You will be contacting thousands of possible affiliates via email; it is essential to automate as much as possible. The following tools are important ingredients to your success.
A. Your Follow Up Emails
Do not rely on one shot advertising; just as your customers will not decide to buy until 3rd or 4th contact, make sure you follow up all inquiries with affiliates. Many times they lack of joining is not lack of interest, but lack of time. Be sure you remind them to contact you.
B. Automated Affiliate Training
Once your affiliates do sign up, give them an automated training system to follow up with them. Send 3-5 emails encouraging them to put up your links, pointing them to successful ways to do this, and giving them a way to contact you. The first 2-4 weeks are crucial to your success; remember that in many networks, anywhere from 10-45% of affiliates never do a thing after signing up. Be sure you get them going.
C. Check to See they have placed your links
Your staff should visit each affiliate site and make sure there are links. This can be automated, but by taking the time to look at a site, especially your higher traffic sites, you can make suggestions for improvement. If you let affiliates do it without any supervision, you will lose effectiveness for your network. Remember that it is important where they place the links on their site to improve your branding and sales. Stay on top of them and encourage your staff with performance bonuses for their affiliates.
D. Check your Affiliate's Performance
Each week you should check the traffic generated from your affiliates along with sales. Keep track of your SellThrough ratio. For the majority of affiliates who generate little or no traffic, encourage them to succeed. Give a gift certificate to every affiliate after the first month; reward them immensely. Remember, even if they don't sell, turn the thousands of affiliates into customers. Even if you reach the best case scenario of 20% of your affiliates really selling, you still have 80% who will not. Why not let them save money with you as well as selling?
E. Have staff dedicated to increasing the performance of your affiliates.
The most successful networks give their staff performance bonuses for their affiliate networks. If managing your network becomes a job, you will lose effectiveness. A good sales force must be honed, trained, encouraged, and tested. If no one is doing this, you are wasting valuable advertising dollars.
