So you've started a partner program, recruited lots of publishers, and you need to maintain your channel growth. But you’ve already built relationships with the largest partners in your industry, and are seeing little impact from your ever-growing list of long-tail partners. So what’s next?

While partner recruitment is one of the most important ways of growing your partner marketing channel, there are lots of other things you can do to mature your program and drive further revenue.

Here are seven strategies you can use to maximise the benefits of your existing partnerships.

1. Create a welcoming partner experience
Consider building an onboarding engagement flow with your partners so they have the greatest chance of success working with your brand from the outset. For instance, provide a range of creatives for them to use to promote your brand, but also help them understand how best to sell your brand to their audience. Provide access to your product catalogues so they can easily find information, and consider how you can share (non-PII) performance data and insights with your mature partners to help them optimise their performance.

Categorise partners into groups and begin to build different engagement strategies for each. As well as creating content for them to use, set up automated messaging systems for each group to deliver the right message at the right time.

2. Maximise partner revenue
Don’t simply let your affiliate deals idle. It’s important to involve partners to keep them active and excited about new opportunities. Identify partners who aren’t producing significant revenue and find ways to re-engage them, such as sharing bonus commission for an initial period, brainstorming new ways of working together (including co-producing creative), or sending out regular partner newsletters.

Take a step back, and align your partners’ incentives with your overall business goals. For example, if you have an excess of a particular product sitting in a warehouse, consider paying your partners more commission on these items to sell the stock. If you’re targeting a specific market, consider paying higher commission for customers based in your target location or demographic. Equally, outline less valuable transactions that you will pay less or no commission to partners for.

3. Monetise more of your customer funnel 
Rather than only working with partners on the standard basis of sales or leads, explore monetising different parts of your customer funnel. Consider different events within your funnel which you can use to provide different opportunities, such as initial membership sign-ups or customer spend over an introductory period. Use these to reward partners for getting prospects through to later stages in the funnel so they’re incentivised to drive higher LTV customers.

4. Optimise the customer conversion path
Maximising conversions is in the mutual interests of you and your partners, so be sure to understand and optimise the customer’s path when they arrive from an affiliate link. Rather than relying on one landing page, conduct A/B testing on different landing pages for traffic arriving from your partners, and use this to improve conversion rates.

Align the customer experience when moving from your partners’ sites to your brand so that it's completely seamless for the user at all times.

5. Learn from your competitors
Keep your partners close, and your competitors closer. Learn from what similar brands are doing. Find out how they are commissioning partners, the initiatives they have that you currently do not have, and how their partner experience compares with yours. Also, consider how you’re communicating your brand’s USP to your partners.

Finding competitor’s affiliate links is easy with a trusted link scanner. Monitor your share of voice over time, and take advantage of your competitor’s 404s or out-of-stock links. Replace them with your own and build deeper relationships with partners in the process.

6. Validate incremental value
Some partners might be generating commission revenue without adding incremental value to your brand. Analyse customer path data and run tests to work out where you’re paying for commissions that aren’t contributing. Then you can alter the commission structure for these partners, or remove them altogether. You should also avoid paying multiple times for the same conversions, so use auto-deduplication tools to ensure that you aren’t remunerating partners for conversions made via other means, such as paid search.

The same strategy applies to any partners that are using methods to fraudulently gain credit for a sale or generate fake conversions. Work with a specialist affiliate marketing partner with proprietary algorithms that can be used to analyse behaviour to identify invalid traffic, flag violations for your team to review and take action to reduce the cost of ad fraud.

7. Discover the partners you didn’t know you had
Part of understanding the customer journey involves recognising all of the places where brand-building originates, not just where partners are contributing at the bottom of the customer funnel. 

Other teams such as the Bus Dev, Channel, Strategic Partnerships, Social or PR departments in your company are likely working with third parties to promote your products or services. Your Partner Marketing department should coordinate with these teams to consider converting legacy relationships into performance-led partnerships, which reward each party for the value they bring. 

Also published in: PerformanceIN

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