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Affiliate Magazine: The affiliate life cycle

You may have heard the quote: “It’s 7 times easier to maintain a client than to find a new one” — Basic Marketing 101 for a brick-and-mortar business. I can confirm that. One of the stupidest ideas I ever had was to open restaurants. The easy mobile money made it possible to open not only 1 but 5 that all failed. It’s better to write now for Affiliate Magazine than in a gastro journal, I guess. I really saw that day-to-day. Getting clients in, especially if your places are off the beaten track, is a real struggle, but once they are in, it’s very easy to make them loyal and return if your food and the ambiance is great!

In Affiliate Marketing, that’s absolutely not the case, as getting an affiliate is fairly easy:

Affiliates are proactive in finding advertisers that are in their vertical

They look for ways to improve their business permanently with better offers and terms

As we work in an online environment — and something like Payout — it is a fact and not subjective, like the taste of food, that research is done fast and easy

Also switching from one advertiser to another or to change offers is done within a few clicks.

Knowing that, we need to use a different strategy to build and keep partnerships with our affiliates that send traffic to your program.

Every program and every AM is different, but let me share with you some points that will help you to develop your own way of top notch affiliate management.

Products have a lifecycle and so do partnerships. Let’s look at the affiliate lifecycle:

1. Acquisition:

How you connect the first time with a partner. Multiple options:

Over referrals from other affiliates that have good experiences with you or other industry people that make a little side hustle with referrals, cold reach out to Affiliates, Conventions, Research done by the Affiliate, program marketing (like writing an article for Affiliate Magazine)

Conversion Point: Getting the affiliate started

Challenge: How interested is the affiliate to start with you after knowing all the facts

Solution: Qualifying the affiliate from the start, present your program as something unique, the affiliate needs to be hot on running with you

Bonus advice: If you have Tier 2 affiliates, announce closing of account if not started within X weeks. There are scammers out there that just collect accounts that they later sell or use for scams after they are not on the radar any more for being a new account.

2. Maintaining:

The affiliate has started the traffic. Now the real challenge starts to keep them live. You are not used to each other, thus the perfect way of working and winning offers needs to be found

Conversion Point: Affiliate continues to send traffic.

Challenge: Affiliate stops for many reasons like bad performance, bad service, technical issues, private reasons, shaving

Solution: CRM system to not forget things, monitoring of results min on a weekly base, solution orientated behavior, bumps, switch from CPL to CPA or Revshare for best sub-sources, avoid to provide offers where you don’t rock just to have a quick buck but destroy overall performance, build deep and personal connections.

3. To the Moon:

Let’s become your affiliate’s favorite partner

Conversion Point: Growing the affiliate from small or medium to Whale level

Challenge: Competition with other programs and networks. Often other verticals are more successful for the affiliate.

Solution: White labels, Exclusivity, Incentives, Personal meetings, proactive informing about bugs and problems, bumps, customized promo tools

4. Keeping:

Your target has to be always to grow the affiliate, but at a certain point, it goes more into a state of keeping the status quo

Challenge: Avoid that the affiliate is reducing traffic or even stopping

Solution: Solution: Close monitoring, regular contact, solution orientated, inviting for first mover offers, run incentives, I would recommend to give to direct pubs money and to networks gadgets, usually an employee is not allowed to keep money but can accept things like headphones

Bonus advice: Cut away bad traffic sources so the overall payout rate for the legit affiliates can be higher

5. Restart

Affiliates are stopping, even if you work perfect, that’s the nature of things. Restarting affiliates is something that should be in the daily routine of any affiliate manager.

Challenge: Affiliate has often a winning solution in place at the competition and you need to offer something better

Solution: Start with Bump for successful Sub IDs, Reach out with newest solutions – maybe affiliate needed something in the past that you now have in place (another reason to maintain your CRM proper), check Callback, promo links and payment details before restart

Bonus advice: If the AM is not well connected with the partner and you have a business developer, it’s often more promising to let the Biz Dev do this task.

General advice

Approaching: Always make it in the first message clear what you want, avoid adding new partners on instant messenger and just post a waving smiley or hello.

Focus on the factors you can influence if an affiliate wants to stop. Don’t get into discussions if they want to switch verticals or don’t want to share reasons, as we all have a private life.

Keep your promises at any price, if really not possible stand up for the issue, its often hard as many things depend on factors you can only influence to a very small level like Tech capacity.

Don’t shit on the competition — you don’t have to blow out the other candle to shine more.

Build your own brand, online marketing has much to do with trust and reputation.

Create common ground with your most important partners: Insider jokes, memories together.

Connect with everybody possible even if not your vertical, people change jobs or make connections for you, also you can earn some money with referring people.

About the Author:

Stefan Muehlbauer is an industry veteran with more than 13 years in Affiliate management, Training of Account managers and building programs. His focus is the adult industry with a history in Dating, Toys, and Telemedicine, but also half of his career he worked parallel in mainstream verticals like Mobile, Nutra, and Leadgen. Under the Affpal brand he gave more than 100 speeches about affiliate management and products, and has an educational program for Affiliate managers and program owners. His main job is the Business Development of the Dutch based online dating company Masters in Cash.

For more insides on Affiliate Management, you can follow his channels

https://www.instagram.com/affpal/

https://www.youtube.com/@affpal

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