How to Create a Winning Affiliate Marketing Business Plan (Guide)

Starting an affiliate marketing program without a business plan is not a wise decision. 

Launching an affiliate marketing program might seem straightforward: sign up affiliates, let them market your products, and watch the sales roll in. Yet, the reality is far from simple.

A solid business plan is crucial to navigate the complexities of affiliate marketing and turn it into a successful revenue stream.

Instead, follow compiled steps to create a business plan for your affiliate program, ensuring your program not only starts on the right foot but also thrives in the long run.

Importance of Affiliate Marketing Business Plan

Affiliate marketing is commonly referred to as a passive income. This is a little bit deceiving and can detract from the effort and skill required to create a successful affiliate program. 

The stats tell us that there’s plenty of money to be made from affiliate marketing, but to unlock this “bounty,” you need to be strategic and have an affiliate marketing business plan. 

• Over 80% of brands run affiliate marketing programs
• 16% of online orders are attributed to affiliate marketing
• Affiliate marketing is the top customer acquisition channel for 40% of US merchants
• More than 85% of marketers expect affiliate marketing revenue to grow

It’s a competitive field you’re looking to enter; you’re up against big affiliate networks and programs offering affiliates great rewards. To be successful, your program has to stand out from the crowd and motivate affiliates to create referrals for you. 

The nice thing about an affiliate marketing strategy is that it draws on many of the skills you already use in your digital marketing, giving you a good starting point.

With the right software, even beginners can set up an affiliate program in a few minutes.

The bigger question is, how do you turn it into a success?

15 Steps to Creating a Business Plan for your Affiliate Program

Whether you run an e-commerce store or plan to start a new online business, it’s crucial to think through key factors before launching your affiliate marketing program.

While affiliate marketing offers low risk and minimal upfront costs for merchants, mistakes in fundamental decisions can hinder your success.

Focus on these 15 critical questions across six categories to ensure your affiliate marketing business plan is on the path to achieving your goals:

Product

Your products will be one of the primary elements that should drive your decision-making.

Q. What Types of Products Do You Sell?

The type of products you sell will dictate the features you need from your affiliate program.

If you’re selling physical products, then you need affiliate marketing software that plugs into your e-commerce platform (WooCommerce, Shopify, Big Commerce).

If you sell products or services, then your software will need to integrate with other platforms like Easy Digital Downloads. 

Q. What Does Your Customer Journey Look Like?

What has to happen for you to make a sale? Affiliates can give you all the traffic in the world, but ultimately, you’ve got to make the sale. 

For example, the B2B customer journey is generally longer and more complicated than the B2C one. If this is the case, you might have a dedicated sales team that just needs leads.

For these businesses, affiliate lead generation is a much better option than using affiliate marketing simply for sales. 

Different business models will require different things from affiliate programs. 

Q. What Commission Can You Afford?

People aren’t going to market your products for free (unless you’ve got some amazing brand ambassadors).

They need an incentive to showcase your products on social media, leverage their SEO, and hit their email lists. 

In an ideal world, you’d be able to offer a huge reward and still make plenty of profit but that’s not how it works.

You have to have a clear picture of your profit margins and understand how much you can afford to offer in commission. 

It’s a balancing act where you have to offer enough rewards to attract engaged affiliates while still ensuring you make a good profit. 

Software 

Your affiliate marketing software is what ties everything together. If you can’t accurately track referrals, then your program isn’t going to work for you or your affiliates. 

Getting set up is the easy part; successful affiliate marketing is more about program features and how you leverage them. 

Q. How Can You Make Your Affiliate Program Easy to Use?

The chances are your program won’t be the only one your affiliates are signed up to.

These guys are entrepreneurs looking to make a good income, so they’re working with many different businesses. 

They don’t have time to waste on a poor affiliate experience. 

This is why your software has to be simple to operate and offer the detailed analytics affiliates need to optimize their performance. 

It’s also essential for you that you have easy access to all the information you need. You want to maximize sales, not manage payouts and other little details, which is why AffiliateWP offers an integrated payouts service. 

You can set up your affiliate program in just a few simple steps, but the important thing is choosing software that streamlines processes for you and your affiliates. 

Q. How Much Should You Pay for Your Affiliate Software?

How much you should pay for your affiliate software depends on the features you need. 

One way is to focus on the passive income aspect of affiliate marketing, go for the cheapest option, and hope you attract great affiliates with minimal features. If you’re hoping to earn tens of thousands of dollars through affiliate marketing, then it’s quite safe to say this isn’t the best option. 

Instead, you’ve got to go back to the questions you answered about your products and ask yourself what features will help you sell them. 

Q. How Can You Govern Affiliate Behavior?

The actions your affiliates take will reflect on your brand, so it’s important to create strong terms and conditions. Your affiliate marketing software should make this easy to set up and give you the tools to protect yourself from affiliate fraud. 

Promotion 

People often underestimate how challenging it can be to find good affiliates.

It’s not all about commission rates; instead, it’s about understanding what good affiliates want, where to find them, and how to showcase your value proposition. 

Q. What does your ideal affiliate look like?

Affiliate marketing is a form of partnership marketing, which means you’re looking for someone who has something you need.

Generally, this is reached, but it’s important you don’t sacrifice a targeted approach simply in the pursuit of a larger audience. 

Take the time to understand your ideal affiliate’s audience and how they reach those people. Are they a blogger, influencer, retailer, email marketer, or something else?

Once you have a profile of your perfect affiliate, you’ll have a better idea of how to reach them. 

