You’ve been there, right? You spend weeks—or even months—finding the perfect affiliate, building the relationship, getting them excited to promote…and then…crickets. No traffic, no sales, no effort. So, what now? How do you turn those inactive affiliates into your top promoters? In this episode, I’m sharing the secrets to wake them up and get them in the game! You won’t want to miss this.
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Don’t make the same mistakes I’ve made with my affiliate programs. Learn my top 20 affiliate program mistakes…and how to avoid them!
Links Mentioned in this Episode
Affiliate Activation Email Templates
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy
7 Secrets of 7-Figure Affiliate Launches
Should You Approve or Decline an Affiliate? How to Decide
How to Communicate Better with Your Affiliates
Successful Affiliate Onboarding: How to Setup Your Affiliates to Win
How I Grew a Major Affiliate Program from $15M to $325M a Year (In Only 4 Years)
How to Activate Your Inactive Affiliates (And Make Them Lifelong Partners)
I know the experience all too well. You work so hard to find a potential affiliate. You nurture the relationship, you get them to commit to promoting and then nothing. They don’t promote, they send no traffic and they make no sales. So what do you do? How do you activate those inactive affiliates, and in fact, how do you turn them into superstar promoters?
Well, this episode will show you how. Let’s get started. So I got this email from a guy. He said he has over 1000 affiliates in his affiliate program. Right. Got a really good product. The offer converts pretty well. Good start. He’s off to a great start. But he said only 42 of them have ever made a sale. Just less than 4% of the affiliates have ever made a sale.
I’m like, yikes. Like, we’ve had programs where we only had like 15%. Maybe it’s a big first promotion, maybe we’re only a couple months in, we might be down around the 13, 12% range, about 4%. That’s not good. So his question, of course was, how do I activate these inactive affiliates? And I mean, even at 15%, 20%, 25%, like we’ve been in the past or even north of that, that’s still a lot of inactive affiliates, a lot of people that we worked hard to get and we didn’t activate. No matter how awesome your affiliate program is, if you have more than a few dozen affiliates, you’re going to have some become inactive.
You can have the best commissions, the best conversions, you have the best offer, the best affiliate manager, all that stuff. But some of them just fall off the earth. So today I want to share the reasons why this happens. It’s important to understand why and then what to do about it. The question ultimately has two answers.
It really depends on whether your program is evergreen or if you’re doing a limited time launch. So if you’ve got an Evergreen promo, it’s available 24 7365 or kind of like I’ve talked about in past episodes, you’ve got what we call a hybrid evergreen wherever I, it’s available pretty much all year, but it’s typically in cycles, like you do a promo every three to five weeks, something like that. So it’s not a launch and it’s not evergreen. So it depends if it’s evergreen or if you’re doing a limited time launch. But first why do they become inactive in the first place? I’m going to talk about that first. Then I’m going to talk about why you need to activate them.
Don’t make the same mistakes I’ve made with my affiliate programs. Learn my top 20 affiliate program mistakes…and how to avoid them!
We consider an inactive affiliate to be anyone with less than three hits or one opt in by roughly day three. Okay. Sometimes we’ll do. If it’s a longer campaign, depending on exactly how long it is, we might extend that as far as day five. So why three? Why one, why three for hits and why one opt in?
Most people with only one to three hits or one opt in, they tested their link. So I don’t do zero. You can send one hit, and I’ll still consider you inactive. You can send one opt in, one lead, I will still consider you inactive. So the reason we do that is because that was probably a test. And so I’ll show you in a little bit when we reach out to them now, sometimes we’ll raise that three number to five or seven.
There’s no perfect number. I just figure most people aren’t testing their link more than three times. And so that’s why we do that. And so, depending upon the system you use, you just run a traffic report, it’ll show you exactly who is inactive. I know with some reports what we have to do is we have our master list of affiliates. So we’ve got our, let’s say 300 affiliates, right? And then we’ve got the list of their traffic, and we basically have to run it against Excel. And we take the ones that have zero hits through three hits, and we dedupe it. And then it takes like five minutes. It’s not that complicated. So that’s who’s inactive in a launch.
Inactive. In an evergreen program, there’s really two types of inactives. We got your inactives and your inactive inactives. So your inactive inactives are of. They’ve never sent traffic or, again, three, five hits or less. Maybe one or two leads. Zero sales like that. Is an inactive inactive, the second version of inactive. Sometimes they call them stagnant affiliates or dormant affiliates. There’s somebody who may, overall, they may have any number of hits and leads and possibly even sales.
They could have done $100,000 in 2021, and now in 2023, they’re completely inactive. They haven’t sent a sale in two years. They haven’t seen any traffic in 18 months. And so we’ll look at those as well. So typically we’ll run it for some period of time. Depending upon the program, it could be anywhere from as little as three months to as much as a year. And we’ll look at those periods of time for being inactive. So it’s not just the total. Now, if you’re on some funky system and there are some out there where, like, you don’t have access to reports by period of time, one of the things I recommend doing, and I’m not going to mention Kajabi here, but there I am an amazing. I’m just kidding. Their reporting is terrible.
