Effective communication with your affiliates is crucial for success. What should you communicate? When is the right time to reach out? And how should you deliver your messages? In this episode, I’ll answer these three critical questions and share strategies to improve your communication with affiliates. Get ready to take your affiliate communication to the next level!
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy
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 Create The Right Affiliate Commissions
Top 14 Reasons Your Affiliate Program is Failing (And How to Fix It)
How to Steal Your Competitors’ Affiliates
How to Communicate Better with Your Affiliates
What do you communicate to your affiliates and when do you communicate with them and how do you communicate them? What are the methods you need to use? These are three critical questions, and they’re all answered in this episode.let’s get started. So a couple of episodes ago, I talked about onboarding your affiliates and we were focused on like, what does that first week or so look like the first couple weeks?
Because as I shared in that episode, if you can get an affiliate to promote within the first couple of weeks, you stand a much better chance of having them be a large affiliate over time than you do if they don’t promote in the first couple of weeks. Now, you know, I shared in that episode, there’s caveats and nuance to that. I almost said some, I almost got those words mixed up there.
But you know, there’s caveats and nuance, right? You know, if you’ve got a launch that’s four months away, just because they don’t promote two weeks after signing up doesn’t mean they’re not going to promote.
Clearly, if they sign up and they say, awesome, you know, it’s evergreen and they sign up and they say, you know, it’s January when they sign up and they’re like, dude, I have got you on my calendar for March 14. That’s six, seven weeks away. That’s fine. We want to get on their calendar, but it’s really important to get them active quickly.
But what about the long term? I promised that I would share this in an upcoming episode and you only had to wait two weeks. So I’m going to share today about the regular updates.
What do we do between launches? What do we do between big promotions? What do we do if it’s an evergreen program, right? What are those regular updates? So there’s a couple of nuances there in and of itself. Again, there’s, if you have a completely evergreen program, really, there’s not a whole lot that changes week to week, and you’re not really all that seasonal.
Maybe you have a little bit of an increase right before Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, or maybe you have a little bit of a bump in q four. You know, maybe you sell more or you sell an equal amount from June through August as you do the other nine months, but you know, it’s still half your sales or the other nine months.
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That’s kind of pure evergreen. On the flip side of that is maybe you only launch once a year or you launch two products each once a year, or you launch one product twice a year, something like that. You have two, three, four launches a year, and that’s it. Then in the middle is more of a cyclical evergreen program or something where you’re doing special promos periodically. So maybe you have your product’s available 24 7365, but you’re going to run big promotions four weeks out of the year and really 75, 80% of your entire year sales will come in those four weeks.
So that’s a hybrid between the two. There’s other nuance as well that we’re not going to get into. But I’m going to talk about all of those, all of the things that you need to do, no matter what kind of a program you’re running. One of the biggest mistakes we see with launch affiliate programs when it’s pure launches is they go dark for nine months, ten months, eleven months out of the year between launches. And that’s something we worked with, with one client recently.
I was really excited. This ended up being, they’ve done 16 or 17 launches. And one of the things that we really hammered home months in advance and we worked with them, was get them warmed up, get them fired up. Now it’s June and your launch is in November. Get them fired up. Now it’s July.
Get them fired. Like, get them excited. You know, we don’t want to get them burned out, but we want to get them really pumped up to promote. And so that’s one of the things that we worked on with them, is not going dark, not being dark in June, July and August for a November launch. Let’s get them psyched up now.
So that’s a big mistake. We see with the launch programs is just lack of communication, period. Like, any communication is better than no communication whatsoever. But what are some of the things that you do need to communicate? There’s no particular order to anything. I’m going to share today.
All right, we’re going to probably bounce around a little bit. I’m going to share some for pure Evergreen, some for the Evergreen hybrid, some for the launch, specific ones. But the one thing you got to do for all of them is you got to educate them.
You know, if we’re talking about launches in the month leading up to, you know, you probably don’t want to do this six months out, but in like the 90 days leading up to your launch, we want to educate them. Evergreen, you can do this year round, Evergreen Hybrid, you want to do this kind of leading into any big promotions, but educate them, share with them what’s working, what’s working for other partners.
