5 Essential Steps for Successful Affiliate Onboarding

We’ll cover some audience expansion strategy later on in this piece, but, for now, let’s move on to the next requirement. This exposure can help build your brand’s reputation whilst also encouraging followers to learn more about your affiliate program and https://www.xcritical.com/ apply themselves. If your program is brand new, you’re likely getting an average of one affiliate per day. At that rate, you can easily hop on the phone and welcome them aboard personally. However, if you have an established program, you’re probably bringing on 10 new affiliates daily.

Step 2 – Affiliate Orientation Session

Meet with your affiliates, one-on-one BEFORE the promotion and craft a custom plan. When the principles of commitment and consistency are invoked, people tend to follow through. So Alan, this post is for you and anyone else who wants to bring on affiliates in a way that almost GUARANTEES a ‘win-win’ affiliate onboarding profitable relationship. So, you’ve got some new affiliates interested in promoting you. Getting paid is important for any affiliate, and when they join a bespoke, independent program, it might be something they’re concerned about.

How Can you Send an Affiliate Onboarding Email?

Also in your affiliate onboarding guide, you’ll want to include the answers to common FAQs. Affiliates are going to have a lot of questions, so compiling them all into one document saves you—and them—heaps of time. Sometimes affiliates go against your affiliate program guidelines despite training them well. Maybe they are running paid search, or doing something against your brand guidelines.

Develop Comprehensive Guides: Building a Strong Foundation

The first thing to do is to contact your affiliate and inform them of your guidelines.They may not be aware that they have done anything wrong. In these cases you could give them a week to fix it, and if it hasn’t been fixed then remove them from your affiliate program. If there is a more serious breach, then you could consider immediate removal. Have marketing materials readily available for affiliates so they can begin promoting right away. To make the most of your affiliate relationship, make communicating easy.

Express your appreciation for the affiliate joining your program and confirm their acceptance into the program. Twitch gives you all the tools you need to beef up your affiliate income. Promoting your new affiliates highlights the benefits of being an affiliate in order to attract more interest. Make sure you tell the new affiliate what they need to do to identify as one of your affiliates. Biztree has a great template to use for getting started with drafting your contract if you don’t already have a standard document on hand. There is plenty of documentation for getting started with API integrations for Process Street.

Many of your affiliates would benefit from a personal call shortly after they have been approved to your affiliate program. This paves the way to build a strong relationship with your affiliate from the get-go. If your relationship is strong from the get-go you are likely to be top of mind for any campaigns they plan on running, and if someone else lets them down, you might be the first person they contact. Thus, educating them to pitch your product successfully is crucial.

• Whether you hire a manager to take care of affiliates or oversee them yourself, it’s crucial that they know who they should reach out to and on what channel in case any questions or issues arise.
• Spending my days writing marketing content, cycling around canals in Amsterdam and attempting to master the Dutch language.
• Barbara has an MBA from The University of Texas and an active CPA license.
• Therefore, activating dormant affiliates or those who signed up but haven’t started promoting is equally important.
• The Wirecutter (now owned by The New York Times) generated $150 million in online sales in just one year from affiliate referral links leading to the various products they were featuring.
• If you’re talking to an affiliate for the fifth time, you shouldn’t need to be reminded of what part of the country they live in or if they are married or have kids.
• A personalized affiliate onboarding program recognizes the individual needs of affiliates and encourages them to thrive through continued support.

Be careful not to overwhelm your new affiliates with too much information and technical jargon when preparing a guide, as your new affiliates might not be able to understand industry-specific terms. Sticking to the simple language will ensure that all your new hires understand the instructions and know what is expected from them. Tools like BrandVerity to monitor paid search are a great idea, and ensuring that all affiliates understand the need to mark paid advertising on social media is essential.

And these onboarded affiliate team members may refer other affiliates to your company’s program. Affiliate onboarding is the process of settling new affiliates into your affiliate program. It aims to train your new partners, ensuring that they feel empowered to review and promote your products in line with your goals and expectations.

