How to Recruit and Manage High-Performing Affiliates

Affiliate marketing can be a powerful channel for expanding your brand’s reach and increasing sales. However, to truly thrive in the world of affiliate marketing, you need high-performing affiliates who are not only skilled but also passionate about promoting your products or services.

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll walk you through the process of recruiting and managing high-performing affiliates.

• Identifying and sourcing potential affiliates
• Outreach and recruitment strategies
• Crafting an attractive affiliate offer
• Onboarding and training affiliates
• Activating new affiliates and Partners
• Keeping affiliates engaged and motivated

Let’s dive in!

Identifying and Sourcing Potential Affiliates

The first step in building a team of high-performing affiliates is identifying individuals or businesses with the potential to become valuable partners. Here’s how to go about it:

Market Research

Start by conducting thorough market research to identify your target audience. Understanding your ideal customer will help you find affiliates who cater to the same audience. Suppose you run an online fitness apparel store.

After conducting market research, you discover that your target audience is primarily fitness enthusiasts, aged 25-40, interested in high-quality activewear. You can then seek affiliates who cater to this demographic, such as fitness bloggers and Instagram influencers.

You should be running a SWOT analysis of your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to identify your “Brand Power” and key value differentiators for building an affiliate program that will naturally attract affiliates and partners. 

Competitor Analysis

Look at who is promoting your competitors’ products or services. These affiliates might be interested in partnering with you, especially if you offer competitive terms. 

For example, you notice that a well-known competitor in the fitness apparel industry has affiliates who run popular YouTube channels dedicated to workout routines and fitness tips. You can consider reaching out to these YouTube creators, as they already have a strong audience interested in fitness-related products.

Start by running a search online for “[vertical] + affiliate program”, or “[competitor] + affiliate program to have an idea of baseline affiliate program terms such as commission structure, top partners, and attribution window and to identify where you can align and build a competitive edge with your affiliate program.

Tools like SEMRush or Ahrefs can also provide you with great insights into the competition rankings, ad profile, audience, and traffic analytics, and help you explore gap analyses. 

Leverage Affiliate Network Marketplaces

83% of affiliate recruitment is done through affiliate networks – source Rakuten’s Forrester Report

Join affiliate networks or programs like Amazon Associates, Impact, CJ, Awin, or ShareASale. These platforms connect you with a vast network of potential affiliates.

Partner with Existing Customers

Your loyal customers may already be advocating for your brand. Reach out to them and see if they are interested in becoming affiliates.

A great way to recruit potential affiliates is to look at your existing VIP or brand advocates, this segment of your customers is highly engaged with your brand and who have a sizeable audience of followers. They already love your brand and have hands-on experience using your products and their content will be more authentic and trustworthy. 

You can prepare an outreach plan to offer them an opportunity to become an affiliate and to drive even more conversions while getting access to more exclusivity from your brand. 

Reach out via your newsletter and create a segment of your high-spenders and frequent buyers to promote and invite them to your program.

Diversify your Program Portfolio

Your portfolio of partners should be well diversified. Your outreach and recruitment strategy may differ based on the types of publishers and partners.

Focus your efforts on building relationships with top traditional affiliate types such as Content, sub-affiliates, coupons, deals, and loyalty partners, for which your outreach, communication, and commissioning strategy should be specific to the group.

Content and review partners may be the best at getting more reach and brand exposure and boosting incremental results, while loyalty or coupon sites usually work with a massive audience of shoppers, ready to purchase. 

Performance-based commissions for content partners are usually 2-4X higher than the commissions or CPA negotiated with deals or coupon sites.

Outreach and Recruitment Strategies

Onboarding high-performing affiliates requires a strategic affiliate recruitment approach to outreach and communication. There are two main approaches to affiliate recruitment Inbound and Outbound Tactics.

• Outbound Recruitment: proactive outreach to prospective partners promoting your program on social media, performing keyword research on search engines, reaching out to your existing customer base, or attending conferences and events, etc.
• Inbound recruitment: naturally attracting partners and affiliates into your programs.

