5 Reasons NOT to Terminate Inactive Affiliates – Coast TV

In our third edition of Coast TV, Senior Online Marketing Executive, Nikki Parker gives her 5 reasons NOT to terminate inactive affiliates. If you have any questions or feedback then we’d love to hear it in the comments below.

Video Transcription

We’ve all heard the term “First impressions count”, but sadly that’s not necessarily the case when it comes to affiliates, and that’s why I’m here today.

My name is Nikki Parker, I’m a senior online marketing executive here at Coast Digital. I’m here today to talk to you about 5 reasons not to terminate inactive affiliates. So, this has come about really because quite often affiliate managers are asked by clients or by people internally to clean up their affiliate list – to tidy up their non-performing (or seemingly non-performing) affiliates. So why shouldn’t we do that?

First of all, they’re free! Affiliates that aren’t apparently performing or converting to sale are not actually costing you anything. Affiliates are done on a cost per acquisition basis, so you’re only paying when they actually convert to sale.

Secondly, brand awareness. Affiliates are a form of free brand awareness for you, so whilst they are converting to sale there’s obviously brand awareness there with a sale at the end of it, but there’s also times when they’ll be putting your banners and other promotional material out into the marketplace and getting your brand across to a wider audience than you could ever hope to do yourself.

Thirdly, many affiliates could just be starting out – it takes time to build up either a website or a profile so many affiliates will start to recruit people on to the program before they’re actually ready to go out to the wider public. These people would appear to be not performing and not producing anything for you, but it’s early days and the sooner you get on to their program, you could well be ahead of another competitor of yours getting on to their program.

My fourth point is that (pretty much following on from the third one) people that aren’t actually appearing to be your top performers now could be top performers in the future. We all had to start somewhere – we know that the likes of the Quidco’s and the Top Cashback’s of this world are superstars in terms of affiliate revenue generators at the moment, and they would have no doubt started somewhere as well, and soon worked their way up.

And finally (and actually quite a key point) is that if you choose to terminate inactive or underperforming (or seemingly underperforming) affiliates, you could lose them forever. We all know that there are times when you decide to end a relationship and that actually can leave a lot of bad feeling when the other person doesn’t feel that there’s a just reason for it. So in the case of affiliates, many affiliates will feel deeply offended by the fact that you’ve decided to suspend them from your program with no good reason. Sadly many of them will also choose to vocalise this on affiliate forums. In doing that, your brand and your affiliate program will get very bad press across the affiliate forums and affiliate communities. I have had someone say to me “Well that won’t really matter because my customer base won’t see that”, however that’s not the case because yes, your customer base won’t necessarily see that, but in the future the other affiliates that might have been superstars of the future may (once researching your affiliate program) may look and that and think “Actually I can see across the forums that this doesn’t seem to be a two-way relationship with this brand, so I’m not actually sure that I want to join the brand”.

So, thank you for listening, I hope that’s given you some food for thought, and if you’ve got any comments then please feel free to leave them below.

Thank you very much.

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