Getting influencers and creators to sign up as affiliates for your product is a great first step, but these sign-ups are meaningless if they aren't translating to more customers and more revenue each month.
To ensure that your affiliates are successfully promoting your product to their audiences, you need to follow these five steps:
1) Set clear expectations for them from the beginning
2) Provide them with quality content and tools they can use to promote your product
3) Monitor their activity and performance closely
4) Reward them for their efforts
5) Keep communication open between you and them.
If you do all of this, you'll see a huge increase in revenue from your affiliate marketing program!
Let's dive in:
Setting clear expectations is critical for both you and your affiliates. Affiliates need to know what type of activity is expected of them, how often they need to be promoting your product, and what kind of results you're expecting from their efforts. By setting these expectations up front, you'll avoid any confusion or frustration down the line.
On your end, you need to be clear about what kind of activity you're looking for from your affiliates. Do you want them to blog about your product? Create social media posts? Make videos? Knowing what kinds of content perform best for your product will help you set clearer expectations for your affiliates.
If you want your affiliates to be successful in promoting your product, you need to give them the tools and content they need to do so. This means creating high-quality images and videos, providing written content like blog posts and social media copy, and giving them access to any special offers or discounts you have for customers.
By equipping your affiliates with tons of high-quality content, it makes their job of promoting your product to their audiences much easier. Not to mention, it also increases the chances that their promotion will be successful, which drives more customer sign-ups to your product in the end.
You can't just set your affiliates loose and hope for the best...
You need to be monitoring their activity to ensure that they're actually promoting your product to their audiences.
This means checking in on their progress regularly, and having some sort of reporting dashboard that makes it easy for you and your team to track their progress in one central location.
Additionally, you'll want to keep an eye on their performance metrics. Are they generating a lot of click-throughs to your product? Are their social media posts getting a lot of engagement? By monitoring these metrics, you can get a good sense of which affiliates are performing well and which ones might need some help.
A key part of successfully managing your affiliates is showing them that you appreciate their efforts. The best way to do this is by offering commissions or bonuses for every new customer they bring in.
This not only incentivizes your affiliates to work harder, but it also makes them feel appreciated and valued. This can help foster long-term relationships between you and your affiliate partners, which is essential for building a strong brand presence in the marketplace.
One of the best incentive packages for your affiliates is a lifetime commission, meaning for every customer they bring you, they get paid a % of that customer's monthly payment for the lifetime of their subscription.
Getting an affiliate to sign up for your program is a great start, but your job is far from finished...
Now's when the real work begins. You'll need to keep in consistent communication with your affiliates by giving them new content they can share with their audience, keeping them motivated with commissions and contests, and keeping them posted on new sign-ups to keep morale high and let them know their efforts are paying off.
Managing affiliates can feel like a full-time job, which is why having a team of experts like UnicornConnect can be a game changer for scaling your affiliate program.
Book a call to discuss your potential affiliate program benefits with our founder Oliver Schmalholz!
If you want to be successful in promoting your product through affiliates, it's important to provide them with quality content and tools, monitor affiliate activity and performance, reward your affiliates for their efforts, and keep open communication with them at all times.
By following these best practices and enlisting the help of a team like UnicornConnect, you can build an effective affiliate program to predictably scale your users and monthly revenue!