Affiliate marketing is all about trial and error before you find out your most suitable strategy. However, when you find the strategy working for you, you need to fine-tune it to meet all your needs. Without fine-tuning your program, you target a wide range of audiences, which can either be hit or miss. Although you need to hit a bullseye to reach your targeted consumers effectively, make sales, and grow your business. Today we will be talking about how you can effectively optimize your affiliate program.
Improving Your Prospecting New Affiliate Method
Prospecting is the process of building brand new relationships. For increasing sales, a business requires new clients, and acquiring new clients requires building relationships. Prospecting is the heart of a business. If it stops beating, your business opportunity dies. Prospecting quality affiliates is one of the crucial factors for your affiliate campaign to succeed.
Acknowledging how essential your sales numbers are and treating them accordingly is the foremost step to improving your prospecting results. It is a continuous process, and is required to be improved every day. There should be effective funnel and pipeline designs to create a sustainable flow of prospects. You should also include a certain time for prospecting into your weekly plan. You can set aside time each morning for prospecting; that way, you’ll feel energetic and can make sure that it is done with the proper focus.
Often it is seen that you prioritize other things other than prospecting while your competitors surpass you. Thus, if you want to prospect effectively, make sure to avoid all the other distractions. When you take prospecting seriously, only then will it bring the optimum results you need to grow your affiliate program. Prospecting is an important step to grow your program, so give it the time that it deserves. In this era of smartphones and social media, putting total concentration on one thing requires sheer willpower. If you fail to provide the willpower, your prospecting will fail miserably.
There are dozens of prospecting methods, and you shouldn’t be afraid to try each and every one of them. You may be good at something, and your business may get the advantages from that strategy. However, every one of your prospects has their idea about how they want to be approached. If you are avoiding any method, you may be avoiding a number of potential prospects as well. You can always set different goals for different approaching methods. Keep track of the time, and set aside a certain time to try each prospecting method. Your affiliate program may have gained a certain boost of affiliates prospecting via email marketing. That doesn’t mean you can avoid cold calling, social media marketing, referrals, trade shows, trade shows, or inbound marketing methods. When you apply all the tools in your toolbox, only then can you expect to see which works best.
You can easily use a script to enhance the effectiveness of prospecting for new affiliates. If you cannot say what your potential consumers want to hear, no matter how much effort you provide, you cannot lock your prospect. Your language choice can make a huge difference when you are building your prospect. However, It shouldn’t sound robotic or way too bookish. Know your consumers, and follow the trend that your consumer base follows. Then decide the correct words that can turn them towards your business or even just make a comment in your social media post. Your awareness, focus, discipline can only make your words perfect and help you gain the desired result in achieving your effective prospects.
The ultimate goal of your prospecting is to build relationships and you should always be result-oriented. You cannot slip into a sales mood! Your ultimate focus should be on building an open relationship. You will hear a lot of ‘no,’ and it is a part of the process. However, you should be focusing on the long-term relationships you can build over time, not getting tons of ineffective ‘yes.’ Every email, every call, every ‘thank you’ card matters. The more your prospects hear about you, the more they will be keen on doing business with you. Nurture your relationships till it grows roots and stays strong. Make a plan and nurture it accordingly.
Things to Improve About your Affiliate Onboarding Process
The process of getting new affiliates familiarized with the program and getting prepared to start promoting your products is referred to as the affiliate onboarding process. The more affiliates you have acquired to promote your business, the more conversions you are likely to get if they can correctly communicate the benefits of your product or service to their audience.
Communicating the details with your affiliates is another important factor in improving your affiliate onboarding process. Clear communication between you and your affiliate will be highly advantageous for both parties. Therefore, be upfront about what the benefits of your product or service are, who that target audience is, the commission they will receive, cookie duration, terms of service, and payout details before bringing them onboard. It will not only improve your affiliate onboarding process but also help your business grow without a hitch.
Making communication easy can help you solve any problems that arise within a very short time. Setting up a certain communication channel (Skype, Telegram, Email etc) for the affiliate will help them to ask any affiliated-related inquiries to the exact person or department that it should be. A dedicated email can be pretty effective in this manner. In addition, scheduling face-to-face meetings from time to time helps as well. It will help you to provide the affiliates more in-depth questions and give you an understanding of if they can meet your needs.
