Building an Affiliate Flywheel: Active Management #21

RBL Flywheel Newsletter #21 💥

This week we're discussing the concept of:

Active Management for Affiliate Partners!

This is Part 5 in the 6-part series: Building an Affiliate Flywheel 💥

We are 83% complete!

You will get a checklist to use to take to your advantage.

Far too many think affiliate is a marketing vehicle that is autonomous driving.

Passive affiliate management does not work.

With this checklist, go forth and make et’s make the most underrated and misunderstood performance marketing “channel” even better. Ask me anything.

Best,

Tye 🤠

Active Management 🚨

This ain’t an index fund.

Brands that attempt to operate them as such fail.

For brands working with teams like ours, we recommend:

1-3 hours per week (depending on program size and scope) to review and approve partners, and plans. We can do the rest.

If you are doing it yourself you are investing 10 hours - 40 hours + per week to do it right.

Launching on an affiliate network, setting your payout, tracking, and adding creative is only the beginning. 😮

You need…

The RBL Affiliate Marketing Active Management ✅ list

Weekly reporting ✅

This needs to include (are you ready?)

• Top movers week over week and month over month

• Clicks leads downloads sales revenue by partner by month (tied to brand North Star Metric and KPIs)

  • Top Ten Partners

  • All Partners

  • All Active vs. non Active

  • Breakdown by partner business model (pie chart)

  • Revenue and costs over time (line graph)

  • Largest movers week over week (conditional formatting)

  • Largest movers month over month

Time investment ⏳

(yes, this is where the word active comes in 🤪)

• If managed internally: 8 hours a week minimum 40 + hours medium to large programs. Likely 80+ hours/week or multiple FTEs working on Enterprise brands

• If managed with a team like RBL 1-3 hours per week for most brands

Applications 🚨

• Are reviewed weekly or daily to approve or decline

• Last thing you want is high quality / potential partners waiting too long on an answer if they can promote you or not

Master Partner target list 🔓

Based on agreed-upon criteria such as

• Unique visitors per month

• EPC (Earnings per 100 clicks)

• Marketing Promotional Method

  • SEO

  • Email

  • Paid Search (Google, Bing)

  • Paid Social (Meta, TikTok, Snap, Pinterest)

  • Forums

  • Programmatic

  • Mobile Apps

  • YouTube

  • Pay Per Call

  • Podcast/Audio

• Relevancy to your Ideal Customer Persona (ICP)

• Offers extended

• Offers accepted / joined

• Active partners (traffic)

• Active partners (revenue) 

• Rejected offer

• No response

• Next steps

New revenue-generating plans 💰

This can get more detailed with scoring systems that are prioritized based on a number of factors.

• Historical performance in similar partnerships

• Estimated performance with this partnership

Sending offers/recruiting x partners per month

• Tied to marketing strategy

• Tied to revenue goals

• Based on a diversified partner mix

• Informed by quality metrics, not just short-term vanity metrics

Monthly newsletter 📰

To all your partners with updated

• Links

• Offers

  • Start and end dates

• Creative

• Landing pages

• Product updates

• Remember this is for publishers, not customers

Consider new mediums 🆕

(if you have a sizable program and it helps you meet partners where they are and have more streamlined agile communication with them)

• FB Group

• Slack

1:1 Check-ins 🤝

Weekly/monthly check-in with top ten partners

• As your program expands so will your connection, calls, discussion, and an in-person meeting with your top partners

Activation campaigns 🎯

to get more join partners delivering value and going from joined to driving: traffic, leads, downloads, or purchases

Run reversals ✋

for valid returns or customer refunds

Loyalty partner order inquiries 🙋‍♀️ 

Answer loyalty partner order inquiries

Review and test some % of paid placement 📢

opportunities with higher quality and higher traffic content sites and portfolios.

Quarterly competitive analysis 🥇 

to ensure commission and approach is in line with the competition

Apply via Homepage 🚪 

Offer way for partners to apply to your program from your website homepage footer

Application Page 💁🏻‍♂️

Should be...

• Clean

• Simple

• Have the following info:

  • Commission Rate (% or flat fee per valued action)

  • Average Order Value (AOV)

  • EPC: Earnings Per 100 Clicks

  • Conversion Rate (CVR)

  • Products available to promote

  • Geographic or product restrictions (be explicit about those that are not commissionable - not ideal but understandable)

  • Program differentiators (longer action referral period / cookie window, larger payouts, more actions, higher conversion rate, better story, more reviews, more velocity, flat fee payments, willing to test, willing to allow wider option of promotional methods e.g. paid search with limits

  • Search Policy (TM, TM +, bid caps, not allowed with goal to integrate in competitive Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs))

  • Other channel marketing / promotional policy e.g. programmatic, FB ads, FB Groups, Reddit

  • Bonus opportunities or ways to earn more for top performers?

• Way to context affiliate manager/team easily with questions

• Partner segmentation. Placing partners in buckets based on the business model, volume, and quality and messaging them with content specific and helpful to their needs

Cohort analysis 👩‍💻

review quality metrics of leads and purchases from partner ID 123 over a multiple-week view. Look at metrics like

• Refunds / Customer Service issues

• Average Order Value

• % new customer

• % time interacted with another affiliate partner in a multi-touch view

• Repeat purchases/buyers

Influencers 🛍

• At the very least you should be gifting top micro-medium influencers perfect for your brand likely to resonate with it and promote for free.

• Utilize that for white-listed paid social ad posts and use it to test into the pay-per-post - pay-per-action affiliate opportunities

• Test into pay per action models, flat fee and gifting to expand this arm of your program. You test via direct negotiation or an tap into an influencer network to prove it out. (just be sure to closely review their terms and conditions to understand costs, timelines and out clause requirements)

Test Maintain and troubleshoot tracking 🛤️

If tracking goes down it’s on you to maintain and fix it so your partners get rewarded for sending you business

Tech 💾 

Review APIs or data feeds as needed to ensure optimized for best use

Network 🧘‍♀️

Good working relationship with a network to get help, ask questions and negotiate to ensure the appropriate scope of work for tracking

In-person 🍾

Attend at least one conference or in-person event a year to meet with industry players, your top partners and explore new partners.

So What?! Why does this matter?

Active Affiliate Program Management will always beat "Passive" management.

Compare the checklist with your existing program to get a sense of how passive or active it is.

Conservative estimates suggest a revenue improvement of 30-70% with active programs in the short term.

However based on data we have seen on current non managed account run rates, I would go so far as to say some brands can improve revenue 300% over a period of 12 months.

It's not just about top line growth, but it's also about the efficiency gained, improved negotiated terms, higher quality, reaching customers at each stage of the funnel, diversity, and accurately attributed partners.

You simply cannot achieve that with a passive approach.