There is no thing that says, like, show me how many hits or leads or sales this person has in a period of time. It’s total. Everything is total. So what we do when we have one client that’s on Kajabi is we basically go in and grab the stats every month. So now we can compare. And let’s just say this affiliate on January 1 had 200 hits, 50 opt ins and ten sales. And then in March, they have 300 hits, 75 opt ins and 15 sales. They’re active. Now, if we get to June and they still have whatever, I said, 375 and 15, now they’re inactive.
They’ve been inactive for 90 plus days. We need to do something to activate them. So that’s the who. Now, when do we reach out to inactive affiliates? Well, typically with Evergreen, we’re going to reach out roughly every quarter. We want to do this in a way.
We’re not doing it willy nilly and one off. If we do it every quarter, sometimes every two months, then we’re able to just hit a lot of people at once and really get into a rhythm with an evergreen program. So you might do it every month, depending upon the number of affiliates you have. If it’s a small number, you know, 50 to 100. I mean, you can do it every month in a launch.
Typically, launches last about an average of 15 days. Now they used to be a little bit longer, but now they’re about 15 days. We will reach out the day after the second day of pre launch content. So if it’s a PLF product launch, formula style launch, where you’ve got like maybe three days of a workshop or three videos and then a webinar, and that takes you through about day ten or eleven, and then you have five, six days of open cartae.
We will reach out the day after the second piece of content. So the day after the second workshop. So they’ve had time to promote the first one and a little bit of time to promote the second one, but not so much time that if we get them active that day or the next day, they don’t have time to promote the second piece of content. Now, for some reason, the calendar is a little funky and the second piece is. Or there’s just kind of weird timing.
We time that roughly around day three to day five, you know, so typically that second piece of content will drop. Maybe on the third day, we’ll reach out on the fourth day. So they’ve had basically no hits, no traffic again. Three in one, three hits and one opt in. But that’s basically nothing. So we balance that out, then we’ll reach out again.
This thing, we don’t just reach out. Once, we reach out again the day after the third piece of content, you still haven’t sent any traffic, basically. And again, we’ll talk about the messaging in a moment. We’ll reach out then, and then we reach out usually the day after open cart as well. This allows us to reach out three times, which is kind of a good balance between getting results and getting on their nerves. And so we reach out at different points and try to get them active. Now, if the promotion, you know, you can use your judgment there. If the promotion you’re running is different, if it’s a five day challenge, then we’re looking at, you want to get people registered before the challenge. So let’s just say starting about seven to ten days before we’ll reach out.
Let’s say we start the promo seven days before the challenge or summit or whatever, or the workshop even. There’s time before the challenge to promote. We will reach out after about three days. Usually we’ll do it mid to late afternoon on the third day. You’ve now had two and a half days to get active and you’re not. We want to reach out, and then we’ll reach out again, usually the morning of the 6th day, and then usually the day that the, like, the afternoon that the challenge starts. Like, hey, it’s not too late to join. It’s not too late to join. Come join us.
Stuff like that. So again, two, possibly three times, if you can. And don’t worry about the being annoying part. Kind of like said, it’s a balance. Don’t worry about being annoying. They can’t send you less traffic than they’re already sending you. Like, you can’t send us less traffic than your zero traffic, basically. So what if you get on their nerves? Who cares? But we do want to balance, you know, we don’t want to be like, every day, like, why are you active? Why are you active?
You know, that kind of stuff. So how do you reach out to inactive affiliates? The answer is very simple. You use any means necessary. Email, text, DM’s, voxer, Skype phone, smoke signals, carrier pigeons, like, whatever you can think of, you use. Now We typically use email.
It’s the easiest one, especially if you got a huge affiliate program I mentioned before, you know, 900 or 15,000. I mean, I can send 900 emails in 10 seconds using gmasks or something like that. So we’ll use that usually for that first one, and then I’ll take a look at it for the second one, and I’ll reach out and maybe identify, let’s say, 20 or 30 or 40 that we have other contact information for. We’re friends on Facebook, I’ll dm them, that kind of thing.
The key, over time you got to learn their preferred method of communication. So if they prefer text, use text. If they like chatting on Skype, you can do so much more with a 32nd Skype message and you can send them 15 emails. That’s why we keep tabs on everyone’s preferred methods of communication. We always keep that on hand. And I mean, I know for me like there are just people I know if I dm them, I’ll hear back from them in 2 hours. If I email them, it could be days. I’m the same way you text me, I’ll respond pretty quickly.
I can’t stand seeing that’s the only thing I see. I don’t have email. I don’t put email on my phone and I check email about once a day. Typically I check it four times a week. I’ll put it that way. I usually miss a day and I don’t get very many emails to me because most of them are handled by my assistant. So because of that I may could take 36,48 hours for me to respond to an email. Now our clients, we have a different way of communicating. My team, we communicate using slack. But my friends and people that I know very well text me, they don’t email me. So if you text me, I can’t stand seeing that I have an, I’ve got one right now. I got texted about ten minutes ago.
