For the majority of affiliate networks, attracting affiliates is a huge headache. I have already published a lot of materials on this topic, and so has my team helps networks with marketing. Today we will look at a related problem – how to retain affiliates by making money on their traffic for many months and years.
Da dase. No base – no stable traffic
What do arbitrageurs look at first? What does it take for them to even consider staying with you? What do you need to have before thinking about additional retention tools?
Reputation
Arbitrageurs can forgive a lot, but a controversial reputation, opinions in the public space that an affiliate network can groundlessly cut payments or refuse them altogether – no. The fundamental solution is to honestly perform your functions, which include a guarantee of payments, even if you have misplaced the advertisement.
But this is not always enough. The affiliate has flooded the fraud and did not receive payment? Maybe go and shit on chats and forums. Not all competitors are sweethearts; fake negative reviews are the norm in our market. We must fight this. You need to work on your reputation.
For example, our friends from Pepper Partners, if the advertiser does not pay them money for normal affiliate’s traffic, make payments out of their own pockets and take the conflict to the public. As a result, the community may consider them scandalous, but every arbitrator knows that in this affiliate program he will receive 100% of the money for his work. This has a corresponding impact on trust and even love for the brand.
You don’t have to make a scandal. You can simply work smartly with reviews, as our friends and clients from Ejex do. Monitor opinions in chats and media, respond to comments and ask your affiliates to write positive reviews. It is important to be and to appear, only then will your reputation play into your hands.
Offers, conditions, KPI
Everything is simple here. If in a neighboring affiliate network the rate for the same offer with the same KPI is 20% higher, it will be almost impossible to attract and retain affiliates. Rates are critical for retention, if not basic, then personal ones for sure.
Infrastructure
There are even among my clients affiliate programs that are perfectly tailored to one source of traffic and do not at all understand the needs and requirements of the affiliate that flows from other sources.
Some people need free ad creatives and PWAs, some people need variety and simple pumping out of landing pages, some people need white pages, and some people will smile if an affiliate network provides creatives or the services of its designer at cost.
Support and affiliate managers
It’s hard to imagine that an affiliate network would become successful without a staff of great affiliate managers and competent support service. Communication skills, responsibility and… Professionalism. These guys are the face of your affiliate network. In the affiliate program, these positions are not filled by traffic experts, but by yesterday’s cashiers — you don’t have to think about affiliate’s LTV.
Everything is ok with the base. What else can you do to increase LTV?
At this level, you don’t just need to please arbitrageurs. You need to make them dependent on you. There are a couple of useful tools.
We form a dependency of the affiliate. Tool 1. Money
Bump rates, minimum hold, simplified KPIs – this is ideal for long-term cooperation. An arbitrator must understand that here he will earn 20+% more money for the same traffic and he simply will not have the desire to defect. This tool is obvious, but there is another, simpler and more cunning one.
We form a dependency of the affiliate. Tool 2. Infrastructure
It’s easy to overload with money. And not very profitable. You can cheat and tie it to yourself with infrastructure. The affiliate needs a tracker, and a sewer. Autofill and cards are also needed, but for our purposes, the easiest way to bind affiliates to yourself is through a tracker and a sewer.
I’ll tell you the scheme used by some networks running on AlterCPA:
- Send the affiliate to the tracker AlterCPA Red. There is a free plan where all functionality is available, and the limit is only for one stream. This is enough to test working with the affiliate network and tracker.
- Quite quickly, one stream becomes not enough for the affiliate and it buys a paid plan, the affiliate network receives its 10% RevShare from each payment.
- Direct the received budget to pay for technical support for the affiliate. Don’t forget, AlterCPA products do not have free technical support – you have to pay for quality.
- The affiliate is happy, since there is virtually no cool support for trackers on the market. Neither paid nor free. We have it. Fast and professional, but at a cost. In this scheme, support for the tracker is partially or fully paid for by the affiliate network.
Approximately the same scheme works with the cloaker AlterCPA One, which, thanks to some very smart algorithms and a constantly updated black-IP database, perfectly filters moderators for any source, including FB and Google.
Such an infrastructure will work with a affiliate network on any engine – our technicians will create an integration template upon the first request.
As a result, we get an arbitrator who depends on an affiliate program, which directs him to cool software, in some cases free, and in others very inexpensive. There the web will receive high-quality support for complex infrastructure, which arbitrators are always too lazy to deal with.
You can also be greedy and keep the referral fees for yourself, then you will get a small additional income for your managers.
Conclusion
Without a strong reputation, good offers and rates, and a competent support team, there is no point in dreaming about an interesting LTV.
If an affiliate network has outgrown its childhood illnesses and learned to work competently with the affiliates, it’s time to form a dependence on itself. Both money and infrastructure. I invite quality affiliate networks to connect their affiliates to AlterCPA software, which has had a great reputation for ten years now. In this way, you will make the life of your affiliates easier, and you will also tie them to you.