If you’ve found yourself in a position where your affiliate programme only has a handful of active players, don’t worry – you’re not alone. Every programme in the world has at least some dormant partners, although granted some suffer more than others. Perhaps there hasn’t been enough time or resource dedicated to your affiliate channel in recent months, or maybe affiliates have been slowly dropping off and you haven’t been able to pinpoint the reason why. Either way, it’s never too late to breathe life back into your affiliate programme.
What do you have to offer your affiliate base?
Before you start to ask what affiliates can do for you, you first need to ask yourself what you are doing for your affiliates.
1) Can I provide the tools to help affiliates promote SFI business easily and effectively?
2) Is it SFI commercially competitive?
3) Do I have the resource to maintain my affiliate programme?
In performance marketing, you reap what you sow. The affiliate channel is an excellent way to generate cost-effective sales on a risk-free basis; however it does need to be maintained. Ideally this should be by someone who understands the channel properly. Invest in personnel with the knowledge and experience to develop relationships with your affiliates and grow your programme.
Once you can answer “yes” to all of the above, you know that you’re in a great position to start reaching out to affiliates with the aim of reactivating your partnerships.
Don’t forget the basics - Don’t forget to arrange a good strategy with your top cashback, voucher, basket abandonment and retargeting partners. It sounds obvious, but still worth mentioning!
Keep up the good work - Affiliate is a relationship-based industry, and relationships need to be maintained. Don’t spend all this time reviving your dormant programme just to ignore it again. Grow your SFI business by recruiting new players, either with fancy affiliate discovery tools or simple search engines: there will always be new players popping up in your industry that you should contact. Affiliate days are a great way to keep your affiliates engaged with SFI, as are industry events, themed competitions and engaging incentives.
Above all, never forget that your affiliates are the ones driving your business forward. As long as you can prioritise their needs and goals, they can help you achieve yours.
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If you’ve found yourself in a position where your affiliate programme only has a handful of active players, don’t worry – you’re not alone. Every programme in the world has at least some dormant partners, although granted some suffer more than others. Perhaps there hasn’t been enough time or resource dedicated to your affiliate channel in recent months, or maybe affiliates have been slowly dropping off and you haven’t been able to pinpoint the reason why. Either way, it’s never too
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