Teach your affiliates the strategies and the tactics that they need to use. If you want a good example of that, go to mattmcwilliams. com affiliate training. I’ve got an example training there that we did. We did an affiliate training webinar for one of our clients. So the only, the normal way to get access to this is only if you’re one of our, your affiliate launch coach clients.
And this is the actual training that we shared with the affiliates of one of those clients. And you can down, you can actually watch the training, see how we do it, see how we train them. You can also download the slides. We’ve got, you know, keynote PowerPoint version. I think we got even got a PDF version.
And you can download those and use those as a guide for you to train your affiliates. But you need to teach them what works. Teach them the strategies, teach them the tactics, and there’s some statistics in there that’ll blow their minds. That’s going to help them to promote more, you know, teach your affiliates why mailing more works or why mailing at a specific time works.
Yeah, I think when we’re running launches, right? When we’re running launches, I often share why mailing on a weekend is a good idea. So what I do, it’s a little trick here.
So the idea is to get them to send an email or two over the weekend, and a lot of times we’ll wrap that up in a contest. You know, there’s all kinds of reasons for this. You actually, I’ll share in a second how you can get a template of this email.
But what I don’t want to do is have them like cancel their Friday email and then send it on Saturday because of this contest. So here’s what we’ll do on Friday. About 02:00 there’s a balance here, like 02:00 pm. most people have sent their emails for the day by 2230, but it’s early enough in the day where they can pivot.
Like, I know for me, you know, I’m recording this on a Friday at about And if I’m, you know, doing an affiliate promotion right now, and you emailed me at right now and said, hey, you should mail this weekend, maybe you weren’t planning on emailing this weekend. We’re doing a special promotion. The top three affiliates you know, get this or something like that. I have the ability to go, hmm, I think I could pull that off.
Let me type up some stuff. Boom, boom, boom. Get our team to load the email. Yada, yada, right? If you email me at five, I can’t do that. I’m like, I’m a half hour from leaving the office. I got my kids, I’m coaching my kids games tonight now. Whatever, you know, great.
That’s great. Somebody will win that contest. It’s not gonna be me. But if you email me at like 1030, maybe that’s just early enough. It probably wasn’t. But if you email me at like 09:00 it was just early enough that I can go into convertkit, click pause on our email that was going out today and instead of sending an email today and then, oh man, I’ll send one more over the weekend.
Now I’ll just send two on the weekend and maybe, you know, win the contest. This is all about getting affiliates to add an extra email that they weren’t planning on sending. But I have to educate them. I have to educate them. So I’ve got a template. If you want to, you can download the template if you just go to mattmcwilliams. com weekend email.
But basically this email teaches them why they should email this weekend. And it gives them the stats and it gives them things like, well, email volume is pretty quiet and people have more time to interact with it.
Right? Help your affiliates understand why you want them to mail more. It’s not just, hey, if you mail more, then you’re gonna make more money, you know, or you mail more. It’s good for me. No, help them understand that way. Share with them the data about how mailing more on cart close day will exponentially increase their sales.
Just share the data with them. I’ll include a post in the show notes here that you can download about why mailing more on cart close day is such a good idea. Teach them how to send to their non clicks and their unopened, right? Teach them those things.
So number one, you got to educate your affiliates, whatever it is, you know, if you’re running an evergreen program, teach them some of the things that are working right. Teach them some of the strategies that are working for other affiliates. If you ask the affiliates, hey, do you mind if I share? Some of them might say, no, that’s a trade secret and I don’t want anybody knowing.
Okay, fine. But many of them will say, yeah, go ahead, happy. If you share that, that’s fine. If you’re doing launches, make sure you get them warmed up before the launch. I’ve done a couple of episodes on that. You can just look those up. Just look them up on the podcast, like warm up, and you’ll find numerous episodes. That’s communication. That’s what you should be communicating. What should you be communicating?
All of the things we’re going to talk about today. When should you communicate? You should be communicating weeks or months and then weeks in advance.
I recommend starting about six months out. About six months out. Just once a month up until about two months out. Just four emails over the course of four months with some of the stuff that we’ll share today, then one Facebook post. So typically what I’ll do is I’ll send an email early in the month, then in the middle of the month, I’ll post to the Facebook group for the affiliates and then repeat that cycle up until about two months out.