Remember that if you hide your affiliate sign-up page on a forgotten corner of your website, then few people will see it. Treat this as a sale and optimize your sign-up page to appeal to your ideal affiliate. 

Q. What Are Your Competitors Doing?

It’s difficult to sign up for an affiliate if you have a direct competitor with a much more attractive affiliate program. Perform market research find out what your competitors are doing, and incorporate the elements you like into your program. 

Another great option is to check out brands you admire and sign up for their affiliate programs. It will allow you to look around and see what they do well. 

Q. What Non-Monetary Rewards Can You Offer?

When creating your affiliate marketing business plan, getting carried away with commission is easy. Yes, affiliate commissions are essential, but they’re only part of the equation. 

Not everyone can offer huge commission rates, so instead, you’ve got to think about what non-monetary rewards you can offer:

• Free products
• Company swag
• Professional creatives
• Tiered affiliate rates
• Personalized landing pages

Any features that can improve conversion rates are highly popular, so one of our favorite tactics is creating personalized landing pages for your best affiliates.

These landing pages highlight the exclusive nature of your relationship and can result in a big boost in your conversion rates. 

Engagement 

Signing up affiliates is only part of the job; you must keep them engaged and selling.

There are many affiliate programs out there, and if you’re unable to engage your affiliates, then you can find their marketing campaigns start to focus on other products. 

Q. How Do You Ensure Your Affiliates Get Off to The Best Possible Start?

Affiliates don’t want to be waiting months for their first sale. They want to hit the ground running, creating great content (product reviews, social media posts, email marketing) and making their first sales. 

When selling your products, you have more know-how than anyone in the world, so share it. Create an affiliate onboarding that contains everything needed to cut your affiliates’ learning curve. 

Nothing is a better incentive than watching commissions come in, and the quicker this happens for your affiliates, the better it will be for you. 

Q. How Do You Maintain Your Affiliate Relationships? 

Humans like doing business with people they like. Sure, they like making money too, but if you create a personal connection,, it will count for something. 

Your affiliate onboarding gives you a great chance to open the dialogue, but it’s important to maintain communication. 

• Ask for feedback
• Notify affiliates of new program features
• Share new creatives
• Offer insider knowledge on your affiliate products
• Continue to innovate with your non-monetary rewards
• Create clear guidelines to highlight your expectations

Conversions

Everything we’ve outlined so far in your affiliate marketing business plan is great, but if you can’t convert, it won’t bring in the results.

No matter how great your affiliates’ marketing efforts are, it’s up to you to sell your products, so this is where everything comes together. 

Q. How Can You Optimize Your User Experience?

You’re working with affiliates and influencers because they have a great connection to their audience. Whether they use content marketing, social media platforms like Linkedin, email marketing, or something else, they create an amazing, personalized user experience (UX). 

To maximize sales, you must create a similar level of UX. It’s no use if potential customers are blown away by your affiliates only to be disappointed by your landing pages. 

We created our Affiliate Landing Pages feature because it enables you to create a seamless user experience.

As these pages are personalized, they can focus on the relationship between you (the retailer) and your affiliate and ensure continuity when customers move from your affiliate’s site to yours. 

Q. How Can You Optimize Your Conversion Rate?

Small improvements in your conversion rate can make a big difference to you and your affiliates. For small businesses that don’t have the resources to reach their target audience in quite the same way as big brands, conversion rates are all important. 

Maximizing the user experience on your landing page should allow you to convert more affiliate traffic, but there’s still more you can do.

One thing to remember is that most people don’t convert on their first visit to your website. Once they leave your site, you cannot reach them without collecting leads.

A great way to immediately get more out of your affiliate traffic is to leverage OptinMonster to create more leads. 

You’ve also got to ensure you capitalize on the moment when a customer decides they are ready to purchase. Your checkout process should be quick, simple, and able to take credit card payments conveniently (WP Simple Pay is an ideal option for this).

Post Sale

Whether a startup or an established business, an affiliate program is a great way to reach a wider audience and boost revenues. However, one thing that tends to be overlooked is that affiliate marketing is excellent at creating repeat customers. 

When you make an affiliate sale, it’s the culmination of an effective affiliate marketing business plan, so you want to ensure you maximize that investment’s lifetime value. 

Q. How Will You Create Repeat Customers?

You’ve worked hard to get new customers from affiliate marketing; now, how can you turn them into repeat customers? This is where you want to focus on your post-sale care and put your email marketing into action. 

A great way to do this is to incentivize your affiliates to keep your customers coming back to you with Lifetime Commissions and Recurring Referrals. 

Q. How Can You Continue to Optimize Your Affiliate Program?

It’s essential to set goals for your affiliate program and choose KPIs to show you how it performs. The right affiliate marketing software will give you access to lots of different data, so it’s important to use this to improve your processes. 

Creating a thriving affiliate marketing program isn’t easy; it will take consistent work.

Some aspects of your affiliate marketing business plan might not work immediately, but that means there’s an opportunity to improve. 

Your Affiliate Marketing Business Plan Starts with AffiliateWP

As you can see, an affiliate marketing plan has many different moving parts.

To bring those moving parts together, you need the right affiliate marketing software, and that’s exactly what AffiliateWP offers for online businesses that run on WordPress. 

We have high-level features and are known for our world-class support, so if you have a question, we’re here to help. We’re always updating our site with the latest tips and strategies to ensure that your affiliate marketing program doesn’t sit idle, and these small details make a big difference. 

We’re here to make your affiliate marketing program a success, and that means AffiliateWP should be featured in your affiliate marketing business plan. 

Get started with AffiliateWP today!