Everything You Need to Know About Affiliate Management for Ecommerce

If you’re looking to implement affiliate marketing into your ecommerce business but you don’t know where to start, you’re definitely not alone. But don’t worry, as you’ve come to the right place. Sit back, relax, and take in our tips for all things affiliates management right here, including who an affiliate manager is and how they manage affiliates, along with the tools to make this task straightforward.

What is Affiliates Management?

Affiliates management is how you grow and build a network of marketers that drive traffic to your ecommerce store or offer, effectively growing your business. The major parts of affiliate management are affiliate programs, networks and managers. You can handle affiliate management yourself internally, or externally with an agency.

For in-house affiliate management with your own team members, you might use a full-time affiliate manager position or team for larger programs. On the other hand, for smaller affiliate programs you could delegate affiliates tasks to a digital marketing specialist. Your other option is to work with an outsourced affiliate management firm. They offer expertise and contacts within affiliate marketing while removing the burden of staffing the right team members to handle the affiliate management function.

The Affiliate Manager

Whether they’re in-house or through a contracted agency, your affiliate manager is in charge of managing the partners within your affiliates program and the affiliate platforms you’re using. Basically, they’re responsible for all things affiliate management so you’re getting all you can out of your program. Acting as the go-to between you and your affiliate partners, they:

• Ensure that tracking affiliate orders/ sales/ clicks works as it should
• Analyze performance and report on activity
• Set target KPIs and affiliate incentives
• Screen and recruit new affiliates, maintain relationships and grow their accounts
• Run campaigns
• Maintain compliance
• Find ways to boost affiliate marketing performance – since affiliates drive over 16% of all US and Canada ecommerce orders!

Skills of the Best Affiliate Managers

A good affiliate manager or marketing company should have:

• The ability to read and understand CSS and HTML
• Basic knowledge timestamps and attribution
• Solid background and knowledge in email and newsletter software
• Familiarity with basic SEO principles, such as copy, backlinks, and onsite attributes
• Interest and experience in creating copy to solve a problem and sell a product or service
• A passion for business development and sales
• A creative mindset, knack for solving problems and ability to explain complex situations to team members in various roles.

Affiliates Management Tools & Best Practices

There’s a lot of helpful functionality you and your team can use for successful affiliate management. Here are a few features offered by the best affiliate platforms such as GrowthHero, which helps to increase your store’s sales with affiliate marketing.

Find and Manage Affiliates

With any affiliate management tool, you should be able to locate new affiliates and grow your network with a search tool to find a specific affiliate program or run a search by domain. GrowthHero does this seamlessly, along with tracking sales, automatically generating commissions, and setting up groups, partner tiers, and rewards from one place. You can also see who you’ve contacted to quickly track where things are at, as well as easily organize your affiliates with specific reward types and settings.

Optimize Affiliate Programs

As a business owner, you need to make better and smarter business decisions with comprehensive data on your affiliates, and get the insights needed to take your marketing to the next level. This could include snapshots of your link clicks, total orders, total sales, active partners, conversion rate, and outstanding commissions due.

GrowthHero’s Theme Configurator lets you present your brand and fully customize your affiliate pages, and with the Program Terms feature you can make program terms clear for your partners before they sign up. It’s also simple for your partners to promote your business through your own marketing resources library. Here, you can share sample images, articles, email templates, Facebook posts, and more.

Referral Programs

With a referral program, you can turn your customers into partners that refer their network to your products. This doesn’t take long and you don’t need any coding skills, with GrowthHero. It’s simple to specify the reward and create a referral link or a discount code for your customer partners to use when they refer new customers. With email templates, you can choose emails to send to your partners with customized style and content. GrowthHero’s Commission Calculation Strategies allow you to pick from four ways of calculating partner commissions. And, through PayPal Payouts, it’s easy to create mass payments to multiple referrers at one time, just with a few clicks.

Tips for Affiliate Management

Your affiliate program should be a win-win for both your business and your affiliate partners. These partnerships are based on transparent, long-term relationships, rather than one-off transactions like an ad campaign. When your affiliates manager does their job well, your program can comprise a large portion of your online revenue, including high return on advertising spend (ROAS) and low cost per acquisition (CPA).

There are some key steps to running a great affiliates management program:

1. Start with the relationship, representing your brand as accurately as you can. Cultivating great relationships is key to a successful program. You’ll need to communicate regularly with your affiliate partners, whether it’s via email, phone or ongoing network newsletter. Since these partners work with many other brands and affiliate managers on a regular basis, you need to stand out and show why your brand is worthwhile.
2. Challenge your partners. You want and expect success from your affiliates partners, and that’s totally expected and normal. There’s no need to be demanding or unreasonable, but if everyone has that mutual trust, respect and need for success, pushing for better results is more than understandable.
3. Be calm, cool and respectful. Remember, the affiliates world is small and everyone is in it together, so you can’t afford to burn bridges. By treating everyone as you’d like to be treated, you can’t go wrong and will set yourself up for long-term successful relationships.

GrowthHero: The Best Affiliate Management Software

With so many affiliates management software tools on the market, it’s important to see what’s out there and do your research, which we’ll help you start right here.

GrowthHero offers affiliate marketing to entice influencers to promote your products and services. You can track affiliate orders with a unique link or discount code and generate commissions automatically. GrowthHero’s referral program makes it easy to encourage your customers to become brand ambassadors, promoting customer retention. And, with multi-level marketing, for a network sale commission, your affiliate partners will refer sales to you while recruiting new affiliates for you.

With GrowthHero, it’s easy to grow and scale your business with an affiliate program. Features include:

• Affiliate management. Manage your affiliate partners and track their referrals with a link or discount code.
• Advanced partner portal. A powerful, customizable panel with marketing resources and event tracking analytics.
• Groups and rewards. Set up partner groups for various deals and manage their rewards.
• Discount codes. Offer affiliate partners discount codes and create referral incentives.
• One-click registration. Convert customers into affiliates using a link with no extra forms.
• Simple onboarding. Get onboarded and start your first partner program in minutes.
• World-class support. Get help from our dedicated tech and support team.
• Seamless payments. Set up PayPal in a few seconds or pay with discount codes for your store, get notifications on how much you’re owed, track who paid you what and when, set up payout insights and track program performance.
• Marketing resources. Marketing resource notifications let you share resources with your users.

This should give you a solid understanding of affiliates management. Now that you’ve taken in these handy best practices, tips and tools for implementing the best affiliate management program, you can easily get started with one like GrowthHero. Good luck!