Personalized Outreach

Craft personalized outreach emails to potential affiliates. Highlight the benefits of partnering with your brand and how it aligns with their audience. 

Whether you manage an affiliate program in-house or work with a specialized agency, you should allocate time to build your outreach plan, highlight the values and benefits of a partnership with the brand, and be ready to attend pitch calls, product demos, and meeting with partners to build strong foundations for your mutual partnership.

Get listed in key directories

20% of programs are set in directories-  sources Affiliate Summit

Getting listed in affiliate program directories can help you reach a targeted audience of potential partners, enhance your program’s credibility, and provide various networking and competitive advantages. It’s a valuable strategy for affiliate program managers looking to expand their affiliate base.

Zoom In 

For Me To Coupon (FMTC) is one of the largest platforms and services that help affiliate marketers and publishers access and manage deals, coupons, and promotions from various merchants and affiliate networks. Host of 2MM+ affiliates promoting 330K+ advertisers, this service simplifies the process of finding and incorporating affiliate marketing content and promotions into websites, blogs, or other online marketing efforts.

This is also an excellent recruitment tactic to leverage to find new partners, who can save time and effort in searching for and verifying deals, ensuring that the content they promote to their audience is current and accurate.

Clear Communication

Be transparent about your expectations, commission structure, and any special promotions. Clear communication builds trust.

Landing Page

Create a dedicated landing page on your website for potential affiliates. Include a sign-up form and detailed information about your affiliate program. Most of the affiliate networks offer customized landing pages and signups you can configure for your program to guarantee a streamlined process with your affiliates. 

Also, for your top affiliates, we recommend considering building personalized landing page experiences optimized for the user and their audience. This can help 2-3X your affiliate conversion rates.

Vetting Affiliate Applications 

There are a few things to look for in an affiliate’s applications. Not a one-size-fits-all approach but there are some essential points and indicators that can help you in the vetting and approval process of affiliates.

You don’t have to work with just anybody, so set up a process that allows you to filter out affiliates that aren’t a good fit. Let’s look at some metrics that help you assess whether your affiliates are capable of driving the traffic and sales you desire. 

These KPIs can serve as qualification thresholds for new affiliates applying to your program and are critical for merchants and advertisers to understand the reach, exposure, and potential to work with them in the first place:

• Brand Alignment and Industry Authority
• Audience demographics – supporting your brands’ market geos and demos – set the basic parameters for your target audience to ensure the affiliate audience matches your target audience.
• Sufficient Traffic volume – set a minimum traffic volume. You want to be sure that the site can generate sufficient traffic to your website.
• Engagement score – target affiliates with high authority. In the long run, you want your affiliates to keep sending active, returning customers your way. 
• Monthly unique visitors – this metric may even be more important than the number of visits. It tells you how many individuals visit the site in a month. If the number is too low compared to the visits, the affiliate isn’t reaching enough new visitors. If the number is too high, no one returns to the site, and that’s a bad sign.
• Supporting the promotional method

RED FLAGS

• Email address or odd website URLs 
• Non-secure websites 
• No social media accounts or active pages 
• Coming from countries with a higher risk of fraud

Follow-Up

Don’t be discouraged by initial rejections. Follow up with potential affiliates, addressing their concerns and demonstrating your commitment to their success. For example, after sending an initial outreach email, you follow up with a second email a week later, addressing any questions or concerns the potential affiliate may have expressed in their response or non-response to the first email.

Crafting an Attractive Affiliate Offer

Once you’ve identified potential affiliates, you need to create an appealing affiliate offer that entices them to partner with you:

Competitive commission structure

Determine a competitive commission structure that rewards affiliates generously for their efforts. Consider offering tiered commissions to incentivize higher sales. 

