How a Bit of Motivation Can Go A Long Way in Your Affiliate Program Performance

Affiliate marketing programs can deliver high quality leads, and help you grow your business. Unfortunately, it’s not always easy to create a successful affiliate program without the help of an affiliate network. Let us help you boost your affiliate program performance.

If you’ve dedicated time to growing your own in-house affiliate program, but haven’t grown sales, your underperforming affiliates may be dragging performance down.

If 5 percent or less of your affiliates are responsible for an overwhelming percentage of your monthly revenue, it’s time to act and motivate the rest to grow your affiliate program and increase success.

Learn how to motivate affiliates to boost affiliate program performance and grow your affiliate program.

How is Motivating Affiliates Different?

If you manage a team of in-house employees, you might not be aware of how challenging it can be to manage outsourced work. Affiliates don’t have the same benefits and therefore the same allegiance to your company as your full-time employees. It’s also more challenging to keep track of their daily efforts.

That’s why affiliate networks are so important, and why ArrowShade provides dedicated account support to our lead buyers.

You must think of affiliates as independent professionals, according to Geno Prussakov, author of Affiliate Program Management: An Hour a Day.

Affiliate marketers voluntarily join programs, and often do so at volume to identify top performing offers they can promote to earn the most revenue. They can decide to stop promoting your product or service at will.

As an affiliate program leader, you have the challenge of marketing your program to marketers. Here’s the ArrowShade guide to motivating your affiliates and growing your affiliate program.

1. Treat Affiliates Like Real People

It’s easy to treat affiliates like programs instead of people. Chances are, you’ll never meet the affiliates that work to promote your products, generate leads and drive revenue for your company. At ArrowShade, we work to get to know our lead sellers, their needs and interests to determine what motivates them.

Just like your in-house employees, affiliates have individual goals and therefore unique motivators. Contrary to what you might think, affiliates aren’t just motivated by money. To motivate your unmotivated affiliates, you’ll need to build a personal relationship. Some affiliates will be interested in learning and growing their skill set. Others may be motivated by incentives, rewards or commission.

Regardless of what their individual motivators are, you have a better chance of retaining and motivating affiliates by treating them like real people. The stronger your relationship with them, the more likely they are to remain in your program.

2. Build a Relationship with Your Affiliates

This isn’t always easy when your swamped with other tasks, but if you’re a dedicated affiliate manager it’s important to dedicate time to this. Build an affiliate communication strategy that’s personalized. Send your affiliates a welcome message when they’re onboarding, share industry tips and tactics, and don’t forget to check in. You want your affiliates to look forward to receiving communications from you. The more you learn about your affiliates, the better you can be at managing them.

For example, ask your affiliates what other programs they’re a part of, and how they feel about them. You can determine how your program fares against competitors and make improvements. It’s important to act on feedback, to avoid making the same mistakes in the future.

3. Use Extrinsic Motivators

Extrinsic motivators use external factors like rewards or incentives to motivate people to take a desired action. These motivators help your affiliates earn more, and that affects your retention rates.

Your affiliate program should be appealing. You should always ask yourself if you would be motivated to join your own program.

Some factors to consider are:

Is your affiliate website or portal easy to navigate and user-friendly? The better your dashboard looks the more likely affiliates will be to trust the legitimacy of your program.

Do you provide variety? Whether it’s in the types of products they can promote or the amount of creative they have access to, the more variety you provide the more choices affiliates have and ability to optimize.

Have you earned affiliate reviews? If you don’t have any affiliate program reviews, you should launch a program to generate them. Send out an email campaign or offer a small incentive to generate reviews. Other affiliates will be more motivated to join your program if there is social proof.

Examples of Incentives

One way to boost your affiliate program performance is to improve affiliate activation rates. If activations are low, you might want to consider providing an activation bonus. This one-time fee doesn’t have to be high, but it’s just one more reason an affiliate would want to promote your program over someone else’s.

Other incentives to offer affiliates included tiered commissions and/or performance bonuses. Affiliates who generate certain amounts of leads could be offered higher commissions under a tiered structure.

Performance bonuses can be given to those who meet certain weekly, monthly, quarterly and/or annual goals. This can help companies who have aggressive sales goals during certain times of year. For example, if Q4 is the best time of year for you, you might want to offer bonuses during Q3 and Q4.

4. Use Intrinsic Motivators

Not every affiliate will be motivated by money or extrinsic motivators. Affiliates may be seeking learning, growth and advancement opportunities. You can help your affiliates learn in a variety of ways.

One of the best ways to educate affiliates is to pay attention to their account and provide optimization instructions.

At ArrowShade, we provide this information to our advertisers/lead buyers, by providing dedicated affiliate managers to lead sellers. We educate them on what is and isn’t working for their account and provide them with vertical or offer best practices.

Beyond education, some affiliates require praise or acknowledgement. While it’s harder to celebrate outsourced affiliates than your internal employees, there are ways to do so. Consider sharing an affiliate spotlight on your social media page where you highlight exceptional affiliates.

Another great way to acknowledge and celebrate top performing affiliates is to create an affiliate newsletter you share with everyone in your affiliate program. You can honor top affiliates and share industry news or tips that will help your community with their campaigns.

Join an Affiliate Network

If all of this sounds like to much work for your organization, ArrowShade can help. Join our network as a lead buyer, and benefit from our:

• Innovative dashboard
• Real-time reporting
• Pre-screened affiliates
• Dedicated account managers
• Affiliate managers
• Affiliate payments/billing
• And more

Contact us today to join our network and boost your affiliate program performance now.