10 Questions For Affiliate Managers
This blog post is provided on the back of a YouTube video, designed to give managers of affiliate advertising some questions to see how they feel about where their affiliate program is currently at. There is some extra depth to the questions listed here for added context:
1. Are you over paying some partners?
If you’re paying all your partners the same commission rate, then you probably are, and there’s some savings to be made straight away by getting tactical with commission rates.
2. Are you wanting more sales from specific partners?
There’s always some partners that are under performing, in that case it’s important to ensure they’re properly incentivised to push your store and/or products.
3. Would you like to grow the number of partners you work with?
There’s an almost infinite amount of partnership opportunities available via the channel. It’s vital to continue to grow via new partnerships that add value.
4. Is there misalignment between your affiliate promotional plan and your marketing calendar?
Ensuring that unique affiliate promotions such as commission increases to cashback and loyalty partners or coupon codes align with wider marketing objectives is vital to protect margin and provide affiliates with compelling offers.
5. Is affiliate fraud an issue for you?
If there’s any affiliates on your program driving sales and you don’t understand how, then there’s a good chance you have an issue. This is the easiest way to waste marketing budget.
6. Are you struggling to launch affiliate influencers?
Influencers and content creators are relatively new to the affiliate space and require different thinking around both incentives and the benefits you get as a retailer. It’s important to develop a custom strategy to unlock the potential here.
7. Is communicating offers to affiliates a challenge?
Using your affiliates as a sales force for your business requires that they’re well aware of your products, promotions and USPs but keeping them updated with ever evolving discounts and messaging can be a major challenge. Get efficient and effective communication channels created and managed.
8. Are your affiliates sales not incremental?
Like ever single channel, you will see overlap between the affiliate channel and other traffic sources, with affiliate tending to sit lower in the funnel – but does it add value? Ensure you have the right data sources to understand incrementality at a partner level.
9. Do you know where affiliate fits in the customer journey for your business?
As with the previous question getting the right data will help you understand the value of the channel. With the right analytics set ups you can get accurate data on new customer purchases and understand which partners drive initial interest, not just conversion support.
10. Are your affiliate sales going backwards YoY?
It’s a competitive space, so staying still means you’re probably going backwards. Innovating year after year is challenging and time consuming. But you should still be seeing natural channel growth in revenue.
For those answering ‘yes’ or ‘maybe’ to any of these questions, help is at hand. If you’d like to solve these issues or need assistance in another way with your partnership marketing, please get in touch - we have solutions to put you on a path to success with each question asked here and a whole lot more without charging you ongoing commission fees.