Like a light switch or a faucet, you simply turn on the affiliate channel and sales flow like electricity to a bulb or water into your glass. It’s very much like paid search or even catalog marketing. You spend time “running the wires” or “hooking up the plumbing”, but once it is ready to go, sales shoot into your order system in moments. You just have to make sure the wiring is right, the campaigns are live, and it’s done. It’s sort of like Field of Dreams with Kevin Costner. If you build it, they will come.
Wake up Jamie. Jamie, get up. It’s Monday. Time to get up and lead the charge? Jamie…are you up?
What a strange dream that was. 🙂 Oh how I, and my team as well as every other agency and affiliate manager out there wishes that were true. Unfortunately, it isn’t. A ‘switch’ to turn on affiliate marketing is not realistic. Why isn’t it? The simple answer is – it just isn’t. Like a light switch…you simply turn on the affiliate channel and sales flow like electricity to a bulb. Affiliate marketing is successful because of your relationships. And relationships take time to develop, strengthen, and cultivate into prosperity. They follow a path that sometimes takes months or years to see to fruition. We call this path the Affiliate Activation Life Cycle.
This life cycle has a beginning, but has no end. It begins when we identify a potential affiliate for a program and sometimes yields sales within a few days. This happened with one of our premier accounts, SportChalet. There was a pent up demand for their affiliate program and they were a well known brand. So affiliates jumped right in and we had sales the first day. Wouldn’t that be great if that happened every single time? Affiliate marketing is successful because of your relationships. And relationships take time to develop, strengthen, and cultivate into prosperity. It doesn’t. Why? Well, mainly people, seasonality, vacations, affiliates’ own project pipeline, email clutter, good intentions, higher priority advertisers, and much more. Too often the belief is that once you open an affiliate program on a major network, that affiliates will sign up immediately, post links and generate sales. But that is a robotic view of the channel. And it’s unfortunately not the rule. With programs like paid search, the rules are pretty much clearly laid out. You put together an ad group with keywords. You optimize your landing pages. Google tells you how much that costs, and you either pull the lever or you don’t, right?
Affiliates don’t work that way. Imagine you are an affiliate. You receive 100 emails per day (probably higher actually) requesting to join programs. How many can you actually get to while you run your business, maintain your own project pipeline, respond to requests from affiliate managers you know, respond to customer requests, and generally grow your business? What happens when you have a sick day, or staff is out of the office? These things pile up.
Let’s walk through a recent activation cycle so you get a handle on how it works.
Day 1
Our Publisher Development Manager receives a publisher development request from our team.
Day 2
Our publisher development team compiles a list of affiliates that meet the criteria in the request. Initial outreach is made via email. About two in ten respond initially. Let’s walk down the path of one of those two.
Day 3
We respond to the affiliate with more information on our program. This particular website owner understands affiliate marketing so we don’t have to educate them on the concept. This saves about two weeks of explanation. No lie, two weeks. We set up a call to introduce the products and client to the affiliate and discuss the opportunity.
Day 6
This was the soonest we could get the meeting. But the affiliate couldn’t make it. Had to reschedule for a week.
Day 13
Time for our meeting and it went well. We introduced the product, got a great understanding of what they need to be successful, not only with this program, but overall. From this meeting with have five things to gather for this affiliate.
Day 14
We make our initial request to the Advertiser, our client, for two of the five things we need to get this affiliate going.
Day 15
We deliver the three items we have for them and contact the client to remind them of the remaining two.
Day 21
We receive the final two items and send them over to the affiliate. No initial response.
Day 23
We connect via social network and reach out via phone to ensure they received everything they need. They have. This advertiser is slated for inclusion on the site at their next new advertiser rollout – 14 days from now.
Day 37
The new advertiser rollout occurs and client is now listed in the affiliate’s search engine and at the bottom of the product page. This is their format for any brands that are not top tier, like Target, etc. They let it run for 30 days before they review the searches, impressions, clicks, sales, and commissions generated.
Day 67
After 30 days we have seen good results. Conversion rate is in line with the affiliate’s expectations, a decent average order size, and their commissions are good enough for them to work on optimization. They then send us a packet of increased exposure opportunities.
Day 71
The JEB team meets with our client to discuss the success of this relationship and the many opportunities provided to us for increased sales. We highlight the ones that we think are going to be the best. The advertiser will review and get back to us.
Day 78
During our weekly call the advertiser has a few questions. It takes three more days to hear back from the affiliate on those questions. We advise the client accordingly.
Day 85
The Advertiser gives approval on a number of the opportunities and the affiliate team begins preparing the materials for the affiliate. This can take anywhere from a few moments to a week or more. This affiliate needed custom offers and pricing on products so it took a little over two weeks.
Day 100
All new materials are sent to affiliate and the offer goes live. The [affiliate activation] life cycle has a beginning, but no end. At this point, you probably get the idea. It goes on and on. Was this affiliate fully optimized? No, after 100 days we have some great data points, have built a great relationship and are on our way to a significant increase in sales from this one partner. We’ve also started to receive unsolicited opportunities from this partner because of the successes we have had with this advertiser and others. So we start to engage in those. About 100 individual conversations and engagement have occurred over this time frame to get us to this point. It’s quite extensive isn’t it?
And this is a time frame from someone who replied to our initial engagement. What about the ones who didn’t? We continue to reach out to them over a period of 12 weeks via email, phone, and social networks. Not creepy-like, but we do give them several opportunities to engage in a mutually beneficial relationship. And when they do respond, the process above starts for them as well. At any one point, our entire team may be walking 2000 affiliates through this process.
At the end of the journey, we hope to have each affiliate, that has the potential, fully optimized for a given advertiser, generating as much revenue for them and commissions for themselves as possible. And then we are done right? Too often the belief is that once you open an affiliate program on a major network, that affiliates will sign up immediately, post links and generate sales. Nope, affiliates take vacations. Affiliates have employee turnover. Affiliates launch new products. Affiliates launch new sites. Affiliates make mistakes and remove our advertisers from their site. And sometimes we make mistakes and push out bad creative or promotions and offers. Then the outreach and engagement begins.
During this entire process, that really sometimes takes years to develop, you get to speak to so many affiliates so many different times. We love it. You really do get to build strong relationships with so many. Several affiliates attended my wedding almost 10 years ago. And my staff has some seriously good friends in the community now that help them grow their clients programs.
But, a faucet it is not. It’s probably more like a garden. A garden with lots of sunshine all year waiting for you to plant, weed, feed, fertilize, and harvest. All year long. Go forth and get your green thumb on!
What do you think? You feelin’ me out there? Or you think I’ve been in the sun too long? Let me know in the comments below.
PS – Hey affiliates, don’t think this article was written complaining about how long it takes sometimes. We seriously enjoy working with you and building these relationships 🙂
