Relationships in Affiliate Marketing

One of the biggest parts (arguably) to affiliate marketing is relationships.

Having a product / service that is desirable obviously helps. A site that converts will obviously attract affiliates. A recognisable brand will also be conducive in the initial affiliate recruitment stages.

Above all else though, having a close working (and often personal) relationship with your affiliates is fundamental to any affiliate marketing success.

They need to feel professionally respected and desired - otherwise why else would they promote you? Why else would they risk their own resource and money in promoting you?

Affiliate Success Stories from ‘Little Brands’

There are many examples of successful affiliate programmes from brands which you might not necessarily think of as ‘large, well known’ brands. The reason for this success is because they know how to treat their affiliates well!

Examples include:

• Prezzybox
• Sunshine

Prezzybox Affiliate Programme - Award Winning

Prezzybox resides in an extremely competitive market - gifts and gadgets. However, due to the success of their affiliate programme (driving 35% of their business!) - they have enabled to become established as a true market leader.

Zak Edwards - the managing director of Prezzybox, clearly knows the power of affiliate marketing and how you need to treat your affiliates to keep them motivated to work for you.

Prezzybox has a wide affiliate base and due to their committment to constant communication with their affiliate base on various blogs and forums - they are able to continually grow their base. They also recognise the power of Super Affiliates and how to incentivise them.

Offering new innovatory methods has also ensured that the programme continues to be a programme of choice for many affiliates. In 2007, Prezzybox launched a new content item for their affiliates - Vidiboxes. These were product videos contained in creative formats and were hugely popular among the content affiliates - not least because of their great CTRs!

Essentially, Prezzybox’s committment to innovation and committment to keeping their affiliate base happy ensures that their business is safeguarded, even in the worst economic climates!

Sunshine.Co.Uk - Wordpress Plugin!

At the recent A4U Expo - Sunshine.co.uk revealed their completely new revolutionary tool - a wordpress site plugin. You can simply create your own travel based site on wordpress. Simply get a domain, install wordpress and away you go.

The plugin includes an XML feed of all the offers, an image media tool and content structure. The result is essentially a ready made site!

Why have Sunshine gone to such lengths? Simple. To make it even easier for affiliates, who may not necessarily tried their hand at the travel game previously, to get involved in promoting their programme.

The initiative really is revolutionary - it has created alot of buzz and PR in the affiliate community and I am sure it has already started to grow a large affiliate base for them.

Affiliate Marketing Tips - Improving Affiliate Relationships

There are numerous ways in which relations with affiliates can be improved - the most important thing is to understand your affiliate base, understand what makes them tick and tailor your incentivising to them.

Ways of improving affiliate relationships include:

• Tiered or incentivised commissions (giving your super affiliates a higher tiered commission works well)
• Tailored Landing Pages - ability to customise to the affiliates strengths must be taken into consideration. Tailorin landing pages for them where you remove any leakage points, remove phone numbers etc (give the affiliate what they want - within reason obviously)
• Specific Phone Numbers - if telesales is a strong sales channel for your business, consider giving your top affiliates their own specific phone numbers. This ensures you are completely rewarding their efforts.
• Brand bidding / closed set of brand bidders - consider allowing your top affiliates to brand bid. Consider the impact this will have on your own volume and implement strict rules around this (ie keeping below your own brand). If you are a large advertiser that already suffers from a host of competitor brand bidding - a strategy to force competitors out and push them off the front page is to let 2 or 3 affiliates brand bid.
• General Rewards - Many advertisers often treat their affiliates to special events and days out. This could be something small from taking them Go-Karting for the day to treating them to a holiday abroad. Having larger prizes and rewards running for a set amount of time ensures it keeps your affiliates motivated and incentivises them to promote you even harder.
• Creative Innovation - For content affiliates, innovation in displaying product feeds is essential. Creating completely new formats (like Prezzybox) ensures that the affiliates are able to monetise their traffic better, thus driving more volume for the merchant.

General communication is also fundamental in the management of affiliates. Answering affiliate’s questions, paying affiliates on time, updating on any new business changes and general personal communication. Get to know your affiliates personally, take them for a beer, treat them like real people! This just helps build long term, effective affiliate relationships.

If you have a site that converts, you operate in a profitable sector and know how to treat your affiliates like Kings (or Queens) - then you really are on to a winner.

Related posts:

1. Affiliate Management Affiliate Marketing is a specialist channel within online marketing that...