Affiliate marketing has emerged as a powerful strategy for businesses to expand their reach and increase revenue. However, the success of any affiliate marketing program hinges on effective affiliate onboarding. To thrive in the competitive world of affiliate marketing, it’s crucial to provide your affiliates with the knowledge and resources they need to excel. Affiliate partner onboarding is a vital step in the process of new affiliates joining your program and preparing to promote your products or services. While each partner is unique and initial negotiations may vary, there are common elements during the onboarding process that contribute to a smooth start to the partnership and relationship. You already know what affiliate onboarding is from your role in affiliate marketing management.

While researching, learn as much as possible about your affiliate’s business model and use this to personalize the onboarding process. With time, you’ll find different ways to segment your affiliates to give them the best possible affiliate onboarding. Consider creating a “getting started” guide with all of the most important information your affiliates need. This not only makes the onboarding process smoother for them; it also cuts down on the amount of support you (or your affiliate managers) need to provide. Part of the affiliate onboarding process is setting expectations and one of the best ways to do this is with your affiliate terms and conditions. Your affiliates will have seen this information when they signed up, but it’s important you continue to stress the value of this document.

Make a decision, and record whether the applicant was successful or unsuccessful in the form field below. Now that you’ve gathered the sample content, it’s time to review all of the information you have on them and make a decision as to whether or not they are a good fit. Not only that, it’s the RIGHT thing to do when your working with affiliates who are in position to help you succeed. If you make three sales in your first month, I might give an affiliate a thousand dollar bonus if the numbers work. Obviously, if it’s a launch and you’re launching in April, and it’s January…you can’t really do anything for them there.

You can use an email marketing service, such as Mailchimp or Constant Contact, to create and send the email to your affiliate list. These services allow you to create and save email templates, segment your list, and track engagement metrics. Chrissy Kapralos runs a Toronto-based writing agency called No Worries Writing Co. She’s passionate about helping businesses communicate and share their stories.

You might segment affiliates based on their platforms, audience size, or experience with your product or affiliate marketing in general. The manager of your company’s affiliates program develops an overall strategy and online materials for distribution prior to holding an orientation session to launch the onboarding process. Your organization will take several steps to implement the affiliate partner strategy. This is the process of getting new affiliates acquainted with your program and prepared to start promoting your products and services.

This gives them an opportunity to prepare questions and helps make these conversations more productive. If you’ve been running your affiliate program for a while, you may have noticed that you receive certain questions over and over again. You can save yourself a lot of time (and frustration) by anticipating these inquiries and providing the answers upfront.

But not all fellow streamers are considered Twitch affiliates. Instead, they must meet certain criteria to reach Twitch affiliate status (more on that later). Your partnership terms should be a legal document, with information specific to the kind of affiliate partnership you are offering.

Affiliate onboarding is great because it opens a conversation and you can use it to get important insights into improving your program. If they haven’t already, this makes it easy (and inviting) for them to respond to you with questions or concerns. You can’t expect people to understand what you want from them if you make your terms and conditions incredibly complicated though. You could give them a copy of your product, a free trial, a demo, or a branded t-shirt.

Identify the questions that you get asked repeatedly and put them into your guide. If you’re new to affiliate marketing, you can find lots of relevant questions with a quick Google search. Try thinking about what you would want to know if you were an affiliate. But before we get into some key affiliate strategies, it’s helpful to explore exactly what affiliate onboarding is.

There’s no better first impression than a warm welcome—except for maybe a warm welcome and a gift. So, start your relationship off right by throwing in a gift along with your welcome message. This article is your companion for first-time Affiliate Onboarding. From start to finish, Affiliate Onboarding can take as little as 10 minutes, depending on verification checks. Spending my days writing marketing content, cycling around canals in Amsterdam and attempting to master the Dutch language.

But don’t think one or two videos with three viewers is enough to become an affiliate. Your history over the last 30 days needs to show an average 3-person viewership. Most of the heavy lifting is over and done with at this point. Right now, your priority for onboarding the new affiliate is to make sure they have everything they need to perform their responsibilities to the best of their ability. Below is an email widget that has been auto-populated with the applicant’s email address, alongside a template email notifying them of their unsuccessful application. Below you will find an auto-filled email widget, with your new affiliate’s email address and a template message congratulating them.