How To Attract & Scale Partnerships

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Part I: Build A Strong Offer

One of the most important factors in attracting affiliates to your campaign is how well your campaign converts.

This is especially true for affiliates promoting your brand that are running in paid media channels. The better the conversion rate, the higher the return on their ad spend (ROAS), and the more money they can make. The more money they make, the more sales they drive and the more money a brand makes. It’s a beautiful sequence of events. If you want your campaigns to convert, you need to build a strong direct-response offer. A compelling offer consists of two things:

A Clear & Concise Offer Model
A Customer Incentive

The purpose of a clear and concise offer model is that it indulges a buying mindset vs. shopping. Performance-driven brands often create adjacent funnels or landing pages, specifically designed to sell a specific offer as an alternative to driving customers to their main e-commerce store where they attempt to sell many of their products via shopping or add-to-cart experience.

Some common offer models include the following:

Product bundles (single SKU, or mix and match)
Free Trials
Try before you buy sampling
Quiz
Straight subscription
One time purchase vs Subscription

All of these models are proven out, but it really depends on your product type, COGS, price points and audience to determine the best model to deploy for your business.

Beyond a concise offer model, if you want to convert customers immediately, offering an incentive is an amazing tactic to get them to increase their path to purchase and buy right now. You could incentivize your customers with:

Free gifts
Buy One Get One free deals
Free shipping or gifts based on achieved spending thresholds
Unlocking discounts based on achieved spending thresholds
Entry into a contest.

Funnels, Funnels, Funnels!

Brands that are driving all of their traffic to one website are missing out. Building unique funnels that lead to customized landing pages, have a much higher chance of converting customers.

For example, you could build custom landing pages around the following:

Going deep selling a specific product within your catalogue
A unique marketing angle
A promotion
New Product launch
Hyper-targeting unique audiences

Getting into a regular cadence of building funnels will be life-changing for your business. The performance wins you can get out of this tactic alone can gain you a massive competitive advantage over the competition. This is a great strategy to drive consistent sales volumes, outside of the busy shopping seasons. We’re still shocked that more companies still aren’t doing this. Also, giving your affiliates a variety of funnels that align with their channels and audiences, is a very attractive feature. And could be the difference maker in choosing to run your campaIgn over another. In funnels we trust!

Channels

The more channels you can give affiliates access to promote your products, the more affiliates you will attract. There are certain rules of engagement you can put in place to avoid cannibalization or prevent violating the terms of service mandated by channels.

Geos

The broader an affiliate can target their audiences, the higher the probability they can unlock new audiences.

Incentives

Who doesn’t like incentives!? When brands offer incentives, it’s a great sign. It means they want to scale their business and are willing to pay at all costs to do so. Finding brands with this sort of competitive, money-making mindset, usually indicates they will be a great partner and will invest heavily into the relationship so both sides can make money.

Some examples of incentives include:

Bonuses or gifts for achieving sales thresholds
Unlocking higher payouts or gifts based on achieving sales thresholds
Funding Test budgets (in the case of paid media)
Higher payouts for desirable channels or markets they want to penetrate

The point is if you come across a campaign that offers additional incentives, especially good incentives, it is worth giving it a second look and going deeper. In our experience, the best, most experienced brands that make great partners understand the importance of these tactics and they tend to lead to the most profitable partnerships.

Seasonal Promotions

Sometimes brands choose to exclude their affiliates from participating in seasonal sales like BFCM, product launches, or new promotional offers for fear it will cannibalize their paid media dollars behind these initiatives. It makes zero sense. Affiliates are the best tool you can use to compound your efforts or generate buzz or promotion. As the privacy wars heat up, targeting is not nearly as efficient as it once was. Facebook now is the equivalent of a Times Square billboard. The more ads that can be shown on these billboards, the more products you will sell. And affiliates can help you increase the velocity of being shown on these billboards. So why limit the size of your promotional team? At the end of the day, 2 salespeople are more effective than 1.

Use your affiliates as an accelerator for all your promotional programs. They will 100% increase your reach and revenue.

Big Caps

The more units you make available to your affiliates to sell, the more they will sell. It’s that obvious. Don't limit their scale by imposing small caps. If you need to in the beginning to gauge quality, particularly with new affiliates, that’s fine. But make sure you have the checks and balances in place to validate quality measures so you can lift that cap and let them fully sink their teeth into the opportunity and get you lots of sales. Brands that have small caps will be overlooked by large affiliates because they don’t see it as a scalable opportunity to make money.

Responsive Communication & Agility

Affiliates can be needy sometimes. That’s not a knock, it makes sense. They are out there trying to sell your products and there will be plenty of times they will require a brand's help or resources to amplify their efforts. In the case of paid media buyers, they are out there spending their own money attempting to sell your products. So if they can’t get a hold of you, they could be losing money by the minute.

If it takes you too long for a brand to respond to their requests or if you ignore them altogether, they are going to bounce. That’s a guarantee.

