Your affiliate program is up and running, and your advertisers and publishers are enjoying the conversions and revenues. This isn’t the time to rest on your laurels, though. It’s time to knuckle down and analyze your results and statistics.
Any successful affiliate program relies on a mixture of high-converting offers and high-performing affiliates. Your affiliates will, of course, expect to be paid on time, so a timely payout process will also be high on any affiliate’s checklist. Still, all things being equal, your offer payout will be the primary consideration for any affiliate.
You have to remember here that affiliates don’t really owe any loyalty to your brand or products. If your payout for a particular vertical in a specific geo is $600 and your competitors offer $700 for the same terms, then expect to see your affiliate base diminish.
Now obviously, you can’t just keep bumping your affiliate payouts. There’s a limit over which it no longer makes sense to have an affiliate program. If you’re paying out more than you bring in, your affiliate program has failed.
So how do you keep your partner program attractive to affiliates and profitable for you to run?
Here are a few tried-and-tested ways to improve your partner program.
1. Update your marketing materials
It really doesn’t matter how fresh looking and unique your creatives and landing pages are. These soon pass their sell-by date. One of the facts of affiliate marketing is this. Your creatives and landing pages will get copied and ripped by other merchants and affiliates. There’s no avoiding this, so don’t get too upset when it happens.
Anyone with an account on Anstrex or Adplexity will find your ads and landing pages. The successful ones will soon be copied, and there’s very little you can do about it. In any event, changing out your creatives is our top tip to improve your partner program.
News and trends shape the affiliate world in all verticals. This is especially true of the financial verticals. Look at the recent surge in cryptocurrency prices, such as Bitcoin cracking the $60,000 mark last month. Creatives based around that price rise were performing exceptionally well. Unfortunately, we still see landing pages with that $60,000 price, despite Bitcoin now trading around $45,000. If your creatives and landing pages rely on the latest information or prices, keep them current. Gone are the days of people taking landing pages at face value. Your potential leads will check the information on your landing pages, so keep them as current as possible.
2. Who is promoting your product?
Have you ever come across the 80/20 rule? The essence of this is that 80% of your results will come from 20% of your efforts. That equates to 80% of your conversions coming from 20% of your publishers in affiliate terms. These are your top partners. They represent a considerable percentage of your revenues, and the relationships with these top partners have to be nurtured and maintained. Pay bumps, custom marketing materials, API access. Anything your affiliate managers can do to keep these top-performers happy and onboard.
Your affiliate management system should be able to give you all the data on your top performers. Keep an eye on your reports, and make sure to maintain the relationships with your best affiliates.
3. Partner Types
Promoting anything online calls for a mix of media types and traffic sources. Love it or hate it, Facebook gets a ton of traffic and odds are your potential leads are on the platform. Your affiliate system should be able to give you all the traffic stats for your partner conversions. Check your traffic reports for any “missing” sources and get the numbers up. Incentivizing conversions from missing traffic sources is one way to achieve this. If you’re low on conversions from social media, offer partners a commission bump for their efforts on these sites.
Are you missing the real heavy-hitters? The super-affiliates? Signup on the big affiliate forums, sponsor a thread and do your recruitment there. Offer the community useful content like guides, walkthroughs, or even regular update of the best performing offers and geos. These are communities where the goal is to get conversions and make money. The members will appreciate anything you can add to the mix. Quick example here. One of our clients recruited 12 affiliates after they published a list of hacks for speeding up landing pages!
If you’re interested in optimizing your partner program, you’re in the right place! Get in touch with us today, and one of our success managers will walk you through the tried and tested way to improve your affiliate marketing program results.
