Is affiliate marketing one of your top three marketing channels? If not, it might be time to examine why your affiliates aren’t bringing in more sales.
The potential is certainly there. Shopify reports affiliate marketing is one of the top three customer acquisition channels for 54 percent of marketers, and 20 percent rank it as their most successful channel.
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Our Top 11 Tactics for Motivating Affiliates
I’ve been affiliate marketing for over 25 years! I’ve also been on the other side of things, as an affiliate program manager. The following affiliate motivation techniques have worked best for us over the years, and they continue to have the most impact today.
1. Competitive Commission Rates
We’ll start with commission rates because it’s one of the first things affiliate marketers consider. However, you won’t necessarily have to pay a high percentage per sale, you just have to be competitive.
Competitive commission rates are based on what your competitors are paying. Before setting a commission rate, it’s critical to know what the standard is for your industry. You don’t want to pay too little or too much, by comparison to your competitors.
For example, I have a website hosting partner that pays $20 CAD/sale for shared hosting packages, and I have another one that pays $175 USD. Most other website hosts I’ve worked with start at $50+/sale, but will negotiate higher rates based on performance. Which partner program do you think I promote most often? While more goes into my decision than the commission rate, I’m certainly motivated by the reputable programs paying $150 or more.
For experienced affiliate marketers, another important consideration is how well your offer converts (or will convert) for them. If they’re not making money from the partnership, they’ll move on to competitors or avoid the product/service category altogether. It doesn’t matter how much you’re paying if they can’t make a sale. If you have a high conversion rate for a product or service, make sure you let your affiliates know so they don’t base their decision on your commission rate alone. For the same reason, include your average basket size so affiliates can see the full payout potential.
This is especially important if you’re working with typically razor-thin business-to-consumer (B2C) margins, and consequently offer a small percentage of sales as a commission. They need to see the big picture to be motivated because as investors and super-affiliates like to say, “I don’t get out of bed for less than 10%.”
2. Outstanding Onboarding
Get off to a roaring start with a comprehensive onboarding process that’s sets up your partners for success.
“Affiliate onboarding is a structured workflow that brings new affiliates into your program and equips them with the knowledge, tools, and motivation they need to promote effectively,” writes Joran Hofman. “This process often includes a mix of training, resource sharing, and strategic communication.”
3. Make it Easy to Promote You
The easier it is to promote you, the more you’ll be promoted.
Make it simple to link to you. It’s important to use software or an affiliate network that facilitates deep linking, so affiliates can create their own link to a specific page/product on your website. If they know you carry a certain product and it’s easy to create a direct link to it, you’ll become one of their go-to merchants.
Additionally, make it easy to promote your products by including the affiliate’s ID in the ad code when you send out newsletters. For example, if you’re promoting Boxing Day deals, include the personalized code for banners and text links so the affiliate can easily copy and paste.
4. Make Them Feel Special
Extend special offers of a higher commission to recruit individual affiliates. Select affiliates who are specifically targeting your ideal market, such as Canadian niche bloggers. Lure them into your program with higher commission rates, exclusive deals and coupons, samples, merchandise, company swag, performance bonuses, contests, free content, and access to training.
5. You’re a Star
Your program’s top performers can be leveraged even further. Arrange special promotions with individual affiliates, such as supplying products for blog contests or paying extra for a sponsored video. Don’t be afraid to work outside the standard program box and ask them about their PR options. They know what works best for their audience and they have many creative ideas.
6. Provide Review Products or Services
It’s much easier to sell something you’ve used yourself, and even easier to sell something you continually use.
7. Fresh Content
According to CJ, the income of Canadian affiliate marketers who promote advertisers through content has grown exponentially in recent years. In 2020 alone, it grew by 126 percent YOY! That growth continued in 2021 (28 percent) and 2022 (16 percent).
Provide stellar content for affiliates to use on their websites, social media, and in their newsletters. Fabulous content should be useful to their readers, with the promotion being so subtle it almost looks like an accident. Encourage publishers to customize articles for their audience.
You can create a section for affiliate content on your website for marketers to access whenever they need it. Include timeless (evergreen) articles and target a variety of your buyer personas / customer avatars. When you create content around your customer avatars, they’ll be published most frequently by affiliates who have a similar audience. Make it a condition of use to only include a link to your business in the article.
You can have different levels of content, going from general content suitable for a wide range of affiliate niches to custom content for the top 10 percent.
Content for the top 10 could include:
- Extended, more detailed versions of content created for other affiliate publishers.
- Content customized to suit their audience.
- Multiple formats, such as a video version.
- Additional sidebars, charts, infographics, etc.
“It’s also important to identify both the affiliates that are currently driving a strong portion of total sales and those that are smaller but fast-growing,” writes Chrissy Kammerer for Partnerize. “Such ’emerging’ affiliates sometimes warrant personal attention because they are clearly demonstrating the potential value they can drive for your business.”
