In the US alone, affiliate spending is forecasted to reach $8.2 billion by 2022. However, if you’re simply supplying your affiliate partners with URLs and leaving the rest up to them, then you’re almost certainly leaving money on the table. By optimizing your WooCommerce affiliate program, you can claim a bigger cut of that $8.2 billion. When your program is running like a well-oiled machine, you’ll also waste less time micromanaging your affiliates and performing tedious admin tasks.
In this post, we’ll share four tips for improving your affiliate program. These can help you increase your sales, widen your profit margins, and earn you lots of valuable first-time customers. Let’s get started!
1. Provide Detailed Marketing Materials and Resources
To set your new partners up for success, it’s important to familiarize them with your products and value proposition. The faster your affiliates can get to grips with your business, the sooner they can start generating sales. For this reason, it’s smart to create an effective onboarding process.
The Solid Affiliate WooCommerce affiliate plugin has a dedicated dashboard where you can share onboarding information and resources with your affiliate partners. As soon as you approve their registration, your new members will have access to everything in this dashboard:
This enables them to start learning about your products straight away, and without requiring any one-on-one time with you. These onboarding resources can also minimize the amount of questions you receive from your new affiliates.
When populating your dashboard, remember that the more information you provide, the faster your affiliates will be able to act like an in-house member of your marketing team. For this reason, you may want to create a range of onboarding materials such as informative videos, helpful FAQs, and product catalogs.
2. Enable Partners to Track Their Sales
Your affiliate partners only receive a commission on successful sales. This means that your typical affiliate is highly motivated and eager to continuously improve their marketing activities. To capitalize on this urge, we recommend that you provide your partners with all the data they need in order to evaluate their own performance.
Armed with this information, your partners can continuously optimize their affiliate marketing activities, without requiring continual coaching from you. Plugins such as Solid Affiliate often provide a dedicated dashboard where your partners can access their own statistics:
This empowers your partners to be more proactive and successful. Since this information is always at the affiliate’s fingertips, they can even monitor the performance of their in-progress campaigns. This puts them in a strong position to refine their current activities on-the-fly, rather than waiting until you provide them with an end-of-the-month report.
3. Encourage Your Affiliates to Prioritize Big-Ticket Items
For any business owner, every sale is a success. However, your online store may have some big-ticket items that deliver better profits. You can encourage your affiliates to prioritize these lucrative items by increasing the commission they’ll receive on that particular product.
You can use Solid Affiliate to set a per-product rate. This gives you the flexibility to pay a unique commission for every single item across your WooCommerce store:
If you have dozens or even hundreds of products, then setting the commission on a per-product basis may be too time-consuming. In this scenario, it may be easier to override your site-wide commission rate for individual products:
Once this system is in place, your affiliate partners will automatically gravitate towards promoting the products that deliver the best profits. This can help you boost your bottom line.
4. Offer a New Customer Commission
Securing new customers is the key to growing your business, and affiliate programs are an effective way to introduce your WooCommerce store to an entirely new audience. Once a visitor decides to convert, you have an opportunity to impress them with the quality of your products and the customer experience. If you succeed, then you might transform this one-time visitor into a repeat customer.
Once a customer is visiting your store directly, you’ll no longer have to pay your affiliate partners a referral fee. This means more profit for your business, even if you originally acquired this client via an affiliate link.
With this in mind, you may want to offer your affiliate partners an incentive for sending new customers to your WooCommerce store. Using the Solid Affiliate plugin, you can award your affiliates a commission whenever they refer a new shopper to your website:
If you offer subscriptions, then you may be interested to learn that Solid Affiliate also enables you to award commissions for the initial sign-up. Once you’ve established these extra incentives, you can sit back and watch those valuable new customers roll in, without having to constantly prompt your partners to pursue a new audience.
Conclusion
Affiliate marketing is often referred to as passive income. However, there’s nothing passive about running a successful WooCommerce affiliate program. If you’re going to get the most out of your partners, then it’s well worth spending some time optimizing your program.
Let’s quickly recap four ways to improve your WooCommerce affiliate program:
- Provide detailed marketing materials and resources, using a WooCommerce affiliate plugin such as Solid Affiliate.
- Enable partners to track their sales.
- Encourage your affiliates to prioritize big-ticket items.
- Offer a new customer commission.
Do you have any questions about creating a world-class WooCommerce affiliate program? Let us know in the comments section below!