Then I start to ramp it up just a little bit. Okay. Because there’s more stuff that you’ll see as we go along. Biggest thing is just communicate a lot. The biggest mistake is not communicating enough. That’s the biggest mistake that we see is just not communicating enough. So what are some of the other things that you should be communicating? Again, this applies, launch applies, evergreen applies, hybrid, whatever.
Give them behind the scenes access. You know, give them access to what’s going on in your preparation for the launch, for example. And one of my favorite videos that I always have clients do is if they’re recording, you know, the pre launch videos or they’re doing like a run through of their live workshop, just get on and do a five minute video. What you do is you set up, you got your team there setting up, and you just, you know, you’re on set and you just say, hey, guys. Hey, partners, I’m on set here.
We’re three days from the start of the live workshop, or we’re a week away from the live workshop or whatever it is, and we’re just doing a test run through. Just wanted, you know, here’s what it looks like. Here’s some of the stuff we’re going to be doing. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I might even include, you know, if they’re doing the walkthrough, I might even include, like a ten minute little snippet of it or a blooper, you know, that’s always fun. Like, I might even start off like, we’ve done this because I don’t want it to be too polished. But we’ll take, you know, a blooper or two at the beginning and then, hey, partners, I’m here live, you know, boom, boom, boom, you know, three to five minute message, and then at the end finish up with a couple more bloopers.
So there’s like four or five bloopers, you know, two or three on either end, bookending the message. This just keeps it fun, right?
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Videos, just going live in the Facebook group, you know, for partners periodically. Again, this doesn’t matter what kind of program you’re running, just going live or recording a quick five minute video, you know, hey,
partners, I was thinking of, you know, something, you know, such and such, right? Sharing a lesson that you learned from another. Maybe you promoted something as an affiliate and sharing something that worked or didn’t work, constantly hammering home those important dates. You’ve got to do that, right? You’ve got to constantly remind them of, when does the promo start? Promotion starts April 14. April 14. April 14. April 14. April 14, right? You’ve got to hammer that home. You got to give them plans.
You know, if this is a purely evergreen program, but maybe there is some cyclicalness to it. They need to know what those dates are that are important and have a plan for building up to that.
Teach them going back to that. Teach them how to warm their audience up. Teach them how to promote the webinar, how to promote the ebook, how to promote the free report, how to promote the quiz, how to promote the assessment, how to promote the workshop, how to promote, you know, sales, whatever it is.
Teach them specific things, how to do better with email. Give them a specific lesson on social media. Give them a specific lesson on a part of social media, Instagram, Facebook, whatever. Give them a specific lesson on how to use DM’s, how to use their Facebook groups, how to do lives.
You know all of those things, right? These are all the things that you can be giving to your affiliates. Announce contests and prizes. That’s pretty popular, right? Give them the information they need to know about. Hey, guys, we just announced this. It’s a $250,000 contest. Or it’s a $10,000 contest, or everybody who makes five sales gets this, whatever it is.
Like, let them know those things. If you know what your contest is going to be eight weeks in advance, announce it. You’ll remind them, but go ahead and announce it. Get some excitement about it. Give them updates on everything, you know. Oh, my gosh, the webinar was amazing.
Oh, you know, last week was our second biggest week in, you know, the past year. Whatever it is, just give them updates. Shared success stories, testimonials when you get a testimonial, if you’re an affiliate manager, here’s what you do. You tell your customer service team anytime somebody sends an email with a really cool story, do me a favor, take a screenshot, send it to me, or let’s start a channel in slack or whatever.
But I want to know anytime somebody says something nice about our product so I can tell it to affiliates. You know, one of the biggest things you can do with Evergreen, every three, four months, just reach out and ask if there’s anything they need.
With a launch. Ask if there’s anything they need, you know, a couple weeks out, and then, you know, maybe a day or two in or the day before.
Just ask if there’s anything that they need. Ask for referrals. Hey, do you know anybody who’d be a good partner? That should be your number one source of affiliates, by the way, once you get up and running. Now, this is not true of your first hundred to 200, but once you hit a point where you have about 500 affiliates, your number one source of new affiliates should be your current affiliates.
So reach out periodically, you know, a couple months out from a launch. Hey, really excited. Remember April 14, April 14. You know, anybody who might be a good fit to promote this? If it’s evergreen, just maybe reach out, you know, once a quarter, once every six months is probably enough. So, of course, the next question is, when do you communicate with them?