Providing the affiliates the necessary tools can reduce your hassle on a large scale. Your banners, tweets, Facebook posts, promotional videos, product feeds or marketing kit can make affiliates understand the messaging that works best within a very short time. It will make each affiliate’s promotion consistent and recognizable for their audience.
Personalizing the total affiliate experience helps highly improve the onboarding process. Each affiliate will have different levels of understanding, and you are the one who knows your product or service. So, reach them out and brainstorm what the best way they can promote your product or service. In some cases it’s best to hold their hand and walk them through the whole product or service offering so they get a full understanding of the best affiliate marketing process to implement..
Questions You Should Ask
Optimizing your affiliate program requires the ability to ask the right questions. With the right questions asked, you’ll know how effective the program will be for your business as well as the affiliates who promote your offerings. Rather than stacking thousands of questions or sugar-coating them, you should be direct when looking for finding the right publishers to promote your products or services or getting feedback from your current affiliates. Only then can you get a direct answer and can understand the capability of the affiliate.
Here are some questions you should ask your CURRENT affiliates that have already been approved for your program:
- How is our offering performing to your audience?
- How does our offering compare to other campaigns your running in the same niche?
- What is the CTR, CR and EPC of the other campaigns in the same niche?
- Please share the urls of these products
- Can you suggest anything to make our offer convert better? Wording? Pricing?
- Are you able to get everything from our tracking system?
- What do you need to scale up promotion for our product?
Here are some questions you should ask your CURRENT affiliates that have already been approved for your program but stopped promoting your offering:
- Why did you stop promoting?
- What are you promoting now?
- Please share the urls of these products
- What is the CTR, CR and EPC of the other campaigns in the same niche that you’re promoting now?
- Can you suggest anything to make our offer convert better? Wording? Pricing?
Here are some of the questions you should ask affiliates BEFORE approving them to promote your product or service:
- Do you have a website? If yes, please provide the URL.
- What is your monthly website traffic?
- What is your primary traffic source?
- Which other products are you currently promoting?
- How much revenue did you generate in the last 2 months promoting these products?
- Please share a screenshot of the platform the revenue is generated from and show today’s date on your computer or phone.
- Who is your contact to promote these products?
- How long do you think it will take for you to generate substantial sales?
With these questions, you now have the ability to optimize your program effectively. You also have done competitor analysis if your potential affiliates or active affiliates are promoting your competitors products!
Feedback from Your Affiliates
The feedback provided by your affiliates is pretty important to optimize your entire program. The affiliates know how well your products are received by their audience and your potential consumers. Therefore their input is a valuable asset to reorganize your strategy and recognize your strong and weak suits. What you are offering may be amazing for a group of consumers. Yet, it may not provide a mutual benefit to the affiliates who are needed to promote it. So, consider what your affiliates are telling you about your offerings. Consider the feedback you receive, and plan what you can alter and what you should discard. Your business brings you the optimum value only after you’ve made adjustments based on the feedback of your affiliates.
How is Your Program Compared to Your Competition?
Tracking your competitor is another important step in optimizing your program and bringing fruitful results. You should seek out who your competitors are and what the offer their affiliates. Why not apply to their program and see what their onboarding questions are as well as the assets, commission and payments they offer affiliates to promote their offerings? Listen to what your current affiliates are telling you about your competitors. They will provide you with important information like how the product is compared to yours or the extra it brings to the table. By tracking that information, you’ll effectively get to know what else you need to include in your affiliate strategy and what is there to let go of.
Tracking The Data
Tracking affiliate data is pretty crucial. It will give you a certain understanding of what is working and what isn’t. Moreover, you get to know what requires attention and what you can just simply avoid. Not every strategy works the same. Focus on what is working and pin it to higher importance. Do your products convert a lot higher on iOS traffic in Canada than iOS and Android users in the US? It’s time to focus on getting more iOS traffic in Canada from your current affiliate base or even better – find NEW affiliates that have their traffic! Go out and find a reliable traffic source that has this traffic to test an internal media buy on.
We cannot tell you how important it is to optimize your affiliate program in order to increase the results not only for your company but for the affiliates driving the traffic. You need to remember that your affiliate’s are promoting your products and services but only get paid when the agreed upon action takes place. If another offering converts better for them and they are able to generate more revenue they will shift their focus right away leaving you behind without notice. This is why you always need to be focusing on consistently improving your program.