Being responsive and agile to their requests is the easiest way to bolster their commitment and increase their success rate. We recommend brands have a dedicated rep devoted entirely to their affiliate program. If you really want to turn it into a profit center, it requires a body and full-time committed resources internally to get it going. Remember, if you invest in your affiliates, they will invest in you.

Exclusivity

Super affiliates that are capable of pushing large amounts of sales to your brand love to have exclusive rights over a channel, product or market. This isn’t always possible, depending on the size of a brand, but if it is, it’s a great way to incentivize an affiliate to double down on the opportunity and drive large amounts of sales. If you are fortunate enough to find such a relationship, dangle the carrot of exclusivity. It can be a really effective tactic to maximize effort and scale with deserving partners.

Part II Brand Assets, UGC, and Ads

Building content is hard. It’s no easier for partners. Brands that don’t make the necessary investment into producing content, will certainly be overlooked by partners, and potentially consumers too.

Remember, partners aren’t magicians. They can’t go out and promote your products if you don’t provide them with the tools to do so. Remember, you are only compensating them for the sales they generate. Not to produce content. Some can and will produce content, but it should never be an expectation. Content is expensive and time-consuming to make. Especially good content. So, the more content you produce and share with your partners, the more traffic and revenue they will drive. See below for key takeaways from this topic.

Build a Content Engine

Build a content engine for UGC, brand assets, banners and ads. There will be a content flywheel effect once you have built a healthy base of content that media buyers, influencers, publishers etc., can build on top of.

Keep your Content Organized

Organize this content in a way that it’s easy for partners to grab what they need. The easier you make it for partners to find and get access to the content they need, the higher the probability they will run with it and start sending you sales.

Be Consistent

Make a goal to share new content with your partners every week. Content is like sales currency to them. It will get you more testing and scaling, but also prevent existing partners from churning out. The more content you produce, the more content they will make on their own.

Part III: Competitive Payouts

Partners don’t love your products as much as you do. I’m sorry, but it’s a reality. You can tell them how great it is and why it’s so much better than your competitors, but that alone will not be enough to get them to drop everything they are doing and begin promoting your solution. You know what will: show them the Money!! Or in this context, give them competitive payouts.

There isn’t a perfect science to determine payouts. But here are some important tips to keep in mind when you do, so you can avoid being overlooked when they are on the hunt to find their next big campaign to run.

Base your payout on Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV).

Partners should be fairly compensated based on the quality of the customers they are delivering. There shouldn’t be a one size fits all payout for every partner in your program.

Track and report abandoned carts (warm leads!) your partners are delivering.

One of the best parts of partner marketing is that you only pay when a customer purchases your product. But what about all those abandoned carts (warm leads!) your partners are delivering that you can now monetize via email, SMS, or live agent outreach? If you can successfully convert even 20% of these leads into customers, all those dollars go right to your bottom line. And the best part is, you didn’t have to pay anything for them! Make certain you track and report on these sales so they can be taken into consideration within your AOV calculation. This will provide a better determination of how profitable the channel actually is and better inform you on how to properly price your payouts to partners.

One last thing to consider, partners also lose out via attribution leakage. Meaning, let’s say a prospective customer clicks a partner ad, goes to the landing page but then decides to open up their browser and do some more research. If that customer ends up purchasing via Amazon or through the brand’s paid search link or any other link for that matter that isn’t the partner, the partner won’t be attributed to those sales.

On average, our data shows that approximately 17-20% of customers are not attributed back to the initial partner lead source. This can be tricky to track, but it's not impossible. This loss of attribution should also be taken into account when pricing your payouts.

Click here for more context on how to determine your payout.

Part IV: Help Partners Scale by Sharing Data & Insights

Sharing more insights about your products and customers is important to partners for two reasons:

It provides new prospects with more information about your business so they can determine alignment with your brand
It helps existing partners build better strategies to maximize campaign performance.

Below, is a list of examples of requests partners have historically asked brands to provide that can increase the odds they will test your campaign or stay committed to scaling.

This may seem like a lot of information to divulge to a new relationship, particularly the performance metrics. But if you put yourself in the shoes of the partner for a second (particularly in the case of a paid media buyer) they are investing their own capital and resources to help you find new customers with no guarantees of profit. In fact, there is an equal probability they could lose money depending on media costs. Hence, having some historical indicators about performance and ad costs can help them make a better determination on fit and strategy. See below for examples of the types of information you could share with partners.

Customer Profiles & Insights

Customer Persona Types
Customer Demographics (age/gender)
Customer psychographics
Ideal Customer interest types

Campaign Performance Data & Insights

Conversion Rates (broken down by top-performing channels)
The cost-per-acquisition (CPA) costs in paid media channels (applicable to paid media affiliates)

Creatives

Highest engagement/top converting ad content
Highest converting landing pages/funnels
High-performing angles
Highest converting ad copy/messaging

Tip

You could develop a 1-pager that incorporates a lot of the information above that could be shared with partners when they join your program.

