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The merchant-affiliate relationship is a vital part of an affiliate program. It is important to have a clear line of communication within an affiliate program for it to be successful. This builds affiliate trust and loyalty. Hence it is important to manage affiliates in your program efficiently.

It is important to keep affiliates satisfied since it is them that do the hard work of promoting your products. Therefore having a healthy relationship with affiliates and keeping your affiliate program transparent is beneficial. Having a good reputation in the affiliate marketing also helps in attracting more people to your affiliate program.

Here are five practices you can follow to have a healthy merchant-affiliate relationship‌

Table of Contents

1. Keep Payments Streamlined
2. Have Clear Communication
3. Offer Bonuses to Affiliates
4. Provide Affiliates with Creatives
5. Educate Affiliates on Promotions

1. Keep Payments Streamlined

A great way of maintaining a healthy merchant-affiliate relation is by keeping payments regular. Information such as minimum payouts and payment schedules should be made clear to affiliates who register for your program. It is generally advisable to keep a wide variety of payment modes available to your affiliates since this helps them receive payments conveniently according to their location or region. ‌

In a report by Tipalti, over 47% of affiliates dropped from an affiliate program due to payment issues, where one of the leading payment issues was that the payment was late.

According to the report, affiliates often share their business experiences on affiliate communities and forums and payment issues are a leading problem they face. A negative reputation can affect an affiliate program’s success. ‌

2. Have Clear Communication

Keeping a clear line of communication with your affiliates is a good practice, this keeps your program transparent. A welcome email to your affiliates is just not enough, consistently being in touch is very important. It is also important to lay out basic program details such as commission rates, payment cycles, etc to your affiliates to avoid confusion.

A great way of communicating with your affiliates is by sending them a weekly affiliate newsletter, which can inform them of new products, sales, and other changes that are taking place in your store. This helps affiliates stay ahead and plan their promotional activities. It is also good practice to address questions and queries by affiliates in a quick and timely manner.‌

3. Offer Bonuses to Affiliates

A great way to increase the performance of affiliates and improve relations is by offering affiliates with bonuses. It is good practice to reward affiliates for their performance, you can also set monthly targets for your affiliates, where they can be given a bonus, once they achieve the target. Not only does rewarding affiliates increase their performance but it also improves morale. This is a great way to build affiliate loyalty.

Another great way of improving merchant-affiliate relations is by providing newly registered affiliates with a signup bonus. This is a great way of financially incentivizing newer affiliates to get them started. Various other ways such as organizing giveaways of products or discount coupons to affiliates also help in building a healthy relationship.‌

4. Provide Affiliates with Creatives

It is good practice to offer affiliates with creative material such as banners, logos and other types of media files to make it easier for them to carry out promotions. By providing affiliates with creative media, they can directly go ahead with their promotions.

This is particularly useful for affiliates who do their promotions on social media platforms such as YouTube or Instagram. By sending them media files that are suited for these social media platforms, it makes it easier for affiliates to promote your product with their followers. This also helps in keeping the promotional activity in line with your brand identity.‌

5. Educate Affiliates on Promotions

It is useful to inform and guide affiliates about the program you are running and suggesting them with best practices that they can carry out for their promotions. This, in combination with keeping a clear line of communication with your affiliates, can be a great way of increasing sales by following proper practices.

By educating affiliates about your products, it can make it easy for them to carry out the promotional activity that is more suited to your brand. This also helps in improving sales and reaching out to a wider range of customers.‌

Conclusion

It is an important part of an affiliate marketing program to maintain a healthy relationship with affiliates. Affiliates carry out the promotions, which results in sales. A good relationship with affiliates not only offers better sales but also increase the reputation of your brand. This also results in increasing affiliate loyalty and trust.