Finding high-quality affiliates that are relevant to your ecommerce brand is one of the most important foundational elements of building a thriving affiliate program. Whether your brand works with brand ambassadors, influencers, affiliates, publishers, or all of the above, the first step to growing your affiliate program requires a strong affiliate network.
However, discovering the right affiliates is not always a simple task. It takes time to manually research and identify the top candidates to partner with your business, and time is extremely valuable when you need to focus on growing your affiliate program.
Meet Refersion’s Affiliate Recruiting Solutions
To simplify the process of recruiting new affiliates and accelerate sales, Refersion launched Affiliate Recruiting Solutions. Through Affiliate Recruiting Solutions, brands that want to scale their ecommerce sales through affiliate marketing can connect with the most compatible and profitable affiliate partners. From researching and discovering new affiliates to recruiting premium content publishers, merchants are able to build powerful affiliate relationships that drive new revenue as they grow their businesses.
Here’s everything you should know about Refersion’s new affiliate recruiting offerings and how you can use these solutions to drive your affiliate marketing program’s growth goals.
Exploring the Benefits of Refersion’s Affiliate Recruiting Solutions
Refersion now offers unique affiliate recruiting solutions to fit the specific needs of your ecommerce brand – wherever you may be in your affiliate marketing journey.
Affiliate Marketplace
If you’re in the beginning stages of building your affiliate network, consider Affiliate Marketplace as a passive affiliate recruiting method for your brand.
This solution supplements your affiliate program growth by allowing merchants to create offers with details and descriptions and publish them within the Refersion Affiliate Marketplace. Affiliates within the Marketplace network can then review, accept and apply for offers to work with your brand directly through the marketplace, creating a way to bring affiliates into your newly established program.
Affiliate Recommendations
Refersion brands can scale their ecommerce sales by quickly growing their affiliate networks and streamlining the entire process of researching, discovering, and reaching out to new affiliates. Get introduced to new affiliates whose audience matches your own.
Premium Ecommerce Affiliates
For ecommerce brands looking to invest more in their well-established affiliate programs, Refersion offers Premium Ecommerce Affiliates. The Premium Ecommerce Affiliates solution involves working closely with Refersion’s Publisher team members to identify top-performing partners, facilitate the onboarding, management, and overall relationship, and measure partnership success.
Taking the Next Steps
Depending on where you are in your affiliate networking program, one of these solutions may jump out more to you.
No matter which program you want to use, however, you still need to make the effort to find affiliates and ensure they work well with your business. Here’s a quick overview of how you can do that.
Initially Finding the Right Affiliates for Your Program
The first step is to determine who’s the right affiliate for your program. Not every affiliate is going to work for every program, and it’s important that you identify the potential partners who will work best for your needs.
Here are a few components that may make it more likely that an affiliate will work well with your program:
- Already creating content within your industry
- Partner with similar but non-competing brands
- Has been making high-quality content for some time
- Has a fair amount of reach and followers
With these specific elements in mind, be sure to prioritize quality over quantity. Much like a relationship, affiliates and brands work together to achieve the best outcomes for their individual needs. As a brand, you’ll want to make sure that the affiliates meet your criteria before you can build a fruitful partnership together.
Making Sure Affiliates Sign Up for Your Program
Next, you need your affiliates to sign up for the program. You can get this in two ways: active and passive advertising.
With active advertising, you specifically reach out to the affiliates who might be a good fit for your program. You may do this through email, outlining the positives of your affiliate program and encouraging them to apply. This is most effective when you have a few specific affiliates in mind and are just starting your affiliate program, as you may have more time and opportunity to reach out directly.
Actively Recruiting with the Post-Purchase Widget
Another option for active advertising is through Refersion’s post-purchase widget, a tool you can use through our native integration with ecommerce platforms like Shopify, Shopify Plus, BigCommerce, and other major platforms.
After checkout, the post-purchase widget invites customers to signup as affiliates through a pop-up promoting your affiliate program. Once they click, customers will automatically be registered as an affiliate, and Refersion will pull in their name and email address from the order. Then your new affiliates can immediately start promoting your brand on social media and other channels right from the same page.
