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Affiliate spending in the US is forecasted to reach $8.2 billion by 2022 alone. However, if you’re supplying your affiliate partners with URLs and leaving the rest up to them, you’re almost certainly leaving money on the table. By optimizing your WooCommerce affiliate program, you can claim a more significant cut of that $8.2 billion. When your program runs 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 grasp your business, the sooner they can generate sales. For this reason, it’s wise 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 lets them start learning about your products immediately without requiring one-on-one time. These onboarding resources can also minimize the questions you receive from your new affiliates.
When populating your dashboard, remember that the more information you provide, the faster your affiliates can act like in-house marketing team members. For this reason, you can 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. Your typical affiliate is highly motivated and eager to improve their marketing activities continuously. To capitalize on this urge, we recommend you provide your partners with all the data they need to evaluate their 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 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 solid 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 their commission 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:
Setting the commission per-product basis may be too time-consuming if you have dozens or hundreds of products. 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 toward 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 can impress them with the quality of your products and the customer experience. You might transform this one-time visitor into a repeat customer if you succeed.
Once a customer visits 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 should incentivize your affiliate partners to send 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, you may be interested in learning 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 constantly prompting 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’ll get the most out of your partners, it’s well worth 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!