How To Recruit Affiliates: A Guide To Finding, Reaching Out, & Activating Affiliates!
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Commission-only affiliate sales is the ultimate dream for most brands. Zero risk: only pay acquisition costs once you make a sale. I don't need to persuade you of the benefits.
But recruiting affiliates is easier said than done. How do you recruit affiliates? Where should you look? How do you reach out & persuade them to spend their time promoting your brand? How do you make sure new affiliates become active? Let's find out 🙂.
To recruit affiliates, the first step is finding prospective partners.
When looking for affiliates, focus on the ones with a similar audience to yours who have a high level of trust and engagement. You should also see if their personality, style, and tone match how you want to present your brand.
Now, let’s look at seven ways to find relevant affiliates for your brand.
Social media influencers have a dedicated audience looking towards them to guide them on the best products and services.
And you can reach out to them and work with them as affiliates.
So, how do you find the right influencers for your affiliate campaign? Using an influencer discovery tool like Modash will help you find, analyze, and shortlist the most relevant creators for your brand.
Here's an example. I'm going to focus on finding YouTubers, because Youtube videos tend to get recurring traffic over time, which lends itself well to an affiliate model.
First, we select the platform in Modash (YouTube), and apply filters relating to the channel itself. E.g. where the creator is located, how many subscribers they have, their average views, engagement rate, topics covered, and more.
Second we can also apply audience filters. For example, we might want to reach channels who's subscribers are in the USA, and predominantly male.
Then, run your search. Using this example, we get a couple of hundred YouTubers who mention Artificial Intelligence in their videos, with a US male audience, 1%+ engagement rate, and 5k-25k subscribers.
You can open up any of the profiles to analyze the creator. You'll find their performance metrics (e.g. engagement rate, avg. views), top content, audience demographics (ages, genders, locations) and more to confirm that they're a good find. Lastly, Modash can find their YouTube channel email in one click ready for outreach later.
Modash has a 14-day trial if you want to give it a spin for finding affiliates.
Outside of typical social media channels like, there are probably quality content creators in your niche. They might be YouTubers, but they could also be bloggers, newsletter writers, and a whole host of other content mediums.
Like with the first example using social media affiliates, the advantage of collaborating with these niche influencers is that they already have a built-in audience who actively listen to their product recommendations and whose purchasing decisions are heavily influenced by these creators. Here are some other places you might find influential experts & content creators:
Here's an example. Ashley R. Cummings is a freelance writer with a weekly newsletter, Content Contact, focused on expert tips for freelancers. She mentioned that she was looking for new companies to collaborate with in her newsletter — which can be an excellent opportunity for a brand who wants to sell to writers/marketers to offer an affiliate deal.
Launching an affiliate program is one of the best ways to attract top affiliates. And for that, you need a dedicated landing page to capture inbound interest in case people search '[your brand] + affiliate program', or even '[your niche] + affiliate programs'.
Here’s how you can optimize your affiliate landing page:
1. Make it simple and direct: Add all the essential details of the affiliate program clearly. Don’t add fluff but speak directly to your potential affiliates and tell them why they should join the program and the benefits they will get from it.
Sephora has one of the simplest and brief landing pages for its affiliate program. It’s direct and without any fluff.
2. Talk about your brand: Don’t just mention the affiliate program. Mention your brand values and highlight how you’re different from your competitors. You can also mention the perks and benefits your affiliates will get.
Adidas does a great job of highlighting the characteristics of great affiliates who will be perfect for the brand.
3. Add an FAQ section: Address all the common questions you get in a dedicated section so you won’t have to waste time and resources answering common queries over and over.
Look at eBay’s affiliate program landing page. It’s entirely focused on frequently asked questions with a simple layout.
4. Show testimonials: You can add case studies and quotes from affiliates working with your brand and highlight the benefits they’ve gotten through the partnership.
5. Optimize it for SEO: 25% of affiliates learn about programs through a company’s website. Sprinkle keywords throughout your landing page, optimize it, and promote your page through social media and email newsletters.
You can make your affiliate program as simple as possible for affiliates to sign up. Instead of creating a landing page, you can create a Google form and easily log in everyone’s responses.
Katari, a skincare brand, asks its audience to sign up for the affiliate program through a form.
If you’ve a good brand ambassador program in place, you can combine your affiliate marketing with it.
Your brand ambassadors are already enthusiastically promoting your brand to their audience, which makes them great affiliates.
Offer your top-performing or most influential brand ambassadors a sales-based commission and recruit them as your brand’s affiliates.
Pura Vida, a jewelry brand, offers a 10% cut to all its brand ambassadors when they join its ambassador program.
Competitor insights will help you analyze if you’re missing anything from your strategy or give you new ideas to try.
You can reach out to your competitors’ affiliates and offer them a better sales commission or find similar influencers for your brand. Let’s have a look at how.
Social media content creators typically use branded hashtags to show affiliate partnerships. You can search those hashtags to find and look through relevant profiles.
Or you can use Modash to track your competitor’s branded and other affiliate hashtags. For example, suppose you're in the cosmetics industry, and one of your competitors is Sephora. In that case, you can add #SephoraSquad and mentions of Sephora’s social media account to track any content that meets those criteria.
Instead of contacting the same influencers, you can look for similar accounts with the influencer lookalike tool. Suppose you’re looking to work with affiliates like celebrity hairstylist Jonathan Van Ness. Just type in the username, and Modash will show you similar influencers.
The easiest way to do that is by looking at their backlinks. This way, you will find out who their affiliates are and how and where those affiliates are promoting the competitor brand.
