How to incentivise and encourage affiliates

Given the huge number of affiliate programs out there merchants are going to need to work hard to get ahead of the pack and offer something different. Affiliate Window alone seem to have several hundred merchants and last time I checked I only had about 40-50 working hours in the week. This means I have very little time to promote many merchants but there are lots of merchants trying to get attention from affiliates.

This generally leads to merchants trying to offer some sort of competition or incentive to affiliates for example

£500 cash prize to our top affiliate this month

However the top affiliate this month is probably the same guy who was top affiliate last month and if it’s not him then it’s probably whoever was second top. If I am currently not paying too much attention to that program and have achieved a handful of sales then I know I will never be challenging for that prize in one month. It just doesn’t work and ends up rewarding the top affiliate who is probably already on a higher tier of commission and enjoying that too. It’s great when you are that affiliate but I don’t think it benefits the overall program.

I’ve seen other incentives where entry to a prize draw was based on the condition of adding a banner to your site. This is easy to do and so probably has a decent effect on the number of people displaying banners but again I don’t believe it will have that great an effect on sales as every man and his dog will host a banner on a page with no visits just to enter the competition and there is no incentive to push for more sales.

There have been a few incentives that has encouraged me in the past and they probably require a bit more work from the merchant but definitely have an effect. Based on those incentives and some other thoughts here are some ideas.

1. 3 Bottles of wine for 20 sales in a month - This was a Figleaves promotion that got me working. 3 bottles of wine was a nice encouragement and 20 sales was quite an achievable target. The wine delivery was actually handled by providing a voucher code at Virgin Wines so I’m sure Figleaves got some nice discounts on the bulk purchase
2. Set a specific sales target for each affiliate - If I made £2,000 in sales for you last month then offering me a cash bonus for reaching £3,000 next month is much better than expecting me to turn into your top affiliate to win anything. It’s a much better approach to consider how you can grow all your affiliates and not just how to reward your best
3. Send me the product - Send me a sample, invite me out to experience your product, offer me a free trial. I can promote your product better when I’ve tried it, know all about it and like it. More than that if you give me something for free I’ll feel like I owe you and am obliged to repay the favour.