Affiliate Program Credibility
Many businesses, both online and offline, invest a great deal of time, effort and money building their brand name. Credibility is, after all, what most consumers want when they’re ready to make a purchase. They want to be assured they spend their money on a product or service that will give them satisfaction. Granted, there are those shoppers who are looking for the cheapest price but they, too, expect the merchant and product to be credible. If the product was advertised as total junk, hence the cheap price, it likely wouldn’t sell very well. Is this the type of product you wish to sell? The type of product that’s associated with your name? Most companies would never consider promoting such a product, yet they treat their affiliate program with such regard. They setup their program, pay the network fees or buy the software, make a few banners then go about managing other aspects of their business. They think their affiliate program can run, successfully, on auto-pilot so it’s practically abandoned. There are few, if any, promotions, new creative or even someone dedicated to managing the affiliate program. Affiliate support requests are unanswered, this sales channel is not motivated and it eventually dies. The program has no credibility, with affiliates, and neither does the merchant.
Does this sound like your affiliate program? Unfortunately, this description fits far too many programs today. After a program reaches this stage, is it too late to turn it around? Usually, with proper management, your affiliate program can recover from this. However, it’s much better to do it right the first time and typically costs much less than having to make up for lost ground before you can turn the program around.
In order to build credibility, you must first want it. This may sound strange but you shouldn’t try to build credibility just because you think it’s something you need to succeed. You should build credibility because you want your affiliate program to be credible, like your brand or company name. Affiliates today are much more sophisticated and are likely to spot a transparent attempt to make your program appear to be credible.
The recipe for success, here, is rather simple but the effort is nothing short of tremendous. You must first recognize your affiliate force for what it is; a sales channel with a great potential. Like other sales people, affiliates want to be rewarded for their hard work, be compensated fairly, need to be motivated and want a certain level of attention. Some affiliates want more attention than others while some just want to know issues are resolved in a timely manner and have the confidence they will be paid on time, and the amount that was promised. Sure, this sounds like just common sense but you would be amazed at how many businesses fail here. You can’t achieve this by letting your program run on auto-pilot. You need someone, or a team of people, who work on this all the time and have it as their number one priority.
Your affiliate manager needs to be accessible. What’s your contact information for your affiliate manager? Is it posted somewhere? Do your affiliates have it? Who do they contact when issues arise? How can a potential affiliate contact you? Too many companies don’t even have a published contact for their program and others don’t even bother to answer email. It’s common to assign affiliate management duties to someone in the organization who already has a full plate and doesn’t have the time, desire or motivation do this properly. Should affiliates invest their time, online real estate and their money on advertising your program if you treat it like a part-time job? The competition for high producing affiliates gets more intense each year and if you’re not spending the time and money on your affiliate program, to make it successful, you can bet your competitor is and is also reaching your potential customers.
In order to build a motivated affiliate sales force, your affiliate program should have the same credibility as your company name and your products or services.