Passively Recruiting through a Custom Registration Page
Passive advertising, on the other hand, puts your affiliate program out there and allows potential affiliates to sign up if they’re interested. This tends to work best when you already have an affiliate base and you’re just interested in having new people join if they’re interested in adding to your affiliate network.
You’ll need an affiliate registration page on your website to filter through applicants and ensure you’re signing up the right promotional partners. Refersion offers several options to automate affiliate signup for your website. In the Refersion platform, you can add custom fields, images, logos, and brand colors to design your affiliate registration page or build a custom registration page and use our API to connect with Refersion’s platform.
Once your registration page is designed to highlight your brand’s best qualities, it’s time to promote it. You can do this quickly through the Refersion dashboard by copying and pasting the page URL into an email, direct message, blog, or social media; OR by embedding the sign-up form into your online store and pasting the code snippet onto your web or landing page of choice.
By using the Refersion Affiliate Marketplace, you can also publish affiliate recruiting offers to the wider marketplace, allowing affiliates to come to you and apply directly to your affiliate marketing team. This is somewhere in the middle; although it requires you to instantly publish offers, it also publishes exclusively to affiliates who might be interested.
Maintaining Affiliate Motivation and Engagement
Once you have affiliates as part of your program, how do you maintain their motivation and engagement? Remember, just like with customers, it’s much less expensive to retain an existing affiliate than it is to find a new affiliate. However, many experts say that 10% of your affiliates will drive 90% of your affiliate sales. If you can improve the number of affiliates making sales, you may be able to improve your sales numbers quite dramatically.
There are many ways to manage affiliate motivation and engagement. You may be able to raise your commissions as a bonus incentive, offer random bonuses to your highest-performing affiliates, and even create events that affiliates can attend to feel part of your brand. However, the one thing that ties these all together is that all of them show your affiliates that you really care about the work they put in as part of your team.
One surefire way to build trust and retain affiliates is through timely and direct payments. With Refersion’s Unified Payments end-to-end system for payment and taxes, affiliates not only receive payment in the correct amount and on-time , but also easily find brand tax documentation in one centralized platform. The end result is strengthened affiliate relationships and a program that stands out to quality affiliates who prefer working with trustworthy brands.
At the end of the day, investing in building a good rapport with affiliates, as well as the tech tools that make it possible, is paramount for a brand’s success.
Keeping Open Communication With Your Affiliates
One of the most important things you can do for an affiliate program is to maintain open communication. Affiliate communication is vital because staying in touch with your affiliates allows you to keep them in the loop, making it more evident that you care about them. Plus, they can also reach out with any questions or concerns that they might have.
Two ways to solidify your communication efforts are by reaching out to your affiliates with a newsletter, and making it as easy as possible to get in contact with you. To build trust even further, you should make sure you get back to any affiliate requests within 24-48 hours maximum. These are both essential if you want your affiliates to feel like you care about their concerns and work harder for you.
If these communication methods seem time-consuming, consider the ease of Refersion’s performance reporting capabilities to communicate with your best-performing affiliates. Keep affiliates engaged and informed by providing them with an affiliate portal to see their performance, send updates and announcements from your brand, and create special offers for different types of affiliates to motivate their efforts.
Refersion makes the functional elements of running a successful affiliate program simple – from the beginning of identifying and onboarding new affiliates to the end result of driving more affiliate marketing revenue.
The Bottom Line
With the launch of Affiliate Recruiting Solutions, Refersion enables ecommerce brands to improve affiliate recruiting and retention with direct connections & relationships, unlimited onboarding of affiliates & offers, custom commissions and rewards, first-party tracking, direct affiliate payments, and integrated tax management.
While affiliate marketing success varies from merchant to merchant, if you’re willing to find and partner with the right affiliates, you can build a thriving affiliate marketing network to scale your business quickly. Whether you’re using the Refersion Affiliate Marketplace to help affiliates find you, finding your own affiliates or working directly with our team, you can turn your affiliate program into a high-ROI channel with these solutions.
