When managed correctly, affiliate marketing is one of the most cost effective online marketing channels. Many online retailers who are new to the affiliate world or those who have been running an affiliate programme for a while often don’t understand the motivation of their affiliates and how to smartly increase conversions.

If you are running an affiliate programme or considering running one, you should set targets and incentives on an ongoing basis to get the most out this channel. Leaving your affiliate channel unmanaged is a receipt for failure.

If you are wondering, your affiliates have joined to make money and as much of it as possible so consider offering monthly and weekly incentives and get them to push your offer just a bit better.

1. Offer a commission based tier structure – the idea is simple, the more revenue the affiliate generates, the more commission is paid. Consider upgrading all your affiliates to the top tier at the launch for the first month.

2. Offer deep landing pages on your site – allow affiliates to send qualified traffic to a landing page on your site, for example sitename.com/#affiliate-name/ which can include their logo.

3. Offer marketing creatives – furnish affiliates with new and sometime exclusive creative for their marketing efforts and consider including the affiliate name in the creative. Works great when the affiliate doesn’t have enough in house resources to create new curatives.

4. Offer product bundles – consider product bundles which are only available to customers who come via the affiliate channel, for example buy product x and get product Y free.

5. Offer a discount code – give your affiliates a discount code, exclusive to the affiliate channel.

6. Offer a cash reward – consider a cash reward for highest earning affiliate, best improved affiliate, highest value order affiliate etc so a few affiliate might win.

7. Offer free products – one of the best ways to make affiliates sell your products and for a relatively low investment. Make them not only your affiliates, but also brand ambassadors.

8. Offer a prize – similar to the above, however sometimes easier for the business to justify in terms of company expense.

9. Offer development resources – though XML and RSS integration are becoming more main stream, some affiliate have little knowledge as to integrating XML or RSS so consider offering free one day development whereby someone from your IT team spends a day tweaking the affiliate product offering.

10. Pick up the phone and ask them what you can do better – self explanatory (I hope)

So when setting incentives for your affiliates, try and place yourself in their shoes and ask ‘what will make me as an affiliate site do more for this merchant’. All in all, setting targets and incentives is an integral part of a well managed affiliate programme and it is never too late to start!

This entry was posted on Friday, February 20th, 2009 at 3:03 pm and is filed under Affiliate Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.