If you have a pure evergreen program, like, there’s no cyclicalness whatsoever, if there’s any cyclical nature whatsoever, then naturally, throughout the year, you’re going to ramp up, leading into the high points, right? If you’re running periodic promotions, kind of that hybrid program, you’re gonna, you’re gonna center your communication around those high points.
I mentioned earlier. With the launch, I would do monthly up until about two months out from the launch, and then I would get a little bit more frequent. We’ll talk about that in a moment. But if you have no cyclicalness whatsoever, to your affiliate program and you’re not doing any promotions, there’s like literally nothing that changes.
Then I would send a once a month kind of newsletter type thing. I’d include three of these elements. Maybe a tip, a strategy, you know, what’s working, maybe a good story, a testimonial or an update, something like that.
I would include things like that. And then one of the other things, right. You maybe announce a new contest for the next month. Well, if you’re announcing a contest for the month of, say, march, then in March you’re going to increase the frequency. You’re going to really start increasing the frequency ten days out from March, you know, about February 18 or so. And now that almost becomes like a launch.
Almost kind of becomes like a launch. And so as far as the win, again, a consistent once a month email. And then I would, if you can track this in your system, I’d send to, you know, pop that out to the unopens roughly, you know, ten to twelve days later. And then I would post once a month or so in your Facebook group, maybe even twice a month in your Facebook group.
The Facebook group is going to be one thing. In fact, you can use your email to point back to the Facebook group. So, you know, you post in the Facebook group a tip and you post in the Facebook group a really cool testimonial. And you post in the Facebook group, you do a live where you answer some questions, then use the newsletter almost to point back to those pieces of content.
You can include something else as well. So they make sure to open your emails. But that would be the rhythm I would get into with that, with the cyclical type thing, maybe you got like four big promos a year. So once every roughly 90 days you’re basically have two months off and then a month where you’re ramping up and then two months off.
I would follow the evergreen pattern, you know, for those two months, and then I would just ramp it up. In the midst of, say, a ten day promotion, you know, you’re emailing every day, five days before through the, you know, the promotion, 15 days. You’re posting on the Facebook once or twice a day during that period and then for a launch again, you know, the thing is once a month. So if you’re launching, say, March 1, then you got your follow up emails, things like that.
We’ve talked about those before. That’s kind of like the week or two after the launch. But I would send an email, you know, it depends on the payments as well. If you have affiliates getting paid and let’s say you’ve got a four month payment plan, well, that kind of takes care of that, you know, but what about the affiliates who didn’t get paid? So I would just send a once a month email or once a month, you know, Facebook post.
You don’t really need to get too hyperactive about it. You know, you could alternate between Facebook and email about five months or so until you hit about, you know, six months out. Then I’m going to go basically every other week. So I’m going to send an email at the beginning of the month, Facebook post in the middle, vice versa, doesn’t matter.
And then the next month I’m going to repeat that. So it’s just starting to amp up the frequency. And when I get about, you know, six to eight weeks out, I start going roughly, you know, every two weeks or so, about eight weeks out until about the two weeks out mark, and then I start really ramping it up from there.
So that’s the win. But the biggest thing is just having some level of consistency so that they’re never going more than about 30 days without hearing from you in some manner, just keeping them somewhere in their brain. And if you give value, then they’re going to love it.
You can use email, you know, how do we communicate? Use email, use Facebook group, use, you know, telegram groups if you want, you know, communicate with them however they want to be communicated, especially for your bigger ones. One of the things I highly recommend is, you know, stop relying on email and Facebook periodically send them something in the mail. This was hugely popular.
We haven’t done this with all of our clients, but we do like, we’ll do like a quarterly physical newsletter. It’s basically, you know, if you can picture, you know, it’s two, so it’s four pages. You know, the one side is the mailing stuff, so there’s really nothing on there. So it’s actually three pages of printed stuff and it folds in in half and then in half again.
And, you know, you mail it, and, I mean, it costs fifty cents to print and, like, eighty nine cents to mail. Not even that. I don’t even know how much it costs. It’s pretty cheap, though. So you cost about a buck 50 a person. You have a thousand affiliates. It cost you $1,500.
