Tips for Building Long-lasting Affiliate Relationships

Some may argue that working with the right affiliates and providing them with relevant offerings—whether monetary or non-monetary—is the key to building successful affiliate partnerships. Nevertheless, individuals are at the center of affiliate relationships in the end.

The relationship you have with your affiliates is far more complex and cannot be reduced to a transaction. particularly considering how important it is to cultivate strong affiliate relationships for a brand to succeed with performance marketing.

Affiliate relationships are based on values like honesty, respect, and trust, just like any other healthy relationship. In light of this, companies ought to approach their affiliate programs more like people-oriented businesses than like companies selling products or services.

In a poll by Influencer Marketing Hub, it was found that 67% of participants who budget for influencer marketing intended to raise that amount in the upcoming year. Having solid relationships with your affiliates is a guaranteed method to keep your brand ahead of the performance marketing pack as new competitors enter the market.

Just in time for the biggest relationship-focused holiday, we will highlight some tips that can help brands develop and maintain mutually beneficial affiliate relationships that can even be applied to your Valentine this year.

Tip #1: Communicate Well and Build Rapport

Having an open line of communication that’s also collaborative helps build good rapport with affiliates, in turn helping brands cultivate loyalty with affiliates, influencers, and brand ambassadors. Focusing on establishing affiliate loyalty takes time and effort, but it pays off long-term as it enables brands to grow with their existing affiliates instead of wasting time constantly searching for new ones.

Good communication isn’t just about being responsive and attentive or answering their questions on time. It should ultimately lead to good rapport, which means more than just getting down to brass tacks with affiliates. People buy from people, as the saying goes, and the same goes for affiliate relationships. Brands looking to grow meaningful relationships with their affiliates should take the time, for starters, to actually get to know them. But, what does getting to know an affiliate necessarily mean?

Some ways brands can get to know their affiliates are:

Researching and learning more about their brand or persona

Performing due diligence on their social media to find out things like interests, followers, and who they’re following.

Brands that invest the time to genuinely get to know the affiliates they partner with have a strong base of affiliates that are personally invested in the brand and can give meaningful feedback. Mutual and honest feedback is key to fostering a successful affiliate relationship.

Tip #2: Be Transparent

In keeping with good communication, transparency from the get-go is key. Being transparent with your affiliates from the very beginning not only establishes trust but also helps with eliminating any confusion and unclarity an affiliate might have. Being direct about your expectations, commissions, and goals eases things for both parties and is a building block for a long-lasting and fruitful affiliate relationship.

Tip #3: Be Consistent

As mentioned above, being consistently attentive and responsive in your communication with affiliates is a key aspect of developing and maintaining positive affiliate relationships. But, consistency in the way a brand interacts with affiliates shouldn’t just stop there. Being consistent in things like commission payments is another building block to developing affiliate trust.

Recognizing the importance of this, Refersion-developed Refersion Pay as a relationship-building solution for brands and affiliates.

Through Refersion Pay’s centralized platform, brands can sleep easy knowing that the affiliates they partner with receive automatic and direct monthly payments, as well as access to necessary tax information that simplifies their tax compliance.

Refersion Pay streamlines the affiliate program workflow for brands by offering automated order conversion approvals and scheduled payments from a variety of payment alternatives. Additionally, this makes businesses stand out to VIP affiliates and premium publishers that won't take PayPal as a form of payment and insist on direct ACH.

If brands don't use these digital solutions when they can, they run the danger of losing the trust that they have built with their affiliates. Using digital solutions such as Refersion Pay not only frees up time for companies to concentrate on more important tasks than payments, but it also makes scaling easier and enables them to work with a larger number of affiliates than they could have previously.

Invest in Your Affiliates

We hope this has given you a fresh perspective on the value of relationships in all kinds of partnerships—not just those with affiliates. A brand's success is largely dependent on its ability to establish positive relationships with affiliates and the technological tools that enable these relationships.

Refersion may assist your brand when it's ready to begin using a relationship-building affiliate technology solution.