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How to Boost Affiliate Engagement
How to Boost Affiliate Engagement

Learn the different ways to engage affiliates to keep your program popping with good activity.

Nick Castellano avatar
Written by Nick Castellano
Updated over a week ago

Your affiliate and influencer network is similar to your customer base in many ways. You know your customers will have some active times and other times not so much. Affiliates will be the same. The key is to keep your brand top-of-mind.

With consistent, strategic communication, you can ensure your network stays engaged and active.

Top-of-Inbox

We recommend having a framework of proactive communication in place. You can start with our platform emails. These are transactional and will send when a specific event happens. When you're ready, you can get more proactive and robust with your comms by hooking into the power of Klaviyo or Mailchimp.

📍 Where we are in the app: Account>Settings>Integrations

Other integration options may be possible. Check out our integration with Zapier as one option. And feel free to start an in-app chat with us or email us at [email protected] to ask about others.

Newsletters

You want your network to feel like they are part of something exciting. And they are! But your content doesn’t all have to be original or focused on affiliate marketing either. Some ideas for affiliate newsletters are:

  • Your company news

  • Exclusive discounts for affiliates so they can test-drive products they may want to promote.

  • Surveys (makes the most sense for larger programs). The list of questions can be a collaboration between your marketing and product teams.

  • Recycled, reframed, existing content. Think of how you can continue to increase your networks’ understanding and love of your brand. Some ideas of existing content you can upcycle pretty easily:

What Not to Say

We recommend giving your network ideas, but we don’t recommend giving them canned messaging to use in their promotions. Your affiliates will do best when they drop your products in their own authentic words. Especially if you are in a niche market, the last thing you want to do is create noticeable overlap between influencers in your network.

Frequency

Chances are your affiliate marketing efforts are part of a larger marketing effort, so the “how often” questions really depends on your capacity. But some of our brands with the best ROI are in touch with their affiliate network once a week.

In-App Announcements

📍 Where we are in the app: Dashboard > Message Center > Send Announcement

We also have an Announcements feature on the platform that will allow you to blast a message out to all affiliates subscribed to a specific offer.

Announcements will only be seen by your affiliates if they are logged in to Refersion. This makes them great for maintaining activity, but not the ideal tool for re-engaging affiliates. They are used most effectively in tandem with an email or newsletter introducing a new product or financial incentive.

Examples From Other Merchant Partners

Blenders Eyewear leveraged the Klaviyo integration as part of a “grow at all costs” strategy and were able to achieve a 3X increase in affiliate conversions.

Read the Blenders Eyewear case study to mine for ideas!

Bonuses and Other Incentives

We dive into this one in more detail in our best practice article on Incentivizing Affiliates. But since engagement dovetails into incentivization, the important thing to note is that you may want to hold off on creating incentives. After a little time observing performance you’ll have the data to create the incentives that will drive impact within your network.

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