Send them something in the mail. Really gets people excited. For your bigger affiliates, you could do something special. You know, the list is endless. Just do something special for them. One of my favorite gifts I ever got was a custom made Lego set. And it was me. In fact, they.
It was from Pete Vargas, and they made two of them, one with glasses and one without, because I kind of go 50 50. If you know anybody who knows me, like, from May through October, I tend to not wear my glasses.
And then over the winter, I wear my glasses because of allergies. And so they sent me two versions of the, you know, like a batman and a superman. It had my head, you know, a custom made Lego head.
And I’m like, that is so cool. So there’s all types of things you can do as far as mailings that you can do that would really move the needle. So the important thing is get creative, be consistent, and break the mold again. Communicate via physical mail periodically, occasionally pop out a DM to somebody. Here’s the thing.
If you’ve got 1000 affiliates, well, I can’t dm a thousand people. Well, for one, you could have a va do it. I don’t have a va. My company doesn’t provide one.
You could pay for it yourself. I did that eleven years ago, I worked for a company, and I paid out of my pocket about $200 a month for a virtual assistant because it was cheaper to pay them for 20 hours, $200, than it was to do some of the things myself. And I got a ten X Roi on their work. I mean, I guarantee you the work they did. Like dming affiliates wasn’t called dming back then.
I don’t even know what it was called. Instant messaging. Sitting there, instant messaging affiliates on my behalf was worth what I got out of it, and I never could have found the time to do it. So don’t make the excuse. I don’t have the time to do that. Yes, you go hire somebody. It’s super cheap.
It really. You can hire somebody overseas for less than $10 an hour. And so what I would do, you know, have done this periodically is, so you got a thousand affiliates, again, this isn’t.
If you got 100,000 affiliates is different. But you take your top thousand and let’s just say I post, you know, in the Facebook group or I send an email. Let’s just say I send an email and that email says, here’s your links, and swipe copy for next week.
Something like, I’m just making that up, right? Or there’s a really cool tip or something like that. Or announces a new contest. Doesn’t matter. But let’s just say go with announce is a new contest, then I’ll have my vas, DM as many people as they can. What if they only get to 274?
Okay, well, it’s 274 people who just got a DM. Hey, just want to make sure, did you see the email I sent out announcing the contest? Super simple, right? But it stands out. Breaks the mold. And I get a lot of responses like, no, I didn’t. Hey, cool.
Then boom, boom, boom. Make sure you go check it. Here’s a subject line. And every now and again I would say probably one out of 30. My VA will basically say, I don’t know how to respond to this, so can you handle it? But, I mean, we get mass communication with a thousand affiliates and it doesn’t, I mean, you know, it’s something that the
VA, I mean, they’re doing, you know, one every 20 seconds, so it takes them a few hours and they’ve knocked out a thousand. So just don’t let that be an excuse. Break the mold.
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Physical mail, DM’s, texts, whatever. Just break out of just emails and Facebook group. Emails and Facebook group. Boring, boring, boring. Right? So lots to do. But now you have a plan. Go check out those links. Like I mentioned earlier, I’ve got a link in the show notes for the affiliate training. So you want to know how to train your affiliates? I’ll show you.
I’ll even give, give you the slides. I’ve also got that weekend email template, so you can use that. You can copy and paste the thing. I mean, you know, you might want to tweak it a little bit.
I think the one I have in there is specifically for a client, but you can tweak that. And I’ve got a link for you to share with your affiliates on why mailing more on cart close day is such a good idea.
It’s actually got the stats that we broke down over the course of, you know, hundreds of launches that we ran. So make sure you go check those out. Make sure you subscribe and share, because in the next episode, I’m going to be talking about donuts. Actually, just donut, period. Donut singular. The affiliate donut.
I’m gonna be talking about the affiliate donut in the next episode, so you don’t want to miss that. So make sure you hit that subscribe button. Make sure you share this episode with somebody who could use it. You know, somebody who’s an affiliate manager, an entrepreneur, you know, an aspiring affiliate manager. And they’re like, I don’t know what to communicate. I don’t know how to communicate.
I don’t know when to communicate. Well then I just shared it with you in less than a half hour. Go share this episode with them. If you got any questions about this or anything at all, text me anytime at 260-217-4619 and I’ll see you in the next episode.
See you soon.