It’s important to note it is not a requirement to provide any of the information above if you don’t feel comfortable. Our intention is to simply provide you with examples of requests you may receive from partners (mostly from paid media buyers) interested in working on your campaign.

Facebook Pair & Share Requests and Lookalike Audiences

Every now and then, you may receive a request from an affiliate to pair their Facebook Business Manager with your brand's Facebook page. Typically this request comes from the big-spender facebook media buyers that really want to double down on the opportunity and build a scalable campaign with your brand. It’s important to note you will have complete transparency over what ads they launch from the page via Facebook's Ads Library. FB pairing allows paid media affiliates to run advertisements directly from your brand’s accounts which can help them in 2 ways:

The pairing establishes a connection with your brand that signals to Facebook. This partnership may prevent inaccurate account bans
The affiliation may enable the affiliate partner to achieve larger spending budgets with Facebook that can help scale the campaign faster.

Authorizing this pairing does not mean they will have access to any internal budgetary spend in your brand's Business Manager. Affiliate partners use their own 3rd-party accounts to manage their spending. This pairing is more about optics than anything. It provides ancillary benefits to help affiliate partners build their campaigns in this channel.

Sharing Lookalike Audiences (LALs) / Hashed Email Lists

Another request that could come your way is audience sharing. Similar types of paid media affiliates may request that you share some lookalike (LAL) audience data to help them improve their targeting capabilities to improve the campaign's performance and maximize media spend. The rationale is instead of having them spend a bunch of money at the onset of the campaign to locate high-performing audiences that resonates with your products, their path to making the campaign profitable can be accelerated if brands share some LAL data or a hashed email list of customers that have historically bought your products. Sharing some audience data provides a safety net and assurances to make the campaign profitable on Facebook.

Resources

How to Create Hashed Email Lists:

Facebook Resource
Hashed Generator Tool

How to Pair & Share Facebook Ads Manager Accounts:

How to Share Lookalike (LAL) AudiencesL

Facebook Resource
Ad Espresso Guide

Part V: Keep partners Committed To Yopur Offer

Okay, you’ve done the hardest part: getting the affiliate to set up and run your campaign–now what? Here are some tips to help you maintain and grow that relationship.

Provide Resources & Insights

The more you invest in your affiliates, the more they will invest in you. You know your brand better than anyone. Everything that you’re learning about your customers through your customer service teams, agencies, internal media buyers, etc, should be shared with your affiliates. The more knowledge they have about your products and customers, the more effective they will be selling to them.

Commonly requested resources:

Ready-to-use creatives
Angles known to convert or yield high engagement
Authentic user-generated content (UGC)
Information on the best-performing funnels and traffic sources
Insight into channels, demographics, or countries that are performing well
Hashed email lists of past or current customers
Brand guidelines and best practices

Tip: Different types of affiliates have different desires, objectives and goals. What may get a paid media buyer excited may be meaningless to a publisher or influencer and vice versa. Know your audience and tailor your advice appropriately. Click Here for a more in-depth look into different affiliate types and their biggest drivers.

Be Consistent & Responsive

Having a wide net of affiliates means that you’ll come across people with different schedules, priorities, and traffic sources. It's important to remain resilient and avoid becoming discouraged if they do not respond to you in haste. I'm sure you know how volatile advertising can be, and it's not uncommon for affiliates to experience cycles of this as well. Fear not; it's not unusual for individual partners to periodically hibernate. They'll often re-engage when the time is right for them.

This is not to say that you should expect to treat all conversations like correspondence between pen pals. Remember, affiliates are trying to sell your products and services, and to do that effectively there will be times when they need your help or support. They're continually consuming their own resources as they attempt to do this. Paid media buyers are expending ad costs, publishers are sacrificing their most engaging placements, and influencers are extending personal capital. If they can't get a hold of you for an extended period, they may end up incurring significant losses on your behalf. Be mindful of this and help avoid it by being as responsive as possible. It's a lot cheaper than the credits they'll want to salvage the strained relationship; trust us on that.

Tip: Affiliates have a habit of responding during afternoons, evenings, and weekends. Some are navigating the pressures of 24/7 advertising placements; for others, this is all a part-time side hustle. In either case, the quicker you respond to inquiries, the quicker they can course correct in times of need.

Share News about Company Initiatives

Stale campaigns have a half-life and tend to depreciate in terms of ROI over time. If you don't keep your campaign fresh, affiliates could look elsewhere for more exciting opportunities. Keep them engaged instead by actively communicating with them about new initiatives coming down the pipe, such as:

New product launches
Market expansion into other regions
Newly produced content
Contests, promotions, sales, etc.
Upcoming Celebrity or Influencer collabs

Try to involve your affiliates in any capacity that you can. Don't keep them in the dark. A well-run affiliate program should act as an extension to your marketing team and squeeze more leverage out of existing work