For example, You offer affiliates a competitive commission of 15% on all referred sales. Additionally, for every 50 sales, you offer a performance bonus of $100, motivating affiliates to drive more conversions.

High-quality products or services

Affiliates are more likely to promote products or services that are of high quality and have a strong reputation. Ensure your offerings meet these criteria. You should dedicate time to making sure your website or ecommerce store is generating positive site, product, and service reviews. 

This is a great validator of the high-value offer you market to your audience and is a seal of trust for affiliates and partners to spend time and resources in promoting your offer to their audience. 

Marketing Materials

Provide affiliates with a range of marketing materials, including banners, product images, and copy. Make it as easy as possible for them to promote your brand. 

While text links tend to convert the best with affiliates, don’t neglect the power of great creative assets such as product images, banners, and well-crafted descriptions. This makes it easy for them to create appealing content to promote your products.

Cookie Duration

Extend your cookie duration to give affiliates a longer window for earning commissions on referred sales.

The ideal cookie duration should be long enough for customers to return and make multiple purchases but short enough for affiliates to dedicate themselves and incentivize customers.

A good starting point would be between 30-90 days, depending on the product/service you’re offering and industry trends. 

Consider extending the affiliate tracking period to provide your partners with a greater opportunity to earn, where you analyzed the need for. 

Performance Incentives

Offer performance incentives, such as bonuses or exclusive offers, to affiliates who consistently perform well.
Check out our article on program development and growth strategies to increase your partner engagement while maximizing your ROAS.

Onboarding and Training Affiliates

Once you’ve successfully recruited affiliates, it’s essential to provide them with the tools and knowledge they need to excel:

Welcome Packet

Send new affiliates a welcome packet that includes program details, guidelines, and resources. The goal is to ensure you start building a great relationship with your new partner, foster clear communication and transparency, and equip them with the best tools and tips to be successful in promoting the brand and quickly earn their first commissions.

Ongoing Training Materials

Offer training materials, webinars, or one-on-one sessions to help affiliates understand your products, services, and marketing strategies. In the affiliate platform where your program is hosted, you should update your brand content and best practices docs weekly to ensure your partners have access to the most up-to-date creative assets. 

Access to Analytics

Top affiliate networks such as Impact or Awin, will provide affiliates with access to performance analytics, allowing them to track their progress and optimize their efforts. 

At the same time, advertisers also get access to the performance of their program and can identify ways to optimize click-active partners to incentivize them to drive revenue or discuss placement coverages or specific campaigns or exclusive offers you would like your top publishers to participate in. 

Activating New Affiliates and Partners

At this stage you took the time to go over the right program foundational elements and set up a well-thought strategy around KPIs of success, budget, commission payouts, and recruitment tactics, activating and engaging partners should be streamlined. 

Activation campaigns are also a great way to incentivize those inactive partners to become active and start promoting your business.

Active partners are affiliates that are active (e.g. clicks, sales, signups, etc.) over a certain time frame. The direct opposite is “dormant” or inactive partners. 

• If your click-active ratio is around 50%  and your sale-active ratio is around 5 to 10% then you likely have a very healthy program. 
• Conversely, if your click-active ratio is below 10%  or if you don’t actually have any sale-active affiliates, something is wrong.
• A good goal is for 30% of affiliates to generate at least five clicks per month.

Activating new partners – or engaging with “dormant” partners – is closely tied to how you pitch and craft compelling messages and assets around your products and how you commission partners.

• If you have set the right foundations and strategies for your program and sourced the right partners at the start, activating them should not be too difficult
• How to drive first conversions/sales from your newly recruited partner?
• You need to communicate effectively build a relationship and “enable” your partner with the right assets, materials, and information.

Some programs have thousands of partners and others may have less than 100 partners. The activation efforts for these programs will radically differ.

Likewise, some brands may launch new products or collections quite often or may heavily rely on influencers’ lower-funnel partnerships and regular deals. If there’s more to work with to engage partners, recruitment and activation time and frequency should be higher.

