Could affiliate managers improve program management & communication practices?

As an affiliate manager, it is a key part of your job to learn to communicate effectively with your affiliates. If you don’t, you can lose their interest and potentially cut off valuable revenue sources. It is vitally important that you nurture your affiliates in order to build the brand and achieve your goals.

More recently, some affiliate marketing emails haven’t been hitting the mark and this has resulted in affiliates feeling as though they aren’t getting the attention that they need to do the job.

We spoke with Tero Päivärinta from Cashmagnet Ltd about his recent experiences. Cashmagnet are running mr-gamble.com with over 500 listed casino brands.

Check out what Tero had to say about how some of these marketing emails could be improved.

Affiverse: In your experience, do you think that affiliate managers are communicating with affiliates properly in 2021?

Tero: “I see a lot of good communication via skype with affiliate managers, and a lot of them are very professional. The laziness comes with email marketing, I do think affiliate managers are themselves handling newsletters and, in my mind, this should be the marketing team’s responsibility. With big companies, the country managers or country marketing teams are often responsible.”

Affiverse: Do you feel as though affiliate marketing emails are personalised to individuals or groups of affiliates? Are you given accurate information that is relevant to you?

Tero: “The standard newsletters we see are not personalized at all. As I was previously working on the other side, I did see that the brand was very excited about their new promo and thought the affiliates would use this also easily, but what they don’t understand is that an affiliate has hundreds of brands to promote. So, the email should only contain relevant info, targeted so much that it will be the 2-minute job for the affiliate to act and change the offer or add an offer. Including links ready to use, or keeping content short and to the point is incredibly useful for us.”

Affiverse: Why do you think that marketing in this field has become lazy?

Tero: “I think it’s always been like this, most of the marketing conversations and commercial selling is done via skype 1:1 anyways, it is just the program email communications that never really get the automation and personalisation that is now actually needed.”

Affiverse: Can poor communication get in the way of forming good relationships with affiliates? Can it affect your overall performance?

Tero: “The biggest problems come when the campaigns are changed, and customer uses one promo code that is no longer in use. Is this the fault of the affiliate who didn’t update or the brand who send a badly informed newsletter? You get 5 newsletters in a row telling new welcome offer in Sweden (but you personally don’t even promote there), and then they send the same bad newsletter saying Sweden and Finland promotion changes, do you discard this as the previous emails been misleading, or do you act on it?”

Affiverse: What do you think affiliate managers could do to improve the way that they communicate?

Tero: “Database Segmentation, personalised messaging and marketing relevancy. All these things need to be implemented in affiliate programs, just as brands use the same tools that the CRM team is using to promote offers to different customer segments. That way there is no extra work, and you know the affiliate will get the right message. If the affiliate is changing something, like promoting a new geo-location, they normally contact the brand to discuss a potential deal with this geo-location..”

Key Takeaways

While it may not always be the fault of an affiliate manager if your program marketing emails don’t hit the mark, they do have the responsibility to keep affiliates informed. Skype and social channels can be effective forms of communication but if marketing emails are also being sent out, they need to be accurate and cohesive.

From our experience, we would recommend that emails are straight to the point and relevant to the affiliates who are receiving them. If you send confusing subject lines, the emails might be ignored and offers can get outdated. It might be time to reassess email marketing practices and ensure the brand is being represented in the right way. Don’t let lazy with your email marketing – as it can certainly get in the way of building your affiliate program brand!

Watch this episode of AffiliateDRIVETIME to discover some of the quick ways that you can personalise your marketing messages for affiliates in your portfolio as Lee-Ann shares some of the tools we use to do that for our client brands.

If you need any assistance with managing your affiliate program, make sure to tune in to our FREE webinar on 25 March for some expert advice from Lee-Ann Johnstone. Bookmark the event here!