Servicing Your Affiliates

It’s obvious that affiliates are the cornerstone of a merchant’s affiliate program. But it’s a wonder that so few programs actually service their affiliates and treat them like true business partners. The relationship between you and your affiliates is an interactive one that builds and supports a mutual dependence. If your affiliates are not happy or are not provided the necessary marketing tools, training, and support, they will either under perform or, if they’re good, leave for a more lucrative and supportive program somewhere else.

It’s not the number of affiliates that matters, but the quality of the relationship you have with them. Creating that relationship with personal service is the key to building a successful and profitable affiliate network. That means helping your affiliates not only reach your sales goals but also achieve their full potential.

A good example of someone who supports affiliate marketing efforts is Declan Dunn. He sees his affiliates as true business partners. Working closely with them, he offers to pay half of the advertising costs that they spend to promote his books. If these affiliates are willing to go the extra mile and promote his product, he’s going to make sure he helps. It’s a win-win situation for both Dunn and his affiliates. He gets more exposure across the Net for his new book and his affiliates make more sales.

You may think that paying your affiliates’ advertising costs is going too far in supporting your affiliates. But if you see affiliates as your partners in business and not as a source for cheap advertising, this makes sense. The bottom line is this: To be a real success in affiliate marketing you have to look beyond what is considered affiliate marketing today. Just offering a set of links, some promotional copy, a tracking and report mechanism, and a marketing tip or two is not enough to set you apart from your competitors’ programs and to keep your affiliates loyal.

You have to work with your affiliates not just to grow your sales but to also grow their sites by teaching them how to market successfully on the Net. They must do more than just market your program successfully. All this may seem like extra work and expense, but it’ll pay off in the long run. Look at it as a marketing expense. Take some of the marketing money that you would use for acquiring more affiliates who might or might not perform, and use it to supply training materials and advice to your current affiliates. Increase their success on the Net and they will increase yours.

Categorize and Customize Your Support

Most affiliate programs see their affiliates as one big undifferentiated group of Web sites, but that’s not true. Each Web site is different and will have a different approach to promoting your offers. One general banner or text link will not work for every affiliate. Creating a separate marketing and merchandising program for each affiliate obviously isn’t possible. But if you look at your network hard enough and analyze the different sites that it contains, you may be able to find similarities among them from which you can create different affiliate groupings and offer different linking methods.

First, have someone on your affiliate management staff do nothing but visit your affiliate sites with two objectives in mind:

• Have him create a set of criteria to use to group your affiliates into a few site categories.

• Once these groupings are determined, decide the best strategies to help affiliates achieve their sales goals for your program.

Once these strategies have been determined for an affiliate site, you might give your team a bonus for every site that improves sales by applying a group strategy.

What could these different marketing strategies look like? Besides banner and text links, there are other ways for individual affiliates to promote your offers. Some might work for all your affiliate groupings, whereas only one or two will work with others.

• If an affiliate needs content for her site, newsletter, or eZine, write articles about your product or service subject area. These should be informative and entertaining for the reader and provide links to your products or service, a survey or contest, or a link back to your site to capture a sales lead or make a sale.

• Supply different size ad copy—with links—for those affiliates that want to advertise in eZines or have a newsletter of their own they send out to their site subscribers. Make sure to include a few witty lines of copy with links that they can place in the e-mail signature line to help generate click-throughs from the recipients.

• Some affiliates might want to have more than a simple banner link, or text link or button on their Web pages. Some might want to place images of your products that link directly to those products on your site for purchase. In this way, they could select images of products specific to the content of their site. By communicating with your affiliates, you might find other marketing strategies that they could use that fit within the way they market their site.

Review each affiliate group and match them up with your linking and marketing methods. And most important of all, encourage them to know your product or service.

Encourage Affiliates to Know Your Product

Just because affiliates choose to join your program and sell your product or service, that doesn’t mean they know a whole lot about what you sell. You need to take the time to teach them the basics of your merchandise. That includes knowing the demographic mix of their sites—who comes to their sites and why—and then targeting that mix with your offers. But suppose you have affiliates that seem to join programs that have no relationship to the content of their sites or join every new one that comes down the information highway? What to do with them?

The easy way is to just drop them from your program. But how do you know that some those affiliates might not turn out to be some of your best? If you are willing to make an extra effort with your program, you may very well mold some of those into the 5% of affiliates that provide 95% percent of your program revenue. All they may need is a little guidance on how to position your offer within the context of their sites. It may only take some effective target marketing to help them position their sites to visitors better—along with better placement of your offer on their sites. Taking time to work with sites that respond to your offers of assistance may turn these sites into your better performers.

The quickest and most important way to teach affiliates about the value of your offer and how to merchandise it is to have them use your product or service. If you’re selling a single product or an individual service, have then purchase it and use it—better yet, give it to them if you can—with the expectation that they will do the following:

• Have them use the product and see it as their own. By getting a hands-on experience with your offering they can better understand what it is and how it works so they can better position it within the context or their Web sites.

  Do

  DO encourage your affiliates to use your product or service. Then ask them to advocate its use to their site visitors on their Web sites and e-mail communications.

  
  

• Expect them to give your product or service their personal recommendation to the visitors of their sites. After all, if they’ve used your product or service—and you assume they are satisfied with it—their trust and credibility with their visitors will transfer to your offering, making an easier sale. By putting their stamp of approval on your offer, your and their sales will increase. Their personal recommendation should include some important details, such as what they like about your product or service, what it will do for their site visitors, and why they should buy it. Getting their visitors to part with their hard-earned money is a lot easier if the affiliates, personally have used your product or service and can recommend it.