Keeping Affiliates Engaged and Motivated

To maintain a roster of high-performing affiliates, you must keep them engaged and motivated and develop compelling pitches and promotional materials; 

Prioritize the right efforts

Not every program will yield the same results or require the same level of effort. Whether you are managing a program in-house or on behalf of a client – working in an agency, you need to put in the right efforts with the right partners. ​​

For existing partners, look at historical performance and compare relevant period-over-period campaigns and trends to forecast performance.  Look at specific partner performance for spikes or abnormalities. 

Focus on the top active affiliates and top productive partners, driving clicks and engagement to your site but not driving sales or conversions (yet).

• Top purchase path introducers​
• Top solo partner contributors ​
• Top last-click preferred partners

Regular Communication

Keep affiliates informed about product launches, promotions, and any changes to your affiliate program. We recommend sending monthly newsletters to your affiliates and connecting bi-weekly or monthly with your top partners to nurture the relationship.

Maintain open lines of communication with affiliates.

Address their questions and concerns promptly. Affiliate Program Managers should have stellar customer service skills, and always be ready to hop on calls to resolve conflicts or crediting concerns, follow up on partner emails within 24 hours, and listen to their wants and needs by being flexible with commission structure terms or customized creatives more tailored to their audience preferences 

Offer ongoing support, whether it’s technical assistance, marketing advice, or creative resources.

Incentives and Contests

Run periodic contests or offer performance-based incentives to keep affiliates motivated and engaged. Every quarter you should run a contest where the affiliate who generates the most conversions receives a bonus commission or an upgraded affiliate status, unlocking higher commission rates. 

For example, you can increase 15% CPA to 30% for 30 days. Performance-based increases can also guarantee additional exposure or placements to increase your reach and visibility during the event while driving higher conversions.

Remember, with affiliate marketing, you can control the cost and outcomes. Be creative!

Feedback and Recognition

Recognize and reward top-performing affiliates. Also, seek feedback from affiliates to continuously improve your program. 

Exclusive Opportunities

Offer exclusive opportunities, such as early access to new products or partnerships, to your top affiliates.

Setting up your Monthly Objectives

Recruiting new publishers and vetting new applications should be a daily task and on top of your list. This is where it all starts, the future relationship and how you plan to grow your affiliate program. 

Invest daily time – at least 1 hour – solely on recruitment efforts 

Final Recommendations 

• Q4 and year trends; recruitment tends to be slower during Q4 and many affiliates and partners already locked their promo plans. 
• Prep for key partner recruitment weeks or months ahead of time 
• It’s all about quality and not quantity. Affiliate recruitment is like SEO backlinks portfolio; it is better to focus on recruiting 25 qualified and productive partners than getting 100 low-quality partners driving low to no clicks or sales and even hurting your Earning Per Click and reputation overall.
• Remember that top affiliates or partners may already be tied up with your competitors and it can be more difficult to recruit them or to get a hold of them unless you offer strong incentives or keep up with regular communications and à plan set ahead of time.

Wrapping-Up

In conclusion, recruiting and managing high-performing affiliates is a dynamic process that requires careful planning, clear communication, and ongoing support. If you are serious about expanding to the affiliate model or building a profitable program to grow and scale your revenue, dedicate a resource to manage the program through the entire partnership cycle, from research, and audit to recruitment, optimization, and scale. 

By identifying the right partners, crafting attractive offers, employing effective outreach strategies, providing training, and maintaining engagement, you can build a team of affiliates who will drive success for your affiliate marketing program.

Affiliate Recruitment tasks take on many forms and you can use tactics to source, recruit, and activate partners in and off the affiliate network you set up for your program.

Affiliate recruitment is an ONGOING process. 

Remember, investing in your affiliates is an investment in the growth of your business. Not sure this is the right time to launch your program?

Check out our article on 12 checks to assess affiliate marketing readiness for your ecommerce brand. 

Your Success Starts with The Good Strategy!