Haiden Hibbert January 19, 2022 If you’re looking to grow your e-commerce business and boost sales, a solid affiliate management strategy can do wonders. You need to consider all aspects of this, including affiliate programs, networks and managers.
How to Run Your Affiliate Management Program
You have a few options for managing your affiliate program. If you’re going to do it yourself, in-house, you could have a full-time, dedicated affiliates manager position or a team of people performing this function. But, if you’re running a smaller operation, the affiliate management function could be one of your marketing specialist’s various tasks. On the flip side, if you’re already running a large, growing business and are looking to scale up even more, consider using an outside affiliate management company as your partner. They’ll save you a ton of time and energy doing and managing the work yourself, plus their contacts and expertise in the field can be invaluable.
Tips for High-Performing Affiliate Management
To run a high-performing affiliate management program:
Foster a positive, ongoing relationship. Nurturing quality relationships is vital to a successful affiliates program. You’ll need to represent your brand as accurately as possible as you communicate consistently with your affiliates. Remember that since they work with many other brands and affiliate managers all the time, it’s your job to clearly demonstrate why your brand and company are a great choice to partner with.
Challenge your affiliates and hold them accountable. It’s completely normal and expected to desire and demand reasonable success from your affiliates partners and to push them for more once in a while, as needed. After all, you’re rewarding them for a reason. They should anticipate and respect this, too, as long as mutual trust, appreciation and need for success have been established at the outset.
Put out what you want in return. Being calm, pleasant and respectful goes a long way when things aren’t going well. No matter what happens, remember that the affiliate world is small, so you can’t risk burning bridges. When you follow that age-old advice of treating everyone as you’d like to be treated, you’ll set yourself up for long-term, successful partnerships.
Qualify your affiliates manager. Think of your affiliates as long-term advocates and partners for your business instead of one-time promoters or advertisers that move on quickly. With this in mind, you should craft your affiliate program so that it’s a win-win for everyone, both you and your affiliates. Your affiliate program can drive a significant share of your revenue when your affiliates manager is effective at their job. This means ensuring that all affiliate management-related tasks are conducted smoothly and to a high-quality standard. These include:
- Tracking and monitoring ads,
- Assessing campaigns and reporting on their activity,
- Optimizing your site for target KPIs,
- Screening and recruiting new affiliate partners, maintaining those relationships and growing their accounts,
- Running and managing promotions, and
- Seeking out the best ways to boost your business’ performance through affiliate marketing.
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