical: the first one and more obvious reason is that affiliate is essentially a #partnership channel. It is key to continuously discover and nurture relationships to find mutually beneficial partnerships. The second reason is that typically 80% of an affiliate program volume will be driven by 20% of your affiliates. This means that it is very important not only to optimize long tail affiliates continuously, but also discover and onboard new partners to enhance and diversify your portfolio, which is where a robust acquisition funnel comes into play.

There are four main stages in an #affiliate partner acquisition funnel:

Prospecting: this is the first step in the funnel; in this stage you are typically exploring and finding potential publishers that could add value to your affiliate program. The crucial word here is “could”: not every publisher out there will be a fit for your brand, which is why proper due diligence is needed. Some tactics include looking into traffic sources for your client category, doing search and discovery, running gap analysis, and assessing brand and product fit with publisher messaging and general voice. Some questions you will be trying to answer here are what the audience is, does the site includes product reviews, do they have dedicated space on your brand’s topic, can the brand be placed organically, do they have content already built, what is the quality of that content, etc. Once those questions are answered and you are confident that the publisher is a good fit for your brand, you can move it to the second stage.

Qualifying: once a publisher is moved to this second stage, you begin proactive outreach. This is where your relationship building, selling and negotiation skills can truly be a game changer. For the outreach piece, it is very important to stay on top of your outbound email making sure a proper follow up is sent in 2-4 business days; it is best practice is to include new information in a follow up email, since this increases the chances of grabbing attention and hearing back from a publisher, as many times that initial email can go to spam or simply be buried among the many other emails in your contact inbox. This is a business development intensive stage, where the affiliate manager needs to educate prospective publishers on the product or service value prop, which is why having a one pager or collateral ready to go can really be a time saver -calls and emails can quickly add up, so you want to have material ready to go to be more efficient-. The second piece in this stage is negotiation; it is unlikely that publishers will simply accept the proposed payout terms, which is why being prepared to negotiate is also very important. In order to be ready, you need to know your guardrails and how far you can go with payout terms for a given publisher. A requirement for this is understanding your business’ economics (AOV, desired ROI, expected CAC, ROAS, etc.) as well as the program overall strategic goals.

Onboarding: once a publisher accepts an invitation to join your program and both parties are in agreement on the payout structure, it is moved to the onboarding stage. This is an operational stage where you are typically coordinating tracking links consumption, building and sharing creatives, pushing exclusive coupons if applicable, building co-branded product landing pages, etc. It is recommended to test everything out before a new campaign is launched, to avoid unnecessary tracking issues later on that can hinder the newly formed partnership (this is especially true if the brand acquisition funnel has multiple steps and payouts are on the bottom side). Monitoring initial performance is also recommended, to confirm everything is working as expected.

Optimizing: this is the final stage and arguably one of the most important ones; here is where the strategic input of a seasoned affiliate marketer can make the difference, since measuring performance and identifying improvement opportunities can be nuanced at times. In this stage, it is all about identifying partners with biggest potential, negotiating promotion expansions into other categories, and continue to evaluate performance KPIs and iterate. Being comfortable with data as well as making the case for increased promotions, along with developing those key relationships are going to be the key for success in the long term. Aligning all those activities with the brand strategic initiatives, keeping a consistent marketing message and authentic voice with top publishers is also required for long-term success.

It is important to note that you don’t need to work sequentially in the partner acquisition funnel (and most definitely, that won’t be the case). It is very likely that you will be working on all stages at the same time, building a process that allows you to onboard and diversify your partner portfolio continuously. This means that you will need to be extremely organized in order to keep the flow going, since you will be doing prospecting, qualifying, onboarding and optimizing at the same time… and all those conversations can get confusing! A good tool to manage this efficiently is Asana (and it has a free version), but you can also use your company’s CRM or PRM -if it has one- or simply build your own sheets to track all this activity.

It is also important to stay on top of all conversations, replying to emails and providing answers quickly so that those negotiations and discussions don’t lose momentum; once you’ve grabbed a publisher interest it is imperative to maintain them engaged and be able to close the deal quickly. I recommend answering all partner emails within 24 hours or less and be very communicative confirming receipt if you don’t have an immediate answer.

In conclusion

As you can see, building and maintaining an engaged and active #publisher portfolio is a very labor-intensive activity and one that never stops. This is why outsourcing program management and working with agencies make much sense in many cases, so that brands can focus in what they do best which is building great products and services.

Santiago Saenz Rozas