Having a great affiliate program is an amazing way to boost your income without increasing your workload or marketing budget. Having good affiliates is like having an army of salespeople that you only pay if they make a sale. Even if each individual affiliate sells only one item, imagine the possibilities. But you’re going to have a lot more success if you try not to make the following mistakes that some of the best affiliate program managers made, first starting out.
"We didn't provide enough direction and support to our affiliates."
When you start an affiliate program, if you want it to work well, you need to support your team of affiliates. Provide them with some direction on how to promote your products and/or services. They don’t know what makes your products so awesome if you don’t train them about the products and teach them the different ways in which they can promote.
The way to do this is to set up an autoresponder just for your affiliates to join. Some affiliate software already has this included and will connect to your autoresponder if you set up a list for them, or you can email to them directly from the affiliate system. You may consider services like Clickbank.com and Gumroad.com.
"We didn't assist our affiliates enough with their goals and strategies."
Goal setting with your affiliates is a good way to encourage more sales. You can do this in several ways, such as having a contest that gives out extra money or prizes for a certain level of sales, or a winner takes all approach in that your top salesperson (which is what an affiliate is) gets a big cash prize if they win the contest.
How you set this is up to you, but the point is you want to get your affiliates excited about the potential of how much money you can make. Send them emails about how to set goals, how to reach goals, and tie it with your product. Give real examples of how much they can make so that they get excited to set goals and reach them.
"It took us way too long to offer helpful tools to our affiliates."
One thing super affiliates really want are tools to use to promote your product. They don’t want to have to create everything themselves. Make numerous graphics, emails, articles, videos, and more for your affiliates. For top affiliates, offer to co-host a webinar to promote your products. Offer top affiliates the ability to request specific tools to use to promote your products.
It should be just a matter of your affiliates grabbing the information, cutting, pasting, and editing slightly to make it their own. Tell them exactly what they can do with all the marketing collateral that you have created for them to give them ideas. Don’t just leave it in their affiliate center without telling them what they can do with the tools.
"Our customer service wasn't as good as it should have been when we first started out."
If you want happy affiliates, keep your customers happy. Good customer service is important to your customers, affiliates, and to your bottom line. An open-door policy will help you build good, solid relationships with your customers and your affiliates. Communication is the key to success with both groups.
When a customer reaches out for help, prompt replies are essential, especially if they are angry or frustrated. They need a friendly, knowledgeable, patient, unflappable customer support person to listen, fix the issue, or explain a concept. Good support keeps customers coming back and buying through affiliates.
Email your affiliates often to give them advance notice of promotion opportunities and materials. Make promoting your products easy, fun, and profitable. Provide affiliate support through customer support, or create an affiliate management team to keep affiliates pumped up and happy.
"We had a few hiccups with our affiliate payouts, which meant we weren't paying out on the scheduled days. That was a problem."
If you want happy affiliates that continue to promote your products, pay them at the scheduled time. Some systems allow for instant payments. Systems, such as Gumroad.com, provide that ability. Many also provide for chargebacks and refunds, which extract funds from the affiliate who referred a returned product, so you don’t pay out for returns.
Pay affiliates 30 to 45 days after the sale is made, and the return deadline has passed. If you pay quickly, your affiliates will gladly promote more. Don’t set a payout limit if you can avoid it, either. Cickbank.com and other large companies are famous for setting a minimum for payout. This discourages and frustrates affiliates. They often give up when they feel they aren’t appreciated or that they won’t receive the money that they earned.
"Our cookies were too short."
A cookie is a little program that is downloaded to someone’s computer based on the link they clicked on. It is what enables an affiliate to get credit for the sale. Some cookies expire within a few days. Others expire after 30 days or more. Some cookies only “credit” the affiliate when a sale is made. Others give credit for a referral.
A lifetime cookie credits all clicks to the first affiliate who refers a person. This affiliate also gets “credit” for anything that the person buys. The affiliate and buyer are linked for the lifetime of the cookie. Rather than offering a 30-day or a lifetime cookie, consider a 90, 180, or 360-day cookie to encourage frequent promotion from new affiliates, as well as loyal and super affiliates.
"Honestly, our commission rates were too low in the beginning."
A huge mistake that people often make when embarking on creating an affiliate program is they make the commissions too small. Honestly, anything under 50 percent is probably too low for digital products. It’s understandable that a physical product will have a much smaller payout, but for affiliates who promote digital products, they really do expect at least half.
You must realize that when you develop a digital product, you don’t have additional costs for each sale. Therefore, giving 50 percent to your affiliate isn’t going to break the bank. In fact, it’s going to enable you to make even more money. Imagine how far you’re going to get trying to sell your product 100 percent on your own, compared to how far you’ll get if you have 100 affiliates selling your product for you.
"I made the HUGE mistakes of lowering commission rates."
If you want your affiliate numbers to drop like flies, then lower their commission rates. Do the math to find out what you can really afford to pay out to your affiliates based on the product so that you don’t have to lower the commission rate later. This can sometimes happen with physical products as production costs increase, but it should not ever happen with digital products. If you’re having issues and need to make more money, raise the price of the product or create new products instead.
"At first, we provided no affiliate mistake. What a mistake!"
When you begin an affiliate program, in effect, you are turning your fans into salespeople. Successful companies do this by training their sales force. You want to offer training on your affiliate platform so that they understand how to sign in and get the marketing material. You also want to offer training regarding your products. Give them a sneak peek into your products and solutions. Give them suggestions about how they can promote your products. Teach them about Google Ads, email lists, blogging, product reviews, and so forth. This information will help your affiliates promote and pre-sell your items.
"We didn't stay engaged with our initial affiliates, so they felt forgotten. We should have kept them motivated."
A powerful way to motivate your affiliates is to build an affiliate community. If you choose to create a Facebook group, you can announce your new products, talk about contests, and call out affiliates who have done well. When others know, who is winning prizes, successfully promoting, and earning money from your products, they will believe it can happen for them too. This motivates them to promote more to succeed.
Each of the quotes above are from affiliate program managers now successfully managing programs bringing in at least six figures a year. But everyone must start somewhere! And now you won’t make the same mistakes as you move forward with your affiliate management program.
