Building an effective relationship with your affiliates is an incredibly important part of maintaining your program. It is not enough to simply treat your affiliates as a means to an end and a way for you to drive traffic. You need to ensure that you are building a full relationship with them to best benefit both of you.
Our CEO and founder Lee-Ann Johnstone sat down with industry legend Kirsty McCubbin for an episode of the Affiliate Marketing Podcast. Among the topics they discussed was the importance of building strong relationships with partners and merchants that you might be working with. Here are three key things to remember when trying to build an effective relationship in this sector.
Do not be afraid to make the first contact
It is important to remember that your affiliate networking is a business, and so should be treated as such. If you sit around and wait for the partners to come to you, you are not going to be able to make the same connections as someone who takes the initiative and reaches out first.
If your partners are not engaging with you, find a way to reverse it and start to build an effective relationship of your own volition. Ask potential partners how you could best add value to them, and then use this to further your own activities.
Never assume communication is clear
You need to aim for clear and open communication across all your connections, but you can never assume that you have this clarity. Clear communication will often prove to be half of the battle that you might have, but you need to make sure that you are constantly fighting to improve the standards you might set.
It can never be assumed that everyone in a single conversation knows everything that is being discussed. Always be prepared to have to spend part of a conversation on explanations. Though an effective relationship is built on open communication, you cannot afford to assume that a partner is as knowledgeable about a certain aspect as you are.
Tap into your partner’s resources
Just as you have a unique set of skills that you use to bolster your affiliate program, so will your partners have skills and interests that you could use to your advantage. These skills might even complement yours well, and could help you to cover some of the areas of your program that are a little weaker.
When building an effective relationship with your partners, tap into some of the skills and bases of knowledge that they might have, and do not be afraid to offer yours in return. Working together in this way will help to foster better results for both parties, and could result in a much stronger relationship overall.
Good affiliate programs are built on healthy and effective relationships. You cannot focus entirely on driving traffic and results; you need to make sure that you have a network around you that you have built a relationship with. Focus on creating these crucial partnerships, and you might notice that certain aspects of creating your program might be much easier to handle.
