The Importance of Affiliate – Affiliate Manager Relationships

The success of any affiliate program is built on the relationship between the affiliates and affiliate manager. What do all successful relationships require? The number one element is trust. The goal of any affiliate – affiliate manager relationship is to not only have the affiliate know you, but trust you and know that they will do as much as possible to help them succeed. Building trust does not happen overnight, but in order to get it there are traits you must show including: dependability, being personable,  being helpful, and understanding their business and what their goals are. Once trust is built the affiliates will be more eager to help you out by sharing things they see from their perspective.

How Affiliate Managers Can Help Affiliates

Communicating with affiliates is the only way to build a solid trustworthy relationship and showing them that you value their efforts will go a long way in their eyes. There are many ways affiliate managers can help affiliates grow their businesses; here are a few of them:

Increase Commissions:

Provide them incentives to have their base commission increased. For example, if affiliate x increases their sales by 20% from the previous month their commission will be increased from 10% to 12% for life. This shows the affiliate that you value their time and effort and want them to succeed. Rewarding them monetarily shows your commitment to them.

Exclusive Deals/Promotions:

Affiliates want to differentiate themselves from their competition just as merchants do, so, whenever possible/applicable, providing them with exclusive deals and/or promotions gives them the edge to convert more sales. It may also be the difference in them not promoting a competitor’s product or services. For example, a mommy blogger wants to promote nursing bras on her site; therefore, an exclusive deal (e.g. 20% off [product category here]) is created, but is available to only her blog and her audience.

Custom Creatives and Coupons:

Creating custom banners and coupons is similar to exclusive deals and promotions, but involves designing banners and/or coupon codes for the affiliate to use in their marketing efforts. For example, the mommy blogger (referenced above) affiliate would like a 468×60 customized banner with an exclusive code for the nursing bra sale, so as affiliate manager a banner is created using the color scheme of her site with an exclusive code (e.g. MOMMY20) only her audience has access to. The little things go a long way in building a healthy relationship with affiliates.

The affiliate knows their audience and understands what it takes to convert sales, therefore, as an affiliate manager being personable and helpful will assist in solidifying the relationship and making it mutually beneficial to both parties.

How Affiliates Can Help Affiliate Mangers

Relationships are a two way street and the affiliate – affiliate manager is no different. Once trust is built, the affiliate manager can rely on the affiliates to help improve the program and make it optimal for other affiliates as well. Here are two ways an affiliate can help an affiliate manager:

Feedback on What is Currently Working:

The affiliates are in the trenches daily and they see things that affiliate managers may not, so having a solid relationship can be advantageous in determining what promotions work best, what banners are most effective, and where the business may be trending in the future. In ways they can be considered consultants. They have invested time and money into promoting a merchants product, so they want to ensure the program is fully optimized for their success.

Suggested Improvement to Merchants Website:

This is very important to any successful affiliate program, but cannot occur without the element of trust. For example, the affiliate may be seeing a lot of clicks but no conversions and then they look at the merchant’s site and see a potential issue(s) that may be causing the conversion problem. It could be a variety of things causing the issue, but without the affiliates feedback it would continue to be a problem and cause a strain on the relationship and potentially hinder the success of the entire program.

Building a solid affiliate – affiliate manager relationship begins with trust. It takes time to earn trust, but showing affiliates that you are serious about their success will go a long way, whether it be increasing their commission or creating customized banners for their site.  Ultimately, the hard work from both parties will pay off in a successful and profitable affiliate program.

Managing Advertiser Expectations for an Affiliate Program

This is part of two of the series on managing merchant expectations for an affiliate program [see Part One here]. In Part Two, expectations for a launched affiliate program will be discussed and why it is important to make sure the merchant’s expectations are in line with those of their affiliate management team’s.

Managing expectationsThe merchants affiliate program is live, but expectations are still unrealistic; what needs to be done to reign them in? It is all about communicating and educating them on best practices and previous experiences? If I had a dollar for every time a merchant asked why they are not seeing sales immediately I would be pretty well off. Maybe I am exaggerating a little, but you get the point. When expectations during the launch phase are unrealistic that tends to carry over to the program once it is live. Merchants must understand that affiliate marketing is different than other forms of marketing in that it takes months, not days to build a successful program.

Not seeing any sales?

