You’re an affiliate program manager. You’ve got an in-house team but your program doesn’t seem to be growing at the rate you would like it to. Your team members feel stretched and aren’t able to spend the necessary time to build quality relationships with your current affiliates because they are trying to bring in new opportunities as well. And to top it all off you have senior management breathing down your neck reminding you all too often that the sales targets need to be hit.
You need help. You want to grow your program but you don’t want to completely hand over the reins to someone else. You’re doing a great job- you just need some support! Why not free up your teams’ time and outsource recruitment efforts? Here are 4 reasons why you should:
1. Focus Your Time on Optimization and Activation
Bringing new affiliates into your program is great, but how does it benefit you if they aren’t driving clicks? Affiliates are bombarded with offers and incentives by merchants from all over the world- why would they choose to promote your brand? Well, because you’re awesome; you have competitive payouts, there is a compelling story behind the brand, your website is optimized and ready for their traffic, and you have great consumer offers for them to talk about…but how do they know these things?
If you take recruiting new affiliates off your plate, your team can focus on getting current affiliates active in your program by cultivating weekly or biweekly newsletters to showcase new offers, promotions, and products. You will have the time to negotiate placements with VIP affiliates and deal with any tracking, attribution, or pixel issues that may arise. Activation and optimization efforts are just as, if not more, important than recruiting new affiliates into your program. Focus your time on getting your current publishers driving warm leads to your website and hit those sales targets!
2. Full-Time Attention on Recruitment
Publisher outreach can be incredibly time consuming. As mentioned before, affiliates have multiple offers to join programs numerous times in a day. One email is not going to cut through that noise. Effective recruitment often involves multiple emails and phone calls over the course of a few months- that’s a full time job!
By outsourcing affiliate recruitment you will be able to have someone focus solely on these efforts and not get distracted by the other daily tasks that your in-house team needs to deal with in order to to keep the program optimized.
3. Expertise Specific to Outreach and Recruitment
Outsourcing recruitment means that you don’t have to spend the time to train your team in this area of expertise- what a load off your back! You can hire someone who already knows the industry and the best practices of publisher outreach inside and out. Stick to what you are good at- use your knowledge of your brand to get these affiliates active, and take the time consuming task of recruitment off your plate and give it to those who specialize in it. Work smarter, not harder!
4. Diversify Your Affiliate Portfolio
It can be easy to get stuck on recruiting the low hanging fruit of affiliate recruitment such as content, coupon, deal, and loyalty affiliates. These players are typically experienced in this type of performance model and thus make the on-boarding process much more streamlined for your team. But what about all of the opportunities that you are missing out on?
What about that offline magazine with an AMAZING following that hasn’t been responding to your emails because they have never worked on a performance basis? Wouldn’t it be great if someone had the time to explain the opportunity of performance marketing, to walk them through how to get started in the industry, and to negotiate a hybrid model to give them a risk free way of trying it out?
Of course it would! But who has the time for that? Ahh yes, your outsourced affiliate recruitment team does. Most of these large players aren’t involved in performance marketing due to a lack of knowledge- they drive revenue through paid placements, this is what they know and it has been doing well for them so far. Sometimes all you need is to draft up some quick revenue projections to give them an idea of what monthly performance revenue could look like to help them see the opportunity they’re missing out on. This can unlock the door to a whack-load of untapped, non-traditional affiliate opportunities out there to help diversify your affiliate portfolio.
One Word of Caution
There are thousands of companies out there who specialize in “sending traffic” to your program. When selecting a company to handle this job for you, consider it the same as hiring someone internally. Make sure that their values align with your company’s values, that they understand your branding and can communicate your messaging effectively, and that they understand who your end user is and what types of affiliates you wish you recruit into your program. View this as a partnership: work together, strategize together, succeed together.
Looking for help driving new affiliates to your program? Click here to chat with us about outsourced affiliate recruitment services today.
The post 4 Reasons Why You Should Outsource Affiliate Recruitment appeared first on All Inclusive Marketing.