Find below some very simple ways you too can nurture and retain high-performing affiliates for your business.
Provide Valuable Incentives: Yes indeed! Business persons give incentives for a reason and it is always for the benefit of their businesses. To attract new affiliates and to keep them engaged even after the initial deal, some high-value incentives come in very handy. From experience, some of the best affiliate marketing incentives out there include but not limited to giving affiliates special discount codes and offering them competitive commission rates. Others include giving them extra freebies and branded business paraphernalia like caps, T-shirts, key-holders, mugs, tea cups, notebooks/pads etc.
Reward High Value Affiliates: A valuable reward system is also an effective business incentive some of which may be intangible and immeasurable gestures like simple “thank you” notes and remembering anniversaries with tokens. If feasible, occasional telephone calls are also helpful. That is in addition to occasionally giving away gift cards, freebies and bonuses. These token gestures amazingly go a long way to show affiliates how much they’re appreciated and valued.
Focus more on the Positive: You must learn to focus more on the positive if you want to build enduring business relationships. Yeah, everyone gets to make some mistakes once in a while but that shouldn’t take away the good they’ve been doing all this while. It pays better to focus more on the good while doing everything to avoid greed and presumptuousness. In a business partnership, ensuring everyone gets their dues out of the relationship is what helps to nurture the relationship. Consciously making decisions with utmost respect for what benefits all parties is what helps business relationships to blossom.
Recognize Affiliates Success: Everyone likes to be recognized for what they do if they’re doing it well. It is not out of place to share in the success of your affiliates by helping them to showcase it in whichever way you can. That makes them proud and willing to continue to be in partnership with you. It can make other marketers easily notice their efforts thus engendering more business referrals for such affiliates. Since referrals can have two-way benefits, appreciated and grateful affiliates are much more likely to recommend your business to their fellow publishers, bloggers and influencers. That helps in no small measure to grow your business reputation. As a marketer, reputation can sometimes be the key that unlocks the real growth potential of your business. You can retain affiliates if they genuinely recognize their own benefits from that growth potential.
Foster Seamless Partnerships: Uncomplicated partnerships have a very strong way of making all the partners happy and contented. Working with unpleasant, presumptuous and difficult partners is usually not good for business. The best way to keep a partnership relationship alive and in good stead is to always be open and transparent in your communications with your partners. That helps to keep everyone in the relationship well informed and comfortable. If you habitually act unpleasantly, difficult to reach and generally evasive, it is difficult to foster seamless partnerships.
Provide Affiliates Valuable Information: Good communication is always vital in partnerships. Content marketing affiliates thrive on providing high-value content to the users. Without it, they find it very difficult to attract the needed traffic to patronize their partner-merchant’s products. So, it behoves on merchants to provide affiliates a hefty flow of valuable information relating to the products they are marketing. That enhances the ability of such affiliates to churn out very valuable content for the benefit of the products. When merchants provide good information to help affiliates write high value content, it also helps to ease up their writing and ability to produce more content at faster rates. That helps to nurture and maintain the partnership in good stead.
Partner only the Right Affiliates: It is best to work only with affiliates who like your brand and are ready to identify with it. That is the only way they can get to represent your brand adequately. It helps a great deal therefore to start off your partner relationship on a very strong footing by working only with affiliates who make sense, are easy to work with and capable of providing real value to your business. No doubt you are aware life is a whole lot easier when you’re doing what you love doing and working with people you actually want to work with who share your ideals about your business and your brand. When you work with the right persons as affiliates, sustaining such relationship and benefiting from it is a lot easier.
Involve Affiliates in Company Promos: Why not? They are your business partners remember? When your business has a promo going, making available to affiliates promo paraphernalia like branded mugs, key-holders, stickers, t-shirts, caps, etc. is one great way to get them interested and be fully involved in your promo efforts. As a business owner, you get to benefit from giving affiliates these items in several ways. Firstly, they help to incentivize your affiliates and make them feel appreciated for being part of your business. Secondly, the products help to put your affiliates in good stead to effectively promote your product/brand on and offline. Your business can actually get immense benefits from such promos if influencers actually get to lead the way in your promos. You must however ensure that all persons in the partnership get their full measures and benefits accruing from the promo. That is what helps to nurture the partnership.
Work Only as Real Partners: As marketing experts always like to say, genuine partnerships yield better results. There must be mutual respect and understanding for real partnerships to yield these results. Affiliate marketing partnerships work well when all parties to the relationship are rewarded appropriately in line with the partnership understanding. Anything short can lead to a sour relationship among the partners, particularly when one partner wants to take undue advantage of the others by scheming to get more out of the arrangement than the others. To promote better affiliate relations, a merchant should never try to eke out free promotions from other partners. Every partner must transparently be on board and rewards due to everyone from any promo appropriated transparently as well in line with the partnership understanding. That is what real partners do that helps the partnership to endure and benefit all parties.
Pay Affiliate Commissions Promptly: All business persons work to get benefits from the work they do. For affiliates, the commissions they earn serve as such benefits. Product merchants must never lose sight of the fact that their affiliate partners put in a lot of work and effort to promote their brand. This they do by constantly producing engaging content to grow their followers who patronize the products thereby helping merchants to grow their businesses. These affiliates deserve prompt and adequate rewards for their efforts. For that reason, merchants must endeavor to always keep them as active members of their payroll making sure they are remunerated in line with agreed terms and promptly too. That helps to motivate them well enough to enable the partnership endure.
Provide Free/Discounted Products for Trials: Influencers are opinion molders and the people who follow their lead do so out of trust. Because merchants should not expect every affiliate partner to automatically share their passion for the product/service they are marketing, these affiliates deserve to have a foretaste of the free/discounted products from the merchant. That puts them in a better stead to genuinely promote the products. You get much better results as a consequence of that.
Adopt Structured Commissions Payment: This is one great way to reward affiliate partners in direct proportion to their efforts. In online affiliate marketing compensation plans, it is well known that not all links, promotions, and conversions should pay the same. This is because some of these promotional efforts require more time and effort from affiliates than others. The real reason some need to be better compensated than others. Some merchants deal with this problem by using a tiered commission structure. That way, different affiliate actions garner different rewards. For instance, some merchants tend to pay more commissions if the consumer opts into marketing e-mails after making a purchase or if they convert a new customer rather than a repeat customer. That is why it makes a very good business sense to tier your affiliates’ commissions payment based on performance. That means, you’ve got to pay top performing affiliates more than others thereby incentivizing all your affiliates to work harder for their pay. Business-like no doubt!
