Thanks to a 100% controlled ROI, affiliate marketing is particularly appreciated by advertisers. If you are an agency or an independent digital marketing consultant, offering this service to your clients can help them develop their ROI. If you, yourself, are looking for new opportunities to grow your business, membership can be a great option.
Affiliate marketing, or performance marketing, consists of an exchange system between advertisers who wish to promote their offers and affiliates with an audience (website, emailing database, social networks, etc.) and highlighting advertisers in exchange for remuneration for the leads brought.
- Equipping with a good affiliation platform
In order to perfectly manage campaigns, it is essential to choose the right affiliate platform. This is the tool that will be used to create your campaigns or those of your customers, manage affiliates (selection, remuneration, etc.), provide them with promotional elements (banner, mailing kit, etc.), and of course, track all transformations in order to remunerate affiliates accordingly.
Before making your choice, make sure that these features are offered by the platform you are going to select:
- A dashboard and reports to effectively monitor campaign performance.
- A clear interface for affiliates so they can easily find line items and track their results.
- In order to satisfy as many affiliates as possible, the platform must offer several compensation systems (lead of course, but also CPM or CPC).
- Likewise, it must integrate a billing system in order to easily remunerate the various affiliates.
- And if you’re an agency, importantly, check out how many programs you can create. Some platforms may seem advantageous from a price point of view for a program, but much less when you manage several.
2. CHOOSE AN INTERESTING REMUNERATION FOR BOTH PARTIES:
The affiliate compensation strategy is one of the key elements for a successful campaign. If the pay is too low, you will not be able to win over affiliates. Conversely, if it is too high, the ROI will not be there.
Before proposing a remuneration grid, benchmark the affiliate programs in your theme to see what the competition offers. The objective, for a new entrant, is to offer better in order to attract affiliates.
Also think about pay increments. With this system, you will be able to attract the biggest affiliates by offering a remuneration that increases according to the volume contributed.
3.SET LEAD QUALITY VERIFICATION PROCESSES IN PLACE
Another important point: check the quality of the leads brought. Have a strict follow-up, it will allow you to filter the non-qualitative leads so as not to remunerate them and to identify the affiliates bringing the most qualita
tive leads in order to offer them a system of remuneration bonus and motivate them to provide you with more visibility and volume.
4: PROMOTE THE PROGRAM TO RECRUIT AFFILIATES
Even after the launch phase of the program, don’t rest on your laurels, keep promoting the program continuously. Approach new affiliates on a regular basis in order to offer them your program or those of your clients if you are an agency.
5: IDENTIFY AND RETAIN YOUR BEST AFFILIATES
As we saw in point 3, it is important to identify your best affiliates:
- Those who bring in a large volume of leads;
- Those who bring in more qualified than average leads;
- Or those who have a network that can improve your brand image or that of your customers.
Once these “top affiliates” have been identified, take the time to communicate well with them in order to collect their feedback and offer them adapted solutions.
And at the same time, consider having regular communication (once a month) with all of your affiliates, via a dedicated newsletter for example.
