In an age of dwindling profits and rising marketing costs, affiliate marketing is helping companies market products on low budgets, with less time & effort, and at pretty much zero risk levels. And that’s why the projected budget for affiliate marketing in the US alone could reach $8.2 billion in 2022.
The rising attention to affiliate marketing has gained significant traction amongst global brands to try their hand at affiliate campaigns. However, only a handful of them can reap consistent, high-ROI results.
Why?
Because running an effective affiliate marketing program takes work. It’s more than just launching an affiliate program and setting up a landing page/form to recruit affiliates.
If you want to win with affiliate marketing, you must follow these simple yet fundamental best practices:
1. Start with a plan
If you don’t meticulously plan your affiliate program trajectory, it can invite a lot of setbacks & uncertainty in achieving desired goals.
For example, one of the major parts of running affiliate programs is recruiting affiliates. To plan for that part, you can ask yourself some questions like:
- What niche(s) will my potential affiliates be in?
- What types of products do they promote? Does the audience they target fall under your target market?
- What competing brands are they promoting?
- What offers are they getting from the competition?
- Do they use affiliate networks, and if so, which ones?
Planning will also help you eliminate what’s unnecessary or harmful over the long run. For instance, you may decide not to invite coupon sites to your affiliate program while planning because it may harm profitability in the future.
2. Play smart with compelling offers and compensation rates
“Affiliate marketing has made businesses millions and ordinary people billions” – Bo Bennett
Compensation will be the cornerstone of your affiliate marketing program. If you’re not making your affiliates rich, your program won’t succeed. However, setting a compensation rate that motivates your affiliates but doesn’t eat into your profits is a balanced act. It comes with an understanding of industry standards and your margins:
- You need to understand what standard commission rates your affiliates are working on. Before you set your affiliate program commissions, you must know the typical commission rate they get paid and whether they prefer fixed-rate commissions or percentage commissions.
- Calculate your CLV (or Customer Lifetime Value) to see what you can afford. It’s okay if you don’t make much profit on the first-time customer an affiliate brings – if the average customer stays with you long enough, your ROI will stay positive.
- Also, know what the affiliates are getting beyond the compensation rate. Some businesses give attractive bonuses, offers, and perks on top of commissions to delight the affiliates. Similarly, some brands – like Amazon – attract affiliates even after giving lower commissions because their offers convert better.
3. Optimize your affiliate program landing page
Your affiliate program landing page must be optimized for searchability and conversions. Otherwise, you’ll lose many potential affiliates.
Optimize for Search
According to the BrightEdge study, organic search traffic accounted for 73% of all traffic to business sites. This means most potential affiliates will visit your landing page using a Google search. For example, affiliate marketers search for keywords like ‘affiliate marketing program + [your brand name],’ ‘[your brand name] + referrals,’ etc.
Therefore, you must optimize your landing page to appear on search results for those keywords. Here are a few ways that’ll help you with it:
- Firstly, ensure your page is indexed.
- Mention the exact keyword on your landing page on headings and in content.
- Support your landing pages by interlinking them from the homepage and other resources on the website with exact match keywords.
Besides Google search, some potential affiliates will visit your site to find the affiliate page. So, keep a link to the landing page in the obvious places: Footer and Header (optional).
Optimize for Conversions
Once the potential affiliate is on your landing page, you need to convince them to join your affiliate program with words. Here are a few tips that will help optimize your landing page for conversion:
- Write headlines that communicate what they would want from your business and not what you want from them. For example, ‘Earn $100 on every sale’ is better than ‘Work with a Fortune 500 company.’
- Make offers, perks, compensation rate, payout details, etc., clear. Don’t try to win them with fancy words. Be clear in your offerings.
- Include social proofs and case studies of other affiliates.
- If your program is better than competitors, showcase how. For example, “We give the highest commissions in [XYZ] market/category/niche.”
- Write CTAs that speak to the interest of your affiliates. Personalized CTAs convert 202% more than average CTAs.
Pro tip:
- Create two versions of your landing page, and A/B test them to understand which landing page will reap better results.
Optimize for responsiveness
Conversion rates on landing pages go down when they fail to work across all devices and respond slowly to requests.
Therefore, ensure your landing page is fast, responsive, and optimized for all devices.
Optimize sign-up form
Once a potential affiliate is convinced they want to join your program, they’ll move on to the final step: filling out the registration form. Ensure there are no hiccups there.
Keep the form short and simple. Studies have shown that creating sign-up forms with a long list of questions has low conversion rates. According to Marketo, short sign-up forms outperform long forms with a 13.4% conversion rate.
Pro tip: If you want to target many affiliates and care less about the brand name, just asking for their name & contact details is enough. However, if you’re looking for affiliates in a specific niche, asking more questions that can filter spammers & irrelevant affiliates is the way to go.
4. Find the right affiliates
The success of your affiliate program highly depends on the quality and the number of affiliates you find.
