Re-Energising Your Affiliate Program

Launching an affiliate program is no mean feat.

It takes time, dedication and commitment but even the best affiliate programs can hit a plateau sometimes.?

But what happens after and how can you begin to combat a stagnant affiliate program?

It becomes a case of re-energising your affiliate program but often this can be easier said than done…?

Especially when you don’t have the insights needed but it doesn’t have to feel like an impossible or overly complex task to navigate and with our help and streamlined approach, it can fast become a distant memory.

Instead, you’ll have a well-executed and energised affiliate program.

But there are a couple of key elements that need to be carried out well in order to get your affiliates energised and excited about your programme again but what are they?

How to get your affiliate program re-energised

• Audit?

The best starting point is with an audit, as this enables you to begin looking over the communications that you're sending out. It means that you can see if any of those are still relevant to your affiliates, especially in relation to the onboarding journey.?

This means that you’re aware that when you launch an affiliate programme you create the welcome sequence of emails. Often six months can go by with varying details and your product changing and you might find that you have to adopt different ways of working during this time.?

By starting your journey here you can have a quick initial look and run-through of the affiliate journey, as they start out in your affiliate programme.?

This is an aspect that can prove hugely beneficial later down the road, which is why you want to be getting it right from the start.

• Fresh and Creative?

Uploading fresh and creative aspects can really help to lift your affiliate's conversion rate. It gets customers engaged, interested and talking about your products and services in a way that can be often overlooked.

Affiliates won’t tend to change banners all the time, unless, of course, they're making an E-commerce programme that’s based on different seasonal sales. This would require them to be more proactive but if you're running a programme that doesn’t have as many promotional periods, where you don’t have those bigger sales, timed or themed events that you want to work with, then maybe it's time to do a bit of a creative refresh.?

That’s why seeing what creatives have worked in the last six months, the ones that are sending an abundance of customers or conversions, and then creating a new suite or fresh set of creatives can make the world of difference.

• Exclusive Affiliate Offers

Having an exclusive affiliate offer can reignite interest and encourage those that have run the risk of finding the current offering stagnant a new lease of life.

That’s why offering incentives that can help them participate, engage or win something that money can’t buy can prove hugely beneficial. It’s about finding whatever it is that’s going to drive your partners forward and understanding the different types of partners that you have in your programme.

That’s why thinking about promotions that can really stimulate and encourage them to be active and interested in your programme is a really good idea and step in the right direction towards re-energising your publisher relationships.

• Strengthen Ties

Another crucial aspect is being able to strengthen your ties to publishers.?

I would recommend at least every three to six months that you look at that long list of affiliates in your database and begin to ensure that you're actually reaching out to them.

Making that personal connection and actively thanking them for joining your programme, if they haven't already been assigned to an affiliate manager doing exactly that, means they can really get an understanding of what they're doing to build their business.?

You want to reassure them that they're moving forward and that you’re interested in starting to build a little bit of a personal rapport with them.

Even if they don’t have an account manager as part of your bigger affiliate, driving sales portfolios, you’re offering them support and a good working relationship.

Often this is hard to do if you're in a small affiliate programme but you can also set up automated funnel sequences using your email software to pull a database list. This can date back to the last six months or you can get your BI teams to help you to do that.?

Then it becomes a case of building a personalised sequence of events and of emails that can go out to them. This then lets them know that you're thinking of them and that you're really keen to work and partner with them and you want to find out more about how they're promoting your business.?

• Taking A Strategic Outlook

It can be really beneficial to take a more strategic approach and outlook, doing so allows you to think about the bigger picture and whether you’re giving the affiliates enough leeway to go out and find those customers for you, in the niches that you're working in and at the price points that you're still offering.?

If you aren’t it might be time to start asking why?

When an affiliate programme is two or three years old and it's stagnating but you’ve already tried some of these previous steps and you don’t feel as though you’re reaping the rewards, you can look at a slightly different approach.?

It can be good to look at changing the incentive structure that you're giving, maybe adding in some new tiers for high performers or looking at whether those existing incentive structures are still market-related.?

It can pay off to do some competitive research, to help ensure that you are understanding if your affiliates are actually reacting to this. You want to increase the incentives to increase your affiliate outreach and strengthen your existing relationships.

• Recognising And Rewarding Those Top-Performing Publishers

If you’re still finding your affiliate program lacking the energised burst it needs a really important aspect to focus on is being able to recognise and reward those top-performing publishers.?

Having a look at that second tier of partners that are coming up through the ranks and how you can incentivise them to become top performers can really pay off. It’s also a really important part of your database, which is why having an account manager with the time to dedicate to nurturing those relationships, as much as they do the existing driving sales ones, is really crucial.?

Even if you're looking at it just once a quarter it can really help increase your bottom margin, even if it's just one or 2%. Reactivating some of those second-tier affiliates in your database can really help you to increase and drive sales.?

Plus it can get you those new revenues coming into the business, as well as making new relationships and strengthening them and it’s not something that should be overlooked.

• The Power Of Influencers

The power influencers can have shouldn’t be underestimated, as a different source of traffic, it can become another stream of potential and opportunity.?

So, this last affiliate program re-energiser tactic encourages you to look at just that, the different sources of traffic coming from the different channels and how affiliate partners are using them. This way you can see if your promotions are actually relevant for those channels.

Say you’ve got a couple of Twitch streamers, Twitter communities or perhaps a few influencers on Instagram that are promoting your products and services what you really want to be doing is ensuring that you’re utilising them. Ultimately they need to be promoting you and sending traffic your way.?

You might even want to ask all of those partners about the types of promotions that would work best for their communities, which is why delving a little bit deeper into the traffic and understanding exactly why and what affiliates are going to need based on the platforms and the channels that they're promoting you in is imperative.

You’ll often find influencers might want something simple, it could be merchandise or some form of leaderboard promotion that will allow their customers to reap the rewards too.?

Whichever it is, you want to be sure it’s going to work for your affiliates as much as it is your business and overall program.

Final thoughts…

If you can take anything from the insights and steps shared it should be the importance placed on getting out there and talking to affiliates. This really is the best way to re-energise your programme but following that up with the steps,? starting with a mini audit is a really strong place to begin.?

This will give you some intel and an idea of how you can move forward and ensure that you start to make your programme a reinvigorated and sale-driving one.?