Affiliate recruitment is one of the most important aspects of affiliate management. Nearly 80% of any affiliate manager’s time will be spent on affiliate recruitment. That 80% will be broken down differently for each individual, however, the most successful affiliate program managers spend a significant amount of time on follow ups.
Follow ups are one of the most important aspects of any form of outreach. Below are a few tips for efficient follow up in your affiliate recruitment efforts.
Receive a lot of emails
Affiliates receive a lot of email. A lot! So, it is very easy for your email to get lost. There are many ways that an email can get lost in an inbox (spam, deleted, read but never answered, etc.) Whatever the reason may be as to why your email was not responded to, it is important to make sure that you follow up with a second, third, or even a fifth or six email.
If an affiliate is not interested, most will simply reply back and say that they are not interested in promoting your affiliate program at this time.
Stay Persistent
Staying persistent is a must if you want to finally get in touch with a potential affiliate. As mentioned above, there may be multiple reasons as to why your email hasn’t been replied to yet. Ignoring the email is one of them and that’s where persistence comes in.
Persistence is key for multiple reasons.
1. It shows the type of affiliate manager that you are. You see a potential great partner and you continue until they decide to partner. That makes the affiliate feel that you are dedicated to this program and its success. A successful affiliate program also means successful affiliates.
2. When the affiliate first saw your email, it may have been marked as something to follow up with, but after time, they totally forget about it. Your persistent communication brings your name back to the front of their brain, increasing the chances of them taking action from the email.
Use an Email Drip Campaign
Using an email drip campaign or something similar that allows you to automatically have follow up emails sent out can really be helpful. This allows you to set up the communications from the very beginning and you let the system take care of the sending of the emails on the intervals that you set up.
Continue to feed the email list and the drip campaign will continue to send out emails. This helps free up more time to find more affiliates to recruit.
Track / Test Emails Sent
Just like any type of marketing or outreach, it is important to track your results. I recommend creating a spreadsheet that is your “Master Recruiting List” that includes all affiliate contact information and the dates of the initial outreach and all follow ups. It’s also recommended to include notes on whether or not the affiliate has signed up for the program or what their reason for not joining is.
You can also use this spreadsheet to make note of any out-of-office replies or leave of absences that people may reply back with.
Finally, you can use this spreadsheet to review the response rates of your emails. You can use this to test different types of initial outreach emails, different subject lines, etc.
Affiliate recruitment is one of the most time consuming activities that any successful affiliate manager will perform. It is important to follow up with everyone that you reach out to.
If you have any questions or comments about these tips to effectively follow up with affiliates that you are recruiting, then please leave a comment below.
A absolutely agree we use pitchbox which is design for outreach but you can use it for affilaite recruitment as well