Building an Affiliate Flywheel: Growth Is Never Done #22

RBL Flywheel Newsletter #22 🏃‍♂️

Welcome to the grand finale... 🏁

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Growth Is Never Done

This is the 6th and final part in our series: Building an Affiliate Flywheel

Excited to see you use these learnings in practice and let me know how it goes!

Tye 🤠

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Growth Is Never Done 📈

I'm sure this has been utilized by many in the field of Growth, Business, and Performance Marketing.

However, I would attribute it to Brian Balfour, founder of Reforge. For anyone interested in leveling up their skills and understanding of Growth, Product, and Foundations of Marketing I highly recommend it.

Always Be Testing 🧪

Yes this is one of our favorite sayings.

It is easier said than done.

Regularly running thoughtful experiments is something that too few people do.

It is easy to get complacent.

It is easy to plateau.

Especially for mature affiliate programs and other areas of performance marketing.

Twitter is just one of many brands that observed a correlation between the number of experiments ran and growth rate.

Of course, your tests need to be:

1. Structured correctly

2. Have a documented hypothesis

3. Yield learning that improves the business (used to inform future experiments)

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What Does This Have to do with building and Affiliate Marketing Flywheel for your business? 🤔

Similar to the concept of active management we discussed last week high performing teams and affiliate managers are constantly looking for growth via running a series of experiments. This can come in many forms but here are a few I recommend:

1. Recruitment - frequently assessing new partners to bring into your program that utilize a variety of promotional methods to promote you. This includes Emerging partners new to monetizing via affiliate marketing.
2. Activation - the methods you use to get joined partners to deliver traffic and revenue can be critical. You might need to run through a number of tactics before you get it right.
3. Optimization - how you get the most out of joined and active partners can be the difference between hitting your goals and not.
4. Paid Placement - This can be a missing piece for some brands. Many do not do it and far to often we see brands that are not doing it profitably.
5. Commission / Payout - Yes this is an area brands can test and learn from so long as they are respectful that this is partner pay and needs to be treated with care.
6. Creative, Landing Page, and Offer - A lot can be learned by trying different levers in these key areas

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Why Does This Matter?

How could this leave you behind if you are not testing frequently?

Because growth levers, some partners, and marketing tactics can change quickly...

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Additional context from Reforge on Growth and Lifecycle of channels

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Always Be Testing in Your Recruitment 📶

Bring multiple new viable partners to your program weekly via:

a) Application review

b) Affiliate network search

c) Agency partner database

d) Search Engine Tools

e) Affiliate recruitment tools (utilize to validate who your competitor and ancillary brands are working with)

f) Your network

g) Affiliate marketing conferences

For example in the world of affiliate marketing a brand might consider the following:

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Always Be Testing in Your Activation 🕺

• 1:1 meeting
• Bonuses
• Gifting
• Contests
• Elasticity Tests
• In-person meetups
• creative
• landing page
• offer.

Offering something of value in exchange for their 1st sale or something even more valuable for their 3rd sale.

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Always Be Testing in Your Optimization 📈

• 1:1 meeting
• Bonuses
• Contests
• Elasticity Tests
• In-person meetups
• creative
• Landing page
• offer.

Offering significant bonus opportunities if active partners can reach an increased level of performance than their existing run rate (be sure that the run rate includes factors like seasonality, macroeconomic environment, offer, landing page, existing payout, and competitive analysis).

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Always Be Testing in Paid Placement 💰

(Yes we do this and get an Return On Investment at a rate over 80%)

$15k paid placement with Top Tier Media placement will include email placement, 3 posts, and exposure on their social media channels all adding up to a reach of approximately 750k unique viewers.

The hypothesis is that the enthusiast community and customer segments of this paid media campaign will yield the following results at a conversion rate 25% lower than our previous paid placement tests based on EComm brand's historical data of similar tests and based on our tests with the same partner and different brands.

Estimate / Hypothesis

• 1M Impressions
• 3,500 engagements on social media
• 45,000 clicks
• 675 Purchases
• .5% Conversion Rate
• $85 Average Order Value
• $57,375 in revenue
• $5,737 in payable commissions
• 2.7 ROAS 🔥

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Always Be Testing in Your Commission/Payout 🤑

While you want to be smart about not pulling the rug out from partners, running regular tests with partners to see how elastic they are with payout and measure if material change occurs with payout change.

This can be important to ensure that they are priced right and as profitable as possible for the brand. I do think you need to ensure that with any partnership you are meeting a minimum viable payout.

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Always Be Testing in Your Creative, Landing Page, Offer 🔎

Partners can rely on these areas. This is often the fuel they need to woo their audience to convert.

Just as you would with your other paid marketing levers. This is one you should be looking to improve monthly at a minimum.

For larger brands, you can run campaigns even more often.

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Why does this matter? 🚨

Take Active Management to the next level.

Growth is Never Done.

Always Be Testing.

Trying something new monthly/quarterly, with data-driven hypothesis, that drives revenue, for each of these areas for your affiliate program:

1) Recruitment

2) Activation

3) Optimization

4) Paid Placement Commission / Payout

5) Creative, Landing Page, and Offer will set you apart from other brands.

Getting those tests and improvements right to deliver ROI will ensure you win.