Help Them Sell More: How to Nurture Relationships with Your Product’s Affiliates

Setting up an affiliate program for your platform or product is only the first step. 

If you really want your program to bring in real revenue, you need to get to know your affiliates and to let them get more familiar with your product.

In other words, if you want your affiliate program to boost your revenue, you need to help your affiliates sell more. 

And there’s no better way to do that than by nurturing your relationships with your affiliates.

Why Build Your Relationships with Your Affiliates

Affiliate marketing is a great sales driver, but only if you keep working on making it successful.

Most business owners I know assume that affiliates are supposed to be most interested in selling more. After all, the affiliates are being paid a commission off every sale.

The reality is, affiliates are often overwhelmed with great and high-paying affiliate programs. Yours may very well get lost in the crowd unless you take time and effort to maintain a fruitful dialog with your business’s affiliates.

Affiliate marketing is all about relationship building.

Nurturing relationships with your affiliates has many benefits including:

• Being always in your affiliates’ spotlight (and ensuring they will keep promoting your product)
• Keeping an eye on inactive affiliates and re-engaging them with your brand
• Giving your affiliates more ideas of how they can promote your product

You are interested in your affiliates’ success, and turning them into brand ambassadors is the best outcome you should aim for. 

How to Help Your Affiliates Sell More of Your Products 

Set up an affiliates’ newsletter

Email is the easiest way to keep in touch with your affiliates. With some automation in place, you can even create a short email guide for your new affiliates to receive a new tip every other day.

PayKickstart offers handy email marketing integrations allowing you to use your current email automation platform. These include Mailchimp, Getresponse, Aweber and more.

This will gradually acquaint your new affiliates with your product and teach them the best ways to promote it.

Another good idea is to alert all your affiliates of your upcoming lead generation events like webinars. Your affiliates are likely to help you promote those and generate more leads for you.

Further reading: 

• Download our guide on creating a perfect webinar funnel
• Leveraging Webinars For Sales and Customer Retention

Here’s also webinar software that can be easily integrated with PayKickstart:

PayKickstart comes with a powerful affiliate management solution which will enable you to approve new applicants, monitor your reports and keep in touch with your promoters.

Create a private group

Facebook has been working well for us in terms of having our brand advocates connected. On Facebook you can create a private group and let your new affiliates apply to join. From there, encourage them to get to know one another, share program feedback and ask questions.

It is a good idea to use the group to host regular events, like Twitter chats, Q&A sessions, affiliate spotlights and even Zoom calls. Facebook lets you create events and invite ALL the group members. This has worked wonders for getting everyone participating.

The only downside to hosting your group on Facebook is that not all of your affiliates may have accounts there. But you cannot please everyone. For those left out, you will still have your newsletter and your site.

Set up a separate site

A lot of affiliate programs have a separate site set up where they can organize all the information, give access to lead magnets or any useful downloads, make it easy to find any sales enablement content you may have.

Using a separate site, you can educate your current affiliates and acquire new ones:

• Explain what affiliate marketing is about
• Create a repository of promotional materials. Using PayKickstart, you can make it easy for your affiliates to find promotional materials inside their dashboards
• Include samples of affiliate marketing disclosures your affiliates will need to include when promoting your product
• Add a separate section covering your program news and updates
• Explain how your affiliates can (and more importantly, cannot) promote your product. Possibly, include a section on affiliate marketing arbitrage
• Add an FAQ section where you’d cover questions people tend to ask prior to joining your program

BeRush, the official affiliate hub of SEMrush.com is a great example of a dedicated affiliate program site:

Keep Your Affiliates Involved with Your Marketing Efforts

Making your affiliates part of your marketing strategy will build their loyalty and encourage them to be your more active promoters, and even brand advocates.

Let them know about your seasonal offers and promotional campaigns, come up with exclusive deals for your best-performing affiliates, keep them updated on your successes and failures, share your most effective promotional hacks, and invite them to share theirs. 

With PayKickstart, you can set up an affiliate contest to reward your most active affiliates and re-engage your inactive affiliates. You can start a contest based on the following:

• Sale: Winners are determined based on the count of total sales.
• Amount: Winners are determined based on the monetary amount of total sales.
• Leads: Winners are determined based on confirmed leads the affiliate brought in

Once your contest is created, you will be able to view the leaderboard within your Vendor account.

You can also embed the affiliate contest widget to any webpage to make your leaderboard public and allow all the participating affiliates to access the current stats. The feature makes it incredibly easy to set up affiliate contests without you having to manually calculate sales or lead numbers or creating leaderboard updates.

Further reading:

• What Makes the Best Affiliates​ for Promoting Your Products and Brand?​ 
• What Are the Best Ways to Attract the Best Affiliates?
• What Makes the Best Affiliate Manager? 

Conclusion

Creating an effective affiliate program requires time and effort but if you manage it well, you will end up with a strong community around your product. Strong affiliates are not easy to come by but a well set-up affiliate community building strategy can help you identify and grow your own power affiliates who will stay with you forever.

Ann Smarty

Ann Smarty is the Brand Manager at Internet Marketing Ninjas, as well as co-founder of Viral Content Bee. Ann has been into Internet Marketing for over a decade, she is the former Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Journal and contributor to prominent search and social blogs including Small Biz Trends and Mashable. Ann is also the frequent speaker at Pubcon and the host of a weekly Twitter chat #vcbuzz

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