It’s driving me nuts. It’s like an OCD thing, right? I am getting, I’m like, you know, about ready to click on, pause the recording and go answer this text. I don’t even know what it’s about. It could be spam for all I know, but I have to respond to that text email. I’m like, I’ll get around to it whenever, so keep tabs on those preferred methods of communication.
All right, so that’s the how. What do we send to these inactive affiliates now? I’m going to share one of the most effective emails I have ever used to activate affiliates. All right, with a larger program. Like I mentioned, 95% of your communication is going to be via email.
So we’re going to focus on that, get you some ideas just to get you started. This was an email I first used about eight years ago during Jeff Goyne’s tribe writers affiliate launch. It was sent on day five of the launch to every affiliate who had three or less hits and one or less opt in. All right, I’m going to read this email to you real quick here. All right.
So the subject line was everything okay, first name. So I used their first name, but, you know, everything okay. Question mark. Hey, first name. Just check in to make sure everything was okay. I had you down to support Jeff’s tribe riders launch, but haven’t seen anything yet. There’s still plenty of time to join in.
The launch is going amazingly well, but it’s not too late for you to get started. Let me know how I can help. That’s what I’m here for. All the best, Matt. Now, there’s five elements here. All right. First of all, it grabs their attention.
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You know, if your name’s Tim and it’s everything okay, Tim, it stands out. Stands out. Secondly, it reminds them of a commitment. I say I had you down to support Jeff’s tribe writer’s launch, but I haven’t seen any activity yet. As Robert Cialdini, the book influence. Right.
My team and I just finished reading the revised edition. It’s the first time I’ve read that, but I’ve read the book overall, I think four or five times. Listened to it a few times as well. He says nothing is as powerful as the principle of commitment. We have a natural desire to do what we said we would do. Right. So I make sure to remind them of their commitment.
Hey, I had you down to support this promotion, but I haven’t seen anything yet. Now, a lot of people ask me like, isn’t that a bit of a guilt trip? And I’m like, yep, it is a little bit of a guilt trip, but it’s also going to make them and us a lot of money. So I don’t really care. The third thing it does is it encourages them twice. I say there is still time.
There’s still plenty of time to join in and plenty. I usually put in all caps and I say the launch is going amazingly well, but it’s not too late for you to get started and make sure to point out that there’s time, like day five when we said that there’s people might think it’s too late to join in. Oh, you’re a third of the way through.
No, I make sure to tell them that there’s still plenty of time, so there’s an encouragement in there. The fourth thing it has is social proof. People want to be a part of something successful. I make sure to point out that things are going great and I want them to be a part of it. It says in there, as I just said, the launch is going amazingly well. We did this with my book launch when we did activation campaign. We did it right on the heels of hitting some of the bestseller lists, the early bestseller lists.
And so we pointed out, like, the book’s already a bestseller. It’s already a bestseller. Don’t you want to be a part of promoting a bestseller? That’s social proof. People want to be a part of something successful, and that worked really, really well. We only had something like 110 inactive affiliates. We got, like, a third of them active just from that.
Just because we’re like, hey, we’re a bestseller. Go promote. And fifth, it offers help. You know, let me know how I can help. That’s what I’m here for, is how the email ends. Make sure that you are clear that you are there to answer questions and hold their hand if needed, be able and willing to jump on a call with them to give them tips, strategize with them and all that.
I’ve probably sent, I don’t know, 2300 different versions of activation emails. I’ve been doing this for 18 years now here in a couple months, and this is the one that worked the best. Now, I’ve also cataloged, we’ve got some others that work amazingly well and they are available. We open them up. I mentioned this in that episode back in the day for the new year’s one that we made these available. So if you want to get all of my best activation email templates, all right, go to madmcwilliams. com activate. Mammothwilliams.com activate.
We will put that in the show notes. Go there and you can grab all of the templates. All right, I gave you the best one here, but there’s so many more. There’s scenario based like that’s one that works, but it’s not going to work for everybody because it might not be relevant and you can only use that one once. The everything okay and the guild trip kind of thing.
You can use that one time. What do you do on the next one? Well, there’s plenty more templates, so madmcwames.com activate to get those templates. Also, we’ve got a training coming up soon. Talked about it last week how I built the million dollar a month affiliate program in only two years without any connections or credentials. So none of the like I’m gonna show you how to do this if you literally know no one Madmcwames. com million a month.
That’s where to go for that. We’ll put that in the show notes as well. That’s gonna be a live training, so you wanna make sure you get registered for that. So there you have it. How to turn your inactive affiliates into rockstars into some of your best affiliates I’d love to hear from you what your biggest takeaway from this is. What are you going to do with this information? Text me anytime.260-217-4619
We’ve got links to everything in the show notes that we talked about today. And lastly, make sure you hit subscribe because you do not want to miss the next episode. I want to share with you 15 of the biggest affiliate program challenges and how to solve them. That’s a big thing. These are challenges. I’ve faced every one of these 15, and almost everybody I coach has faced every one of these 15. Every client we’ve got has faced every single one of these 15. We’re going to talk about what they are and how to solve them. So make sure you join us for the next episode. Hit subscribe so you don’t miss it. I’ll see you then..
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