Although affiliate marketing involves letting content creators market your products for you, this doesn’t mean that you should just let your program run undead once you recruit your first batch of affiliates. In this regard, you need to make continual improvements to your affiliate program.

Nowadays, with affiliate marketing software solutions, individuals can run marketing campaigns with ease. Even if you are already running an affiliate program for your business, you probably want to enhance your business in this field. Find out how to make your affiliate program the most effective for rocketing the number of sales from affiliate partners. Plus, learn why you need to use the affiliate software to maximize your program. 

What Does It Mean to Optimize Affiliate Marketing? 

In simple terms, increasing the quantity of sales produced by your current partner network is the key to improving your affiliate marketing campaign. It may also imply improving traffic, leads, and other metrics. However, more sales are the real goal.

Similar to any marketing strategy or plan for driving sales, data-driven optimization can help you maximize the number of new customers coming through the affiliates. For maximum performance, you should, on a regular basis, be looking at your affiliates’ data to know very well what’s working and what isn’t working to bring in cash through your program. Next, act on the data by changing those areas of the program that need revamping. This could mean reducing commissions, carefully selecting new affiliates, optimizing where affiliates send leads, and increasing affiliate engagement. 

How To Optimize Affiliate Marketing Efforts to Drive More Growth?  

Whether you’ve recently started your affiliate program or you’ve had your program for some time, there are a number of steps that can be taken toward the optimization and scale of your affiliate marketing. We recommend these strategies and best practices for that.

Checking Data on A Regular Basis 

You should always have defined, quantifiable affiliate program goals related to a specified period. So that you are aware of how well your program is performing.

Examine affiliate sales income and conversion rates on a regular basis for the specified timeframes. Check other critical metrics for the program, such as average order value, number of unique transactions facilitated by affiliates, link hits, and leads generated. In this manner, you have complete visibility into the program’s performance and may see more clearly how changes you make may impact it. 

Change in Commission Rates 

Suppose you haven’t updated your affiliate commissions in a while. In that case, affiliates may not be quite so engaged – or they may move to other programs where commissions are more lucrative. So, ensure that your commission rates are competitive relative to other programs targeting the same affiliates. 

Be sure that you will, of course, need to ensure that the commissions are still sustainable to pay out for your business. It will be easier to start with lower commission rates, as affiliates won’t get mad if they are increased gradually. If you don’t want to increase affiliate commission rates permanently, raise these a little during peak selling periods or prolonged periods. 

Changing Other Parts of Commission Structure 

It’s not only about the commission rate. That is the only piece related to commissions which you can optimize. Another piece of the commission structure is something called cookie life, which is how long an affiliate is qualified to get a commission after clicking the link. The longer the cookie’s life is, the more opportunities there are to earn. It thus gains appeal among the affiliates.

You could also change the type of commission you pay. If you currently pay a flat fee and your order values fluctuate a lot, no doubt you would wish to switch to a percentage-of-sale model. After all, with a percentage structure comes incentivized affiliates to bring in more revenue.

Another critical piece: if you’re buying traffic, restructure to pay only for sales—or, at worst, also for qualified leads if your sales cycle is not a quick one. If you are paying for the traffic, this exposes you to colossal affiliate abuse.  

Appealing Healthy Competition 

Competition may be an effective motivator, so utilize this for your potential benefit to enhance your affiliate program? Run a repetitive challenge where the top-performing individuals in a month or quarter get an additional prize. Show a list of competitors so members can see who is making the most deals for added inspiration. This will draw in affiliates and drive them to make more deals to climb spots.

Adding New Perks

Introducing extra benefits is an additional strategy to encourage affiliates to sell more. To truly encourage affiliates to hit important sales milestones, think about offering a permanent commission rate at specific lifetime sales levels, or consider temporarily raising an affiliate’s income when they hit specific sales thresholds in a month or quarter.

Offer to provide affiliates with discount codes for their followers–the discounts will incentivize more sales and, therefore, generate more commissions for the affiliates. You could also provide affiliates with free products to sample so that their promotions are more organic. This is particularly worthwhile if you’ve partnered with affiliates who aren’t already familiar with your products. 

Automate Affiliate Engagement

Send emails or messages with reminders about your affiliate program using affiliate software. These work exceptionally well when they are change-related announcements, such as those announcing a commission change, a new perk, or the top-performing group of affiliates who get additional benefits. Regardless of how frequently other changes occur, send out regular reminders about your program every quarter or so.

Why Do You Need Affiliate Marketing Software Solutions to Make Affiliate Marketing More Effective?

You can’t fully optimize your affiliate program if you’re presently using an affiliate network. You must execute your own strategy using affiliate marketing software solutions for optimal outcomes. There are several features to maximize your affiliate program with software that are not possible with current affiliate networks. It include: 

  • You can set any commission rate with the software.
  • You could add complex reward structures, including commission bonuses and contests if you so choose.
  • Another benefit of using affiliate software is a full view of all of your program data, letting you drive optimization decisions based on facts. Meanwhile, with networks, this very affiliate data is owned by them, and they do not provide complete visibility into this data to the end user, so making educated decisions is hard. 

Conclusion

Keep on tracking critical metrics for what’s working and what is not, then implement the best practices that would take your affiliate program to the next level. At the very core of any successful affiliate marketing optimization is the right affiliate marketing software solutions. It can help you optimize your program in ways that simply aren’t possible with affiliate networks alone.