Action points for your affiliate program.
Here are a few action points for your affiliate program that will help you have great results from this channel.
30 minutes a day
Spare 30 minutes of your day for affiliate management activity, more precisely for the management of your entire affiliate program, not only your affiliates. There is no need for a new personnel, this is an activity that someone from your marketing team, business development team or sales team can take over.
At first, these affiliate management activities may seem scary, especially if you haven’t had much to do with affiliate marketing before. But this kind of action is more about people and technology than about marketing. Communicating with your affiliate is the most important action point in an affiliate program management, and if you do not do this, you will not be able to enjoy the performance no matter how much you know about online marketing or how big the conversion rate is. This is why, opening up to affiliates and testing new practices is very much needed.
An improved commission grid
Keep a close eye on your competition inside the platform and adjust the commission grid to the category your program belongs to. Therefore, if you have a clothing store where you offer a 10% commission/sale, but the other programs in the same category offer 20% commission/sale, you can adjust your commision according to your profit margin so you can reach the same level with your competition. In addition, you can offer variable commissions based on your products’ category.
So, if your clothing store has a wide range of products, you can offer different commission values depending on how often your products are being purchased. For example, you can offer 10% commission for men’s clothing, 15% for shoes/accessories and 20% for women’s clothing. In order to attract as many affiliates as possible, you can also offer incentives and bonuses for your best performing affiliates. For example, you can organize challenges to offer x% bonus or prizes for affiliates that generate sales above a certain threshold.
Recruit and stimulate affiliates
A large part of affiliate program management means recruiting and activating new affiliates. In 2Performant there is already a sufficiently large ecosystem from which you can recruit new affiliates. We recommend the following methods to motivate and gain loyalty of affiliates, methods that have proved their efficiency over time in 2Performant:
- Organize internal challenges;
- Provide bonuses for new affiliates who generate sales above a certain threshold in the first months of activity.
- Grant custom test conditions for a limited period of time to new affiliates that promise performance – a higher commission value or a higher cookie life than the standard ones.
Additionally, besides recruiting affiliates directly from 2Performant, another way is recruiting affiliates directly from your client base. What if each client who bought a product shared that purchase on Facebook? Or what if they would each write about that product to a friend? Or what if they would write about that product bought from YOU on their personal blog? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could succeed in motivating your customers to recommend your products or services to others?
How can you do this? It’s easy. You need to implement an intermediary affiliate landing page into your own site that is sending users to your dedicated affiliate page in 2Performant and instruct your clients to create an affiliate account to use the promoting tools you have provided and gain commission of the sales. You can also provide information about your program, how does affiliate marketing work and what are it’s benefits.
Improve and adapt your promoting tools
Product Feeds
We recommend you to regularly update the product feeds so that affiliates will stay up to date with the latest products and/or promotions on your site. Therefore, you can create and upload different product feeds based on the available product categories, such as women’s clothing, men’s clothing, products with discounts, accessories, cosmetic and so on.
Banners
We recommend you to upload at least 2 sets of banners:
- One set of general banners to promote the entire site;
- One set of banners based on product categories or marketing campaigns in progress.
Announce your Promotions to all affiliates
Advertisers Promotions is a new platform feature that allows you to announce your promotions to all affiliates enrolled in the platform. Through this feature, affiliates can see all the promotions that you have listed and published.
This way, you can list your promotions in a dedicated menu and affiliates will be able to see them directly from their own accounts. At the same time, you can still link your promotions with a 2Performant Shopping Event (for example, the shopping event dedicated to Children’s Day or our Easter Shopping Event).
Affiliate Ranking
Affiliate Ranking is the first permanent affiliate ranking based on the number of approved commissions generated in the last 90 days and is perfect in recruiting new affiliates who are performing good inside the platform.
This ranking is visible only within the 2Performant platform – for all active advertisers and listed affiliates.
Based on it, the advertisers can contact affiliates and initiate collaborations for the first time. Also, affiliates will always know their position within the ranking – both in each category and in the general one, making them more and more competitive between each other.
The ranking includes all new affiliates plus the old affiliates who opt to publicly display their position.
Using this ranking, you can invite affiliates who have chosen to list themselves and have notable performances, to your affiliate program.
To do so, go to the Affiliates → Affiliate Ranking section. In the first phase, you will see the ranking of affiliates, along with their traffic sources, from the category your program belongs to. However, you can also see the overall ranking.
For each affiliate, if he/she is not already approved in your program, you’ll have the Invite option.