How To Achieve Affiliate Success & Durable Partnerships

In affiliate marketing, success isn’t just guaranteed by the strength of your product or service but also by how good the deals you make with affiliates and publishers are. Long-term success is often the result of enduring partnerships that have once been crafted to establish win-win cooperation between both parties.

Amber Spears is a Co-Founder at East 5th Avenue, an affiliate management education and marketing company. She was recently featured on Phonexa’s Amplify webinar series to discuss the topic, “Growing Your Affiliate Revenue and Building Lasting Partnerships through Programme, Process & People.”

East 5th Avenue has trained over 2,500 companies that generated over $530 million. From refining account management structures to incentivising performance and encouraging open communication, Spears’ insights serve as a guideline for tapping into the potential of affiliate partnerships.

Below are some key takeaways.

Watch the webinar here.

Define the Perfect Affiliate for Your Business

Spears identified three types of affiliates:

• Traditional Affiliates: Drive leads, help attract buyers, and enable brand-to-brand partnerships that power new markets, verticals, and customers. Traditional affiliate marketing channels include e-mail marketing, affiliate networks, SEO blogs, newsletters, e-books, review sites, and media buyers.
• Influencers & Creators: Thought leaders or micro-to-macro-celebrities with an immense following on social media and podcast listenership, as well as niche-engaged audiences.
• Ambassadors: Regular clients, brand advocates, and people who have a big influence on their friends, family, and peers. In business, ambassadors are the heart and soul of referral marketing and a great source of testimonials.

The basic difference between the three types is that traditional affiliates, influencers, and creators have an audience, while ambassadors have influence. Ambassadors are less efficient at marketing than creators, but they are exceptional in imposing authority and expertise on the audience.

Partnership Marketing’s Three Primary Elements

Here’s what Spears thinks of the three most important elements of partnership marketing – the affiliate programme itself, the people, and the process.

“When I start looking at [a programme], I might say, ‘We’ve got the people and the programme, but that means we have no process, so we have no consistency,’” said Spears. “Or we have the programme and the process built out, but we don’t have a good person in the driver’s seat – they’re doing 10 other things; they’re the social media manager, the copywriter, and they’re expected to be an amazing affiliate manager. That’s not going to work.”

Spears encourages managers who have trouble with any of these aspects to reassess the programme as a whole in the first place to reveal the underperforming elements. This can be a single element or all three elements, and it’s so important to hit the nail on the head with it.

Programme

Here’s what Spears suggests for programs that need improvement:

• Create a high-converting sales funnel
• Integrate Industry-leading payouts
• Establish sales tiers for your best affiliates, where the payouts increase as volume increases
• Deliver white-glove, proactive partner services for top affiliates

Being proactive with services given to the top affiliates is the key, explains Spears.

“If you do not woo them, take care of them, nurture them, they will go somewhere else,” said Spears. “You are sadly replaceable for them.”

People

“You want to align yourself with people – at your level or above it – who are going to give you good credibility and have offers, products, and services you feel comfortable promoting and are a service to your community,” says Spears.

What’s ultimately going to make you successful is bringing on salespeople rather than just people.

“You have to have somebody who likes to hunt in this position, who is motivated by money, and who can actually close business – not just somebody who is good at talking and just managing and growing your current department,” says Spears.

For Spears, it all comes down to combining the right sales personality with proper training.

“They need clear KPIs, a generous [compensation] structure, and they need to be good at both cold outreach and management.”

Process

Spears underscores the need for deep vertical integration with an example of how to maximise exposure when you are working with an affiliate partner that’s only promoting you once a quarter in their email newsletter.

Spears suggests advertisers ask the following questions:

• Can we get featured on your podcast, or can we sponsor it?
• Can we do some live streams or banner advertising together?
• Can we develop insightful blogs?
• Can we connect on LinkedIn and reinforce each other’s efforts there?
• What could we do together to be the best in the niche?

Next, programme managers should figure out how to diversify the types of affiliate partners they’re working with.

“If we’ve already gotten really deep into influencers and creators but haven’t touched the other types, how do we start diversifying into those new verticals? How do we expand our team?” asks Spears.

Team building is the first move a program manager needs to make to scale in a new vertical.

Spears suggests managers create some sort of loyalty amongst their affiliates:

“I closed hundreds of millions of dollars worth of sales as an affiliate manager, and one of my secret sauces was that I planned my whole year in advance with my top affiliate partners,” said Spears. “I knew what launches they were having, I didn’t put mine on top of theirs, I knew what contests they were doing, I was sending them referrals every month, they were sending me referrals every month – we mapped out our entire year so it worked together and not on top of each other.”

How To Build a Program That Incentivises Affiliates

According to Spears, nurturing partnerships and sustaining success long-term can be done in the following steps:

• Define the sphere of influence and list probable partners to target those that serve your target audience
• Set high standards for your affiliate marketing based on competitor programs
• Clearly define program terms, structure, and assets for your ideal partner

Spears looks at the process as a journey:

“Take care of [your partners] and build loyalty instead of just giving them money. You have to go the extra mile and that’s when you really start being sought after,” says Spears.

Filling the Gaps in Your Program

Spears also warns managers who concentrate on new affiliates only:

“Anyone doing process should be looking at this and saying, ‘What are the holes in our current programme? What would happen if our top affiliates left? How do we make sure we build a moat around them so they never want to leave?” says Spears.

“They need white-glove service … be proactive and take care of them – keep regular contact and be responsive.”

Cultivating Partnerships

Without a doubt, the secret to long-term affiliate success lies in relationship building, aligning incentives, and continuous recalibration toward the needs of both affiliates and companies.

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