3 tips to take care of your affiliate marketing strategies during a crisis period
The pandemic crisis forces us to adapt our commercial and marketing processes, and we know every business is doing its best to maintain a dynamic business landscape and reduce the risks.
That’s why at Affilae, our priority is to understand and see where we can support or provide you the information as many of us face challenges.
Here are a few best practices to maintain successful partnerships between advertisers and influencers, affiliate partners.
#1 Analyze and increase affiliate strategies
The current crisis is an opportunity to clean up your program and improve the relationship with your affiliate partners.
Looking at different KPIs, what are your top partners?
- Revenue,
- ROI,
- Average Basket value,
- Contributions/conversions,
- Market share in your global affiliate revenue, etc.
This is just an example of KPIs you can leverage to assess how relevant your partnerships are. Use the data that Affilae provides you to optimize and maximize your partnership strategies and think about the next challenges.
This might also be an opportunity for you and your publishers to look into new ideas (social media, email campaigns, etc).
Why not taking into account what they think, let’s say, with an interview ? Surveys to better understand their audience and how they manage their content strategies.
Draw together positive conclusions and areas to improve in the future.
Keep in mind that affiliate partners could be the best support to help you drive more efficient traffic strategies in time of crisis. Consider their power to influence your targets and your decisions in a positive way.
Stay alert on their communication during crisis and why not, getting associated to their communication?
#2 Reach out to influencers
Everybody knows influence marketing campaigns are hard to manage, especially since it’s quite time-consuming.
Identify the more relevant profiles in the depthof social networks, evaluate their potential, reach out to the right people in order to encourage them to review your products, follow their content strategies and analyze their performance.
Take advantage of this period to get as many partners as possible that you can then engage throughout the year.
Why not launching an outbound campaign with bloggers/influencers who have reviewed similar products in the past for example.
Affiliate marketing is probably the best way for you to highlight your influence campaigns.
Why? Do not only look for one-shots. Think recurrence. When you get an influencer on board, when you sent a product for review, do not forget to onboard them on your affiliate program in order to reward them based on revenue generated
Why not assigning them dedicated coupons too?
#3 Think long-term partnerships
In a time of crisis, the risk is to think short term to avoid increasing losses and to cut off partners tracking and revenue.
If we can get you a piece of advice, do not act under the pressure and consider the global impact of this kind of strategy on your brand reputation after the crisis.
Do not forget that the partnerships you have invested in and you supported will remain among the most efficient strategies to grow business.
So think long-term and ask yourself what are your options to quickly bounce back after the crisis.
Few tips:
- Negotiate payment delays,
- Postpone planned campaigns,
- Negotiate to decrease the commission of your partners over the period,
- Think to extend CPA partnerships.
Take the time to explain to your partners that only a joint effort will allow you to overcome the crisis and rebound together.
#Bonus: Communicate
Protect and preserve your partnerships alliances during this unprecedented crisis, even if you are facing off financial difficulties, always consider other alternatives that will preserve your affiliate partners.
The most important is to understand/consider the weight of the irreparable harm this will do to your brand reputation and also the potential risk to increase affiliate litigation.
Affiliates will appreciate the advertisers that stuck with them in times of crisis, so act transparently and make sure you are paying them fairly.
Stronger than the crisis.
