Affiliate Mastery: Building an Owned Audience Affiliate Program
Interested in affiliate marketing?
You may have seen a lot of chatter about Noah Tucker, CEO of Social Snowball. He recently shared with us at Foxwell Digital his best tips on how to turn customers into affiliates.
How to remove friction from affiliate onboarding:
Understand that an influencer partner is very different from a standard customer within a brand’s owned audience, and therefore should be treated as such with a different onboarding process that is more relevant to the influencer and their partnership and interaction with the brand.
Think about these things that are different for influencers and affiliate programs versus regular customers:
Checkout
Navigating the site
Following on social media
Leaving reviews
Converting a customer into an affiliate should be as frictionless as it was converting them into a customer in the first place.
What not to do to build your affiliate program:
DON’T:
Bury the sign-up and/or information about your affiliate program in the footer or somewhere else non-descript on the site
Use a clunky, long, confusing, or irrelevant affiliate sign-up page
Make someone on the backend/brand side have to manually approve affiliates
How to turn all customers into affiliates:
Turn customers into affiliates automatically and without them having to even apply
Can do this via a Thank You page widget
Make it easy to share their affiliate code/link with their friends, family, and network
How to give affiliates the right incentives:
Make the affiliate offer BETTER than the welcome offer/discount
The sum of two-sided incentives should be equal to the paid ads CPA
Metric to know:
Affiliate Revenue / GMV x 100
How to integrate affiliates into lifecycle channels:
Keep your affiliate communication within the same communication platforms you were using to communicate with them as a customer. They’re already accustomed to seeing you within those channels, which ideally made them want to purchase and become an affiliate in the first place (i.e. social media, email marketing, etc.). Also keep in mind the difference in transactional communication (i.e. information about payouts or changes in revenue for affiliates) vs. marketing communication to affiliates.
Creating higher converting communication to affiliates and their referrals:
Send strategic communication reminders in retention channels (i.e. email/SMS)
Send educational content explaining how the affiliate program works
Send inspirational content about affiliate success stories
Creating performance benchmarks for customer affiliates:
A high-performing affiliate program is ~ 6-10% of GMV coming from affiliates
Affiliate revenue goals are usually ~ 0.5-2% of total revenue from affiliate links
Important to note the difference between loyalty audiences and customer affiliates