Here are a few best practices that will help you find the right affiliates for your business
Reach out to influencers in your niche
80% of consumers reported buying a product after seeing their favorite influencer promoting it.
Buyers now have direct access to influencers’ lives. They know what they eat, what they buy, and, most importantly, where they buy from. Hence, reaching out to these influencers should be your first step at winning sales and gaining credibility.
Now don’t confuse Instagram stars with being the only influencers. When we say influencer, we include bloggers, Facebook group owners, community owners, TikTok celebrities, YouTube stars, etc. Every person who has an active audience to speak to and a decent audience size can be your affiliate.
If you’ve deep pockets, you can go after celebrities and social media stars. However, if you’re starting small like most businesses, collaborating with micro-influencers with 5k – 20k followers is a good start.
Turn customers into affiliates
Can there be better advocates of your product than your happy customers? No, right? Then why go anywhere else when you can turn them into affiliates?
Think about it: You don’t have to convince them to buy your product; they’ve already bought it. You don’t have to talk about your brand; they’ve already experienced it. And you don’t have to ask them to recommend your products; they might be doing it already.
Then why not reward them for doing the job they’re already doing and scale your business?
Today’s successful companies like Uber, Tesla, Airbnb, etc., snowballed and reached where they are because they converted customers into affiliates/referrers.
5. Be selective when accepting affiliates
Before starting your outreach campaign, make sure you’re wary of spammers & make shifters who have a bad reputation for exploiting their audience for a quick buck. Remember: One decent affiliate is better than a thousand bad ones. Here are some of the warning signs you should look for when accepting affiliates- Odd-looking and unprofessional email addresses. Genuine influencers are professional in their approach.
- Unattended comments and reviews on their website and social media.
- History of spamming people. You can figure that out by looking at reviews, comments on social media, etc.
- Inactive social media presence. Genuine affiliates care about their audience and engage with them regularly.
- Poor communication skills. If an affiliate can’t talk, write, and express their thoughts well, then they won’t be able to represent your brand properly.
6. Have clear terms & conditions
You cannot manage all the affiliates and regularly check for wrongdoings. It’s micro-managing and a headache.
The best way to protect your business is by specifying what affiliates can or cannot do. For example, you can have terms like affiliates can’t submit their code/link on coupon sites, they can’t spam links in Facebook comments, etc.
In short, you should be able to turn to your T&Cs in case an affiliate engages in malpractices.
7. Set and track the right KPIs
If you want to scale your Affiliate Marketing Programs, then measure these KPIs from day 1:
- Top Performing Affiliates know which ones to reward and which ones to nurture.
- Total Affiliates make sure all affiliates are registered.
- Revenue by each affiliate to measure the value generated by each affiliate
- Total affiliate revenue to understand the investment of time and efforts required to meet the target
- Effective earnings per click (eEOC) to measure what each click brought by an affiliate means to your business
- Average order value to measure the profitability of your program after deducting commissions.
Tracking these metrics will help you measure your success and find opportunities to grow the affiliate program further. For example, data generated by analyzing revenue generated by each affiliate will help you identify affiliates you need to nurture, affiliates you need to reward more, and affiliates you need to cut ties with.
8. Nurture & empower your affiliates for better sales
Your affiliates are your business partners, and like every business partner, you need to contribute to their growth to sustain that relationship. Your relationship shouldn’t start with signing them and end with paying them. The stronger your relationship is, the bigger the business will be.
Here are some ways you can motivate your affiliates for strong performance
Create an affiliate marketing Newsletter
Create an email list dedicated to your affiliates. Use this email list to share progress, new announcements, offers, feature affiliates, etc. When you make dedicated efforts to communicate with your affiliates, you show that you care about affiliates and want them to succeed.
Leverage coupon deals
60% of online shoppers worldwide search for coupons before making sales. Hence, If your brand is not offering coupons to the affiliates that they can further promote, it will be difficult for your affiliates to convince their audience to buy from you (or, at least, buy from you using their links or codes).
Tip: Ensure the coupon code you give affiliates is of higher value than other coupons on your website. This way, you’ll be able to track affiliate program performance accurately and pay affiliates fairly.
Reward top affiliates
You should give higher commissions or better perks to affiliates who consistently give you good business. Nothing motivates high performers more than quality rewards.
Also, low-performing affiliates perform better when they see that you value performances.
Provide promotional material
Affiliates have their email list, social media followers, and readers on their blogs. To make communication fluid, you should empower your affiliates with suitable marketing material to communicate with their audience. For example, you can create banners, PDFs, Pinterest images, infographics, and social media posts your affiliates can share with their audience.
Pay affiliates on time
Getting affiliate commissions later will demotivate your affiliates to put in extra efforts (or any effort) for your brand. So make sure your payouts are on time.
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Author Details
Juhil is the Head Of Content & Partnerships at Social Snowball. Social Snowball is an automated affiliate marketing app for Shopify that has helped 1000+ merchants create and easily manage their affiliate programs and referral programs.