5 tips to make your affiliate program a success

Your affiliates help you get new clients, but what do they expect from your program? How can you convince them?

Here are 5 rules that will help you better understand how to set up your affiliate program, and for each one, exactly where to apply it in Affilae.

1. An optimized conversion funnel

This is one of the most important criteria for your affiliates, as well as for increasing your conversion rate.

For example, by working on your terms of purchase (free shipping, product return warranty, payment facilities, high-quality product pages), you will reduce the obstacles to purchasing.

The goal is to eliminate all the points where visitors leave. There is only one watchword: test, test and test your conversion funnel again.

Clear competitive advantages and high-quality content add value to your brand, and they will also help you convince affiliates to spread the word about your affiliate program.

2. Attractive commission rates

It is by rewarding your affiliates’ performance that you will motivate them to work more closely with you, and maybe even exclusively.

You must therefore keep an eye on the profitability of your affiliates: the partnership has to be a win-win, we cannot say it enough.

You could, for example, offer them commission levels based on the volume of sales:

• 10% from the first sale
• 12% < 20 sales per month
• 15% for between 20 and 40 sales per month

Why not also offer them the opportunity to have recurring commissions (revenue share) if your business is designed that way? In your rule settings, the option is called Activate recurring commissions: the partner is then paid for every purchase made by a customer they brought to you.

You could also opt for hybrid commission rates, for example:

• 7% CPA + €1 CPL (newsletter subscription or account creation)
• 7% CPA + €0.10 per click
• €150 fixed fee + 7% CPA

Each line matches a separate commission rule in your program. When you create a rule, the Rule type field offers Sale (percentage), Sale (fixed amount), Lead and Click. So you can combine CPA, CPL and CPC on the same program, with one restriction: Affilae accepts a single click rule (message Only one CPC rule is allowed).

For a one-off fixed fee, there is no dedicated rule type: you add it from Conversions then Add conversions, with the Commission type set to Fixed fees. That type adds a commission amount without creating a sale, so it does not impact your number of conversions or your revenue. See Add a conversion manually.

Anything is possible, be open and creative according to your budget, this will stop you closing doors. For a reminder of the main models on the market, read The main remuneration models in affiliate marketing.

3. Elements of high-quality promotion

Your advertising elements (banners, text, images, template emails, promo codes) help your affiliates maximize their conversion rate. Be aware of the formats they use, but also be proactive (and why not social networks?).

In Affilae, everything sits in the Medias menu of your program, which holds three sub-menus.

• Ads for your banners and visuals. See How to integrate a banner on Affilae?, and Popular banner design format for affiliate marketing campaigns to pick your sizes.
• Vouchers for your offers and dedicated promo codes. See How to create and track vouchers.
• Products Feeds for your catalogue. See Explanations of product flows, then Adding a product feed.

Feel free to give them your product feed, so that your affiliates can build deep affiliate links to a product page. That is what the tracking link generator is for: your affiliate pastes the product page URL and gets back a tracked link pointing to it.

Also, add your logo. It appears on your Marketplace program listing, which is the first thing affiliates see when they discover you.

4. Liven up your program

Livening up your affiliate program is its key focus, the most important one. It will enable you to motivate your affiliates to promote your products and services.

Here are some ways to liven up your program:

• Regularly add and keep your new advertising elements up to date, depending on your commercial offers.
• Reward your top affiliates by offering them performance bonuses or gifts. Affilae gives you two tools for this: customized remuneration, which applies a rate specific to one publisher without touching the rules of a whole group, and the Commission type Bonus in the Add conversions panel, to pay a one-off bonus of the amount of your choice.
• Create exclusive deals with the most suitable affiliates, to secure their ongoing communication about your products and services. A publisher group lets you apply the same conditions to every partner concerned, and move a publisher from one group to another as they grow.
• Create challenges, for example by boosting commissions over a period which is particularly attractive for you. You can also share a calendar of upcoming challenges with your affiliates. Events like Black Friday, Christmas or the sales are particularly suitable for this type of action.
  • It could involve challenges like a CPA + CPL per sale, for example a commission of 7% + €5 per new client over a given period.
  • Or a temporary increase in the CPA, or in the payment attached to a product category (for example + 2% on high tech).

Finally, check your program notifications: they are what tell your affiliates about the changes you have just made.

5. Quick payment for affiliates

A quick, problem-free invoicing process makes your affiliate partnerships much easier to manage.

It is important to have as much transparency and consistency as possible in the affiliate payment process, and that starts with validating leads and sales.

Tell them your deadlines:

• Sales validation deadline (generally the beginning of the month, for the previous month’s sales).
• Commission payment deadline (as early as possible is best).

On the tool side, validation happens on the Conversions page of your program. To understand what your affiliate sees at each step, read Understanding conversion statuses. If you handle large volumes, validate your conversions in bulk with a .csv file rather than one by one.

For the payment itself, start with Paying your affiliates: where to start, then Managing payments for a self-managed program.

Bonus: the two habits that make the difference

Test your program before launching it. It would be a shame to spend time building a partner network and then have sales tracking fail, damaging the trust those partners placed in you. A piece of advice: create your own affiliate account for all your tests. The full procedure is in Testing click and conversion tracking.

Ask for feedback from your affiliates, and use it. Do not forget: a good relationship with your affiliates is like a good client, it is much easier to retain them and keep them happy than to build a relationship with a new one.

Related articles

• Create your affiliate program step by step
• 10 tips to find affiliates
• Configuring commission rules
• The different types of affiliates
• Listing your program on the marketplace