In affiliate marketing , two words are essential to the success of any program: engagement and conversion.
Engage : occupy, attract or involve (someone’s interest or attention)
To convert : to change, to transform (someone or something)
Any brand that has launched an affiliate program will find that many of the affiliates that have signed up for their campaign have not yet started promoting their offers (not “engaged”). And while they’ve started doing that and getting some traffic, they haven’t turned that traffic into sales (not “converted”) yet.
Finding ways to engage affiliates and enable them to convert is the major challenge of any affiliate program. This requires dedicating time to it and understanding the challenges affiliates face.
For example, one of the main reasons for this lack of engagement and conversion on content sites is availability. Indeed, these affiliates very often have a full-time job in addition to their blogging activity. Because of this, the time they can devote to promoting affiliate programs is quite limited.
Having a strategy in place that will help you convince passive affiliates to promote your brand, especially bloggers, is essential to the profitability of your affiliate program. You can start by applying these 4 tips:
1 – Define the main objective of your affiliate program.
Do you want to increase your sales? Increase your notoriety? Generate more traffic on your site? Before you start rolling out initiatives to engage your affiliates and help them convert, it’s essential to clearly define your main objective. Ask yourself what a successful affiliate program would look like to you in the long run.
2 – Determine which audience is relevant to your campaign.
Once you have defined your main objective, you must determine the profile of the affiliates who will be able to allow you to achieve this objective. Most affiliate platforms allow you to communicate in a targeted manner with affiliates according to their type (increase in remuneration for cashbackers in exchange for increased visibility, exclusive codes for couponing sites, product testing proposal for content sites, etc.).
Each affiliate is a potential point of contact with your target. Depending on their profile, affiliates reach Internet users at different points in the conversion funnel. In this, we can say that they have a specific audience. If your main objective is to develop your notoriety, your efforts will have to focus on content sites. If you want to increase your sales, you will have to work primarily with retargeters (specialists in customer re-engagement) and cashbackers and/or couponers. You will then need to track the performance of these affiliates to verify that your targeting was relevant. If your campaign is entrusted to an affiliate platform, it is they who will carry out this optimization and monitoring work.
3 – Offer attractive incentives.
Will it be a promotion? A gift ? An exclusive discount code? What incentive can you provide to your affiliates to encourage them to relay your affiliate program? What works well is offering exclusive discounts. In general, advertisers give this kind of discounts only to large affiliates. It is a mistake. By benefiting the audience of smaller affiliates with exclusive discounts, you will generate incremental sales that you would not have had otherwise. Another technique is to give bloggers exclusive information about your brand (new product launch, private sales, etc.) a few days before the start of the operation. The “scoop” side will encourage them to relay the information. Generally speaking, the more valued affiliates feel, the more they will want to promote your brand.
4 – Personalize your communication
If you want to engage your affiliates (and content sites in particular), it’s important to establish a relationship of trust with them. You cannot therefore be satisfied with communicating only about your offers and services. You need to establish a personal relationship with them. Mention, for example, in your correspondence their last post. If you notice a change on their site (design, etc) let them know. Building a relationship of trust with your affiliates is a long-term job, which requires sufficient internal resources. If you are unable to do this work, entrust your campaign to an affiliate platform whose job is, among other things, to manage this relationship of trust with its affiliate network on a daily basis.
Do not forget ! Your affiliates are your brand advocates. They are the ones who will talk about it best and who will encourage Internet users to place an order on your site. If you want your affiliates to take the time to promote your brand, you also need to give them the time and attention they deserve.
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