Give it time; asking why there have not been any sales in the first week is not fair. In my post last week “Managing Pre-Launch Expectations of Affiliate Program” I wrote that it is best to give a program 1 – 2 months to gain traction and start producing consistent sales. Many merchants do not understand that recruiting affiliates (either passively or actively) takes time. The process usually includes an email inviting them to join the program, possibly a follow-up email, accepting them into the program, and optimizing them. Depending on the affiliate, this process could take a month or longer. Ensuring your affiliates are armed with the necessary tools to be successful is the most important part of managing an affiliate program. Rushing this process or giving up too soon because sales are not coming through at the pace expected will do more harm than good.

Affiliate Program = Marketing

Another key to a successful affiliate program is including the affiliate management team as members of the marketing team. This sounds obvious, right? There have been times when managing affiliate programs where merchants have marketing campaigns set up for other channels (email, SEM, Social Media), but do not share them with the affiliate management team, and if they do it is at the last minute and it makes it more difficult to ensure success with the affiliates for the campaigns. The top affiliate programs are successful in part because they treat affiliate marketing the same as the other channels, and that includes aligning their marketing campaigns with affiliate marketing to ensure the most exposure for their campaigns.

Be Open to Change

The strategies outlined pre-launch are being executed and are successful, but something unexpected comes up, what should the merchant do next? The answer is simple – ADAPT.  There may be certain marketing campaigns that were not successful with affiliates, so adapting to what is happening around you in critical. Use competitive intelligence (which should be occurring daily) and create similar promotions to that of the competition so affiliates are equipped with high converting deals/promos. Another reason to be open to change is that the merchants website may not be converting well and changes may be needed, so being open to change is not voluntary, it is mandatory.  Affiliates, the most valuable asset to your program, may have requests like customized banners, exclusive coupons, sample requests, so being flexible and open to doing things differently than planned will assist in creating a quality affiliate program that quality affiliates will want to join.

Set merchant expectations for the affiliate program immediately, so that everyone involved in the management of the program can be given all the necessary tools to succeed and build a program they can be proud of.

Your comments/feedback are welcome in the section below.

Should Affiliate Programs Be Managed or Optimized?

A webinar announcement that was circulated earlier today by Impact Radius started as follows:

Are you managing your performance-based marketing program when you should be optimizing it?

Great question, and as a speaker on this upcoming webinar I’d like to take an opportunity to touch upon this question in my today’s blog post.

During the webinar, together with the legendary Todd Crawford, we will discuss numerous subjects starting from tracking-related questions (such as deduplication, cookie duration, and others) and on to reporting issues. We don’t have to agree on everything to have a fruitful conversation, and one of the things that I would argue today is that program optimization and program management aren’t, in fact, mutually exclusive.

In my understanding, affiliate program management should be approached with several key tasks in mind. Initially outlined in my “Affiliate Program Management: An Hour a Day” book but also dissected in my recent Affiliate Summit presentation [see my slide deck here], I like to view these tasks as 5 central pillars of a healthy approach to affiliate program management. They are: affiliate recruitment, affiliate activation, compliance policing, communication, and … yes, optimization.

There are numerous ways one may optimize his/her affiliate program’s performance. The 3 key approaches that we have seen yield continuous fruit are:

  1. Replicate your own successes
  2. Employ best practices
  3. Spy on your competition

Working in the above-listed directions equips merchants with knowledge which, when used to craft practical strategy, results in building highly agile (and, therefore, competitive) affiliate programs.

However, as mentioned earlier, when it comes to management versus optimization, it should not perceived as an “either… or…” question, but a “both… and…” situation. Affiliate program optimization is management, or, to be precise, one of the five key components of a holistic approach to affiliate program management.

Of course, the “Comments” area below is wide open for your input/thoughts on the subject.

Managing Pre-Launch Expectations of Affiliate Program

This is part of one of a two-part series on managing merchant expectations for an affiliate program. In Part One, managing program pre-launch expectations for merchants will be discussed and why it is important to make sure the merchant and the affiliate management team are on the same page.

ExpectationsWhy do some merchants have unrealistic expectations for their affiliate programs? For some affiliate marketing is a new venture, or they have heard how other merchants have had great success with their products/services using affiliates marketing. Either way, the merchant must understand the difference between unrealistic and realistic expectations and defining them up front is essential to the success of any affiliate program. It begins with the set up process of the affiliate program.