TIP: AI can be utilized for content ideation and research, but I don’t recommend posting a bunch of AI-generated articles. Most publishers don’t want them and if they do, it’s just as easy for them to do it themselves. For research with references, I currently use Perplexity Answer Engine most often. It searches the internet and identifies sources for verification.
8. Next-Level Newsletters
Tips, resources (internal & external), success stories, featured affiliates, upcoming promotions, leaderboards, coupon codes, and anything else that’s valuable and interesting to your affiliate partners. The best way to get them to open your emails is to provide value every single time. You’re not writing it to promote your business, you’re writing it so your affiliate partners can (and will) promote your business.
9. Competitions & Bonuses
Consider holding competitions or offer bonuses as an incentive to make a first sale, increase sales, or even for placing a certain type of link (such as a banner on the home page or a text link in a product review). Popular rewards or prizes are cash, gift cards, and electronics like iPads.
You can get creative with this. For example, you could have a bonus offer that allows the affiliate to earn a free product if they make 10 sales of that product. It can double the benefits because they’ll probably feature the product again after they receive it. If they do, they’ll likely include their own experience and images, making the content more authentic for both consumers and search engines.
Incentives are a much more effective tactic to increase sales than threats of program removal (a sure sign of an amateur manager). Threats will backfire in a multitude of ways.
TIP: Bonuses are an obvious motivator for periodic promotions, but don’t ruin the opportunity with hoops to jump through. Make it easy by automatically enrolling affiliates, as opposed to making them reply to the email or take another step to participate. They’re already factoring in the promotion time & effort that would be involved, and the extra step is often enough for them to pass. Instead, send out the notice & details and automatically enroll affiliates so they can act on the opportunity immediately. Top performers are busy and have to be careful with their time. They can’t chase every shiny offer. For instance, if I see the words, “reply to this email to be eligible…,” I delete it and move on.
10. Hire a Motivated Affiliate Program Manager
Too many affiliate programs languish away in the wrong department, or they’re assigned as an extra task to someone who goes through the basic motions. If you don’t have a designated affiliate program manager, you’ll never scale to the heights you could. You may even lose money. A good affiliate program manger won’t cost you money, they’ll make you money.
Someone has to continuously guide, nurture and motivate your affiliates and recruit new ones. They’re fully involved in making this marketing strategy successful. Additionally, they know how to test, track, report, and refine strategies. It’s a marketing specialty requiring the same level of expertise as any other. Experience for this position is golden, but it can be tough to find.
11. Engage
If your affiliate program is large and your partners respond to engagement, start a Facebook group or pages on other social networks that are specifically for your affiliate partners. You should also have an affiliate page on your website with contact information (including the aforementioned social options).
If you’re using a third-party affiliate network (such as PartnerStack or Share-A-Sale), find out what opportunities for engagement they have. They may have their own communities or contact methods that you can tap into, and some have blossoming influencer programs too. You’ll also find independent discussion forums and groups for affiliate marketers online that welcome merchants.
If you haven’t launched an affiliate program yet, check out How to Start an Affiliate Program for a Canadian Business for further guidance.
Have you found an effective way to motivate affiliate marketers? Please share in the comments below or join us in the Online Business Canada Facebook group.
Related Reading
How to Recruit Top Influencers for your Affiliate Program
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Melody McKinnon is an internet entrepreneur with 25 years of experience in a wide range of online business models, backed by a formal business/marketing education and enhanced by training and mentorship. She has owned or managed both educational and ecommerce websites. Her book, 7 Recession Proof Online Businesses to Start From Home, is available from all major ebook retailers.
Melody has worked with many businesses in a multitude of capacities. She can often be found on CanadianDigitalMedia.com, CanadiansInternet.com, CanadianFamily.net, and AllNaturalPetCare.com, as well as other quality digital publications. Her content has earned reference links from highly-respected websites, magazines and university textbooks.
There isn’t much useful information about affiliate program management out there and especially not in Canada! Appreciate you so much!
Every time I visit your website, I’m greeted with thought-provoking content and impeccable writing. You truly have a gift for articulating complex ideas in a clear and engaging manner.
WOW! The motivation methods are quite common but your insights are toppers. I’m just starting our affiliate program but I’ve been “starting” for a year LOL. It’s much more involved than I expected but I’m reassured by the figures you showed us here. You could even say I’m MOTIVATED! 😉
I agree with hiring a great affiliate manager but they are very hard to find. I’ve looked at agencies that manager programs but I want more personalized service than they can give me. If anyone has any recommendations I’d appreciate hearing them. I’m learning about LinkedIn job listings and will post something soon but maybe you guys have better ways to find these unicorns?
Should we use freelance content writers to compose our articles for partners? Until we find an affiliate program manager I’m stuck doing most of our affiliate program admin. I can’t find that much time but I love the idea!
Content production can be done by any qualified writer. You’ll just have to be very clear on what you want, and it will probably require more editing/customization. Good luck!