Use a tool like Ahrefs to track your competitor’s backlinks. For example, to find Amazon’s affiliate links, look for amzn.to in their backlink profile.
You can export a CSV file of these affiliates and filter them out based on the traffic volume and engagement.
Customer advocacy marketing involves encouraging satisfied customers to spread the word about your product.
But what’s that got to with affiliates?
You can ask your loyal customers to join your affiliate program, as they will feel valued by getting a percentage of sales every time they recommend your products to people around them.
So how do you find these customers?
Harlow, a management tool for freelancers, introduced its referral program for customers. Instead of focusing on finding affiliates, the brand gave its customers a chance to earn rewards through the affiliate program.
You’ve found your ideal affiliates after following one (or more) of the methods mentioned above.
What’s next? Reaching out to them to onboard them.
But before you send them an outreach message, here’re a few things to look for to ensure you’re reaching out to the right affiliates.
Sending a personalized outreach email is the best way to reach affiliates. You can use DMs & comments too as part of the follow up process, but I recommend starting with email.
It's pretty straightforward to find email addresses these one by one manually (e.g. in bios, or 'contact' website pages), but if you're looking for scale, Modash has a tool for finding influencer emails in bulk.
You can either create a list of influencers using the search tool, or import a list. Then, export again to get a new .csv enriched with all publicly available emails.
After getting the email address, it’s time to send them a personalized and compelling outreach email. Here’re a few tips for nailing your outreach email:
Base, a health tracking technology, sent the following email for affiliate recruitment. The email hits all the critical points — benefits of joining the program, a testimonial from a customer, and a mention of the ideal affiliates the company would like to work with.
Don’t forget to send follow-ups and be persistent in getting a reply. We recommend sending five email follow-ups in the initial outreach over two weeks.
If you still don’t get a response, take a 6-month pause before reaching out again with two additional follow-ups.
Check out these free email outreach templates you can personalize and send.
Once you've recruited your first affiliates (or, even before), you're going to need an affiliate tracking software to manage all your affiliates, conversions, and payouts.
An affiliate tracking software can perform a few key functions:
Using affiliate software streamlines the process of affiliate activation. The first part of affiliate activation is to get your affiliates on board with your affiliate tracking software so they can review all the assets you provide, get their tracking link, sign the contract and get to work.
For a SaaS product, FirstPromoter or Rewardful are popular choices. For e-commerce, it may depend on your platform (Shopify, Wordpress, BigCommerce, etc.).
Now that your affiliates are on board with the tracking tool, let's look at what else you can do to make sure those affiliates you've worked so hard to recruit will actually promote your brand.
Most affiliates you recruit will never make a single sale. So, how do you maximize the number who do and increase sales? Let’s have a look at six tips to nail affiliate activation.
Your activation efforts need to start the minute an affiliate is accepted into your program, and sending a detailed welcome email is a great way to kick things off.
Most welcome emails just mention that you have been approved into our affiliate program, which does little to incite action.
Your welcome email should immediately encourage them to start promoting your brand. Customize your email and provide tools and resources to help them get started.
You can also include some media like banner ads, a list of your bestselling products, or other promotional material. Ensure you have set your affiliates for success, and they’ll be more enthusiastic about promoting your brand.
Look at this email by INK, an AI content marketing service — it’s simple, effective, and highlights commissions right off the bat.
Many brands miss the opportunity of regular check-ins with their affiliates. Having an automated email drip campaign solves that problem for you.
Regular check-ins keep affiliates motivated and your brand on top of their mind. You can follow a schedule like this:
Don’t forget to experiment and see what works for your brand. Map out different email cadences and see which drives the best engagement from your affiliates.
Look at this email by the video editing tool Descript. To promote its new AI feature, Descript encourages its affiliates to help spread the word in their YouTube videos. The email details all the relevant instructions to help affiliates promote the new features.
Affiliates are in the business of making money, and they try their best to generate links and sales for your business.
And one way to encourage affiliate partners is by sending them monetization tips and strategies for their business. You can give guidance on the following:
This email by Flodesk, an email marketing platform, is an excellent example of affiliate activation. The email is all about encouraging affiliates by providing them with an "Affiliate Success Kit" to promote the brand.
When affiliates join a program, they’re incredibly excited to promote a brand and earn a commission. But they might lose interest after a while.
To keep them motivated, you can come up with different creative challenges like:
Let’s have a look at the affiliate program of QuickBooks. To encourage affiliates, the brand introduced multiple challenges.
A tiered affiliate program rewards everyone based on performance and doesn’t follow the one size fits all approach.
Higher commission rates are dedicated to affiliates with higher sales volume. This type of program encourages affiliates to increase their efforts to generate more sales for your brand. It also keeps them motivated to strive for a higher tier.
Fiverr offers a tiered affiliate program that offers different rewards for different affiliates.
Affiliate activation efforts never stop.
You shouldn’t stop communicating with your affiliates after a welcome email or an email drip campaign.
By continually engaging with your affiliates, you ensure your brand remains at the top of their mind, and you’ll likely see multiple posts and product placements — increasing traffic and sales.
You can also establish a communication schedule.
For example, you can send a dedicated newsletter to your affiliates every week or after two weeks. Keep communication open with your affiliates and encourage them to reach out to you in case of any queries.
Finding and recruiting affiliates is the initial step toward building a successful affiliate program.
Focus on affiliates with an engaged audience relevant to your target customers who align with your brand.
Modash provides you with the platform to find affiliates through several filters and track your recruitment offers. Sign up for a 14-day free trial today!