In order to grow a healthy affiliate program, you should check your affiliates onboarding process first.
What does affiliate onboarding mean? The experience an affiliate has when they become oriented to your program. The goal is to make it as easy as possible for them to go through each step in order to start making money with your program.
Affiliate onboarding is a one-time experience that should create a smooth journey between your sign up page and affiliate’s first contact with your program. Unfortunately, the affiliate onboarding process is often overlooked.
Here are 5 reasons you should review your affiliates onboarding process:
- Increase the number of active accounts
Provide your affiliates the right information and a clear process of getting them set within your program in Avangate Affiliate Network. Give them all the needed info about your program, your products, and provide them with a welcome kit in order to help with their activation.
- Reduce the time between sign-up and first sale
Many affiliates don’t know how to set-up their links correctly, how to choose which products to promote, and they remain in a pending stage, seeking more info or abandoning the program. If your competitors have a better onboarding process, they may win them easily. Think about what you would need to know as an affiliate and provide them the data in a clear and simple manner in order to help them start selling and reduce the timeframe between sign-up and first sale. Use sale presentations and product tours as these work best.
- Increase the sales volumes
Activating affiliates and helping them achieve their first sale with your program can be hard, but the results will show in time and you will notice an increase in volumes as well Tweet. The sooner they understand more about your products and how to promote them, the sooner the results will come.
- Reduce the number of potential dormant accounts
A bad onboarding process – or the lack of it – will result in a large number of dormant or inactive affiliates. The affiliate signed up with your program for a reason, but somehow never became productive. On average, a good affiliate program has 10% to 15% active affiliates, if you have way below these numbers, you should definitely take a look at your onboarding process Tweet.
- Improve communication and build relationships
35% of affiliates ranked the relationship with the merchant as ‘crucial’ to ‘join, promote and terminate programs’ (AffStat 2015). Communication is key to building the relationship with each affiliate.
A good communication flow will make affiliates happier, more willing to work with you, and trust you and your affiliate program. Tweet
These are five simple onboarding best practices that you should take into account when analyzing your onboarding process. Affiliate programs can see significant growth when they have a clear onboarding plan and engage with their affiliates right from the beginning.
Teodora Dobjanschi is Senior Affiliate Recruiter at Avangate Affiliate Network.
This article appeared in issue 36 of FeedFront Magazine, which was published in October 2016. https://issuu.com/affiliatesummit/docs/feedfront-36
