Karen Repoli — December 12, 2016 Follow @karenrepoliIf you really want to get the best affiliates to promote your products, you need to make affiliate worthy offers. This will make your affiliates want to promote everything you have because they know that you provide a great product, good customer service, and amazing creatives for them to use to market your programs.
In order to attract the right affiliates, it’s important to share certain types of stats with them so that they know what to expect with your program. Of course, if you are just starting your affiliate program you won’t have any stats to show, but as time progresses, this will change. So, track your early stats carefully and document them so you can start sharing it with prospective affiliates.
Important Stats to Share with your Affiliates
Conversion Rate: Affiliates like to know how often visitors to the sales page convert to buyers.
Commissions: Your affiliates want to know how much they’ll make per product and whether or not there is potential to make more due to your deep funnel.
Upsell: Let them know if you offer an upsell or not and what the commission is on that as well as the conversion rate for the upsell.
Recurring Commissions: Tell your affiliates if any of your offers provide commissions over time. For example, if you have a subscription offer, will they get a commission each month.
Incentives: Let them know what type of enticements you offer for successful sales.
Product Reviews: Do you allow affiliates to review your product free?
Visitor Value: Let them know the target market for the product and the value it offers.
Training: While affiliates aren’t your employees and aren’t on your staff, you can still offer a lot of training to help them make more money promoting your products.
Collateral: Ensure that you have plenty of professional graphics, copy, and information that enable your affiliates to promote your product.
Program Description: Ensure that you’re very succinct and inclusive in the description for your program.
Anything you can let affiliates know at a glance is important to share. You can offer more in-depth information as well but the information right up front should include what they need to know to figure out if your product is what they want to promote to their audience.
How to Keep Your Affiliates Happy (and productive!)
Once you recruit affiliates, it’s also important to keep them happy. Happy affiliates will be more likely to promote your products. They may even tell other people about you too. That’s why developing relationships, communicating and following up with your affiliates is so important.
Developing Relationships with Your Affiliates
In business one of the most important things you’re going to do aside from creating amazing products that your audience needs, is building mutually beneficial relationships with other people. In order to build relationships with affiliates, you need to understand them as a separate audience. They have different needs from the people that buy or receive your products. To help you build your affiliate relationships, here are a few things you want to do.
Communicate – Use email, webinars, teleseminars, and other forms of communication with your affiliates. Some of them will prefer email and others will like the one-on-one feel of webinars. When you keep your affiliates abreast of new products to come, changes in old products, sales, and other information they’re going to be that much more likely to stick with you and promote you because of the trust that you develop.
Listen – Communication is a two-way street. Therefore, it’s imperative that you also open the lines of communication in reverse. Ask them questions, conduct surveys, and connect one on one with your highest sellers. For example, you can have a trigger number of sales that elevates your affiliates to your affiliate inner circle where you can help them on numerous levels.
Ask for Feedback – When you send out new products to your affiliates, ask for feedback so you can make the product better before launch. You don’t have to send it to everyone who signs up for your program. Choose a few affiliates for feedback, based on your knowledge of them and their reputation in the business.
Show Your Personality – People do business with those that they like, know and trust. The more you can connect with your affiliates and find ways to show your character, the more you can enhance this effect. Add a little personal information in your emails, webinars, and live videos, and events. Seeing and hearing you can make a huge impression.
Be a Helpful Resource – When you want to have a real relationship with someone, you want to be helpful. Even if the assistance has nothing to do with your business, being helpful and pointing people in the right direction will go far in helping you solidify your relationships.
While you may not be able to pay as close attention as you’d like to each individual affiliate, you can use the information and tools at your disposal to build relationships that will stand the test of time and encourage even more sales. Use email automation, set up training series, host live webinars to talk about your new products and to get ideas. Your virtual assistant can also track your affiliates and help build those relationships.
Keeping Track of People you Talk To — When you are seeking to impress people, one way to do that is to remember who you’ve talked to and what you talked about. A good way to do this is to use some sort of customer relationship software (CRM). Read PC Magazine’s top picks.
Do What Needs to Be Done – Your affiliate’s needs depend on their audience as well. Suppose an affiliate contacts you and asks you to do a live webinar with them, this provides an excellent opportunity for both your affiliate and yourself. It will help you nurture the relationship as you get to know each other working together on the webinar.
Finally, the most important thing of all is to follow up. Even if affiliates contact you infrequently, make sure that you do contact them. Connect, encourage, and connect more. Always deliver top-notch services, products, and tools.
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