What kind of retention campaigns should you run in your affiliate program to keep partners engaged?

Attracting affiliates to your program simply isn’t enough. You also need to make sure that they are as engaged with your program as possible, otherwise their initial enthusiasm for your products could falter over time. Running retention campaigns is a great way to keep your partners interested and gives them the motivation needed to continue promoting your products.

You need to make sure that you foster a good relationship with your partners so that you understand their needs more successfully. A proactive affiliate manager will be able to keep the relationships moving forward and will look for ways to fix any issues that do arise.

Though there are many different strategies that you could try, there are several tried and tested retention campaigns that could work well for you. Let’s take a closer look at some of the things that you could try.

Tiered Commission

One of the easiest retention campaigns that you can run by far is tiered commission. This is a fantastic structure to set up within your program. Your tiers should be on par with or even above what your competitors are able to offer here. Make sure that there is plenty of incentive for your affiliates to climb up the tiers, but also make sure that they are well-rewarded regardless of the tier that they are on.

Competitions

What could be better for engaging your affiliates than a competition? Offer prizes that will get them excited about your products and ensure that you stand out from your competition as your own unique brand. This can be great for building brand awareness and could even attract some potential new affiliates to your brand if used correctly.

There is a wide range of different prizes you could offer. From help creating landing pages and other marketing materials to one-on-one training sessions and more, think about what your affiliates could truly benefit from and use that as the motivation and prize for your competition.

Communication

As an affiliate manager, you need to make sure that you have good lines of communication with your affiliates. Only then will you be able to quickly recognise when an issue might have arisen. You will then be able to fix it quickly, or take proactive steps to ensure that something similar can’t happen again.

This is a retention campaign that is conducted a little differently from others but that does not make it any less important. Make sure you send out regular newsletters with industry updates and news about your program and products. If you know that you will be attending the same event as some of your affiliates, schedule in a time in which you can meet them. Make sure you also have regular chats with them either on the phone or on video call too, as these can be far more productive and a lot clearer than just emailing back and forth.

Keyword bidding

If you run pay-per-click advertising through your affiliate program, you can use keyword bidding as retention campaigns to engage your affiliates. Have a list of keywords and encourage them to bid on them and ensure that they are able to fully understand your product and how to drive traffic using it. This should, hopefully, result in their sites being better positioned on search engines. In turn, they will have more opportunities to expand their community while you can benefit from the increase in traffic and sales that they will see.

Tools

The right tools can help an affiliate really take their program to the next level. Whether it is a subscription to a piece of software or an improved landing page to help with conversions, there are many different tools that you as an affiliate manager can offer through retention campaigns.

Take a look at your list of affiliates as a whole and see what sorts of tools they could benefit from. If there is one area where they need some assistance, this is a great place to start such a campaign from. You will be able to engage your affiliates and ensure that they have a great connection with your brand while also making improvements to it that should strengthen your infrastructure.

These are just five examples of the types of retention campaigns that you could decide to run, and each one could prove to be beneficial in its own way. If you feel that your affiliates are drifting a little, or are at risk of dropping out of the program all together, you need to make sure that you are taking proactive steps to change this.

If you would like some help managing your retention rates within your affiliate program, get in touch with our agency today. We can offer strategic support to help you keep your affiliates engaged and able to drive consistent sales.