Overall Expectations

When initially communicating with a merchant, one of the first things to be discussed is their expectations for the affiliate program. Are their expectations in line with what the affiliate management team is capable of doing? If their goals for the program are too high they need to be informed and an attempt to lower them to a more acceptable level is needed, but that is not always as easy as it sounds. The reason being is that they may have heard other programs had great success at the beginning and they are expecting the same results, however, the merchant needs to understand that every affiliate program is different and comparing theirs to other programs should be avoided even if they are direct competitors.

Website Expectations

The next topic to discuss with the merchant in the set up process is their website. It is the most critical piece to an affiliate program. It should be functional and all landing pages should be optimized to their fullest. With that being said, some merchants do not realize that their site could be the largest roadblock to affiliate program success, but refuse to make recommended changes because they like the way it looks. No matter how nice the site looks, if the landing pages are not optimized properly, traffic sent by affiliates will not convert. Managing website expectations is vital to a merchant and their success in affiliate marketing.

Revenue Expectations

The third topic to discuss with merchants in the set up process is their expectations of sales. Two of the biggest questions asked by merchants before their program goes live are: 1. When will we start seeing sales? 2. What are your projections for the program? Let’s start with question # 1: It all depends on how quickly affiliates are recruited into the program, activated and optimized. Once affiliates are active, optimization is needed to ensure they are motivated to keep promoting their product/service. The previously mentioned steps take time and merchants need to understand that it takes approximately 1-2 months to start seeing results from affiliates.

Now onto question # 2: Making projections for an affiliate program can be slippery slope, but it all comes back to expectations set forth by the affiliate management team hired to oversee the program. The biggest piece to the projection puzzle is the website. If it is new or does not convert well, then projections may not be what originally expected, therefore, showing the merchant everything that is involved in starting and managing an affiliate program is essential to the success for everyone involved. Affiliate programs take time to grow, which may be scary for some merchants, but it is just a fact.

Check back next week for part two of Managing Merchant Expectations for an Affiliate Program, where 3 more critical pieces will be outlined to ensure merchant expectations are kept in check once their affiliate program is launched.

Affiliate Management: Common Misapprehensions, Definitions

With this being the very first post on a brand-new blog, I cannot think of anything better to devote it to than to the core subject of the blog. Since this website is fully devoted to all things affiliate management, let’s start right from affiliate management itself.

Having worked as an “affiliate manager” since early 2000s, I have taken note of several different definitions of “affiliate management.” Here they are – together with the reasons why, in fact, they all represent nothing but misapprehensions about the subject.

Approach #1: Affiliate management – the process of overseeing and managing affiliates.

Flaw: By the very definition of the term, affiliates are independent, self-managed online marketers, generally not accountable to merchants for performance, and free to choose what affiliate programs to promote, and what programs to drop, what merchants to push more aggressively, and on what merchants to spend less effort.

Approach #2: Affiliate management – the practice of supporting, supervising, and controlling the company’s relationship with its outsourced affiliate manager.

Flaw: While the previous definition/approach aimed at going deeper than necessary safely possible, this is one is surprisingly shallow. No company should ever equate their “affiliate management” approach to mere vendor management. Handling vendor payments, reviewing their routine reports, and managing your contract with them has nothing to do with affiliate management.

Approach #3: Affiliate management – the process of managing the company’s relationship with the affiliate network.

Flaw: While, similarly to approach #2, this one equates affiliate management to vendor management, it may end up being even more disastrous than approach #1. Presuming that all you need to do is keep positive affiliate network balance, while the rest will be taken care of by the network can be deadly. The network’s job is provide you with the infrastructure for running your affiliate program. The rest (affiliate recruitment, compliance policing, and other affiliate management tasks) is extremely rarely included by default.

Having said all of the above, here is what I suggest as the definition of (and the approach to) affiliate management:

Affiliate management – common shortening for affiliate program (or marketing) management, or organization and coordination of affiliate marketing activities of a business, as well as full support of its affiliate program with the purpose of equipping affiliates with the tools and knowledge they need to market the business efficiently.

Since in most cases it involves management of a specific program, wherever possible/suitable I try to call it affiliate program management. It is also because of this that I included the word “program” in the very domain name of this website.

More articles on the subject to follow. Stay tuned…

Oh, and if you have something to add to the above, the “Comments” area below is all yours! I’d love to hear your thoughts too.