10+ Affiliate Program Best Practices for 2024

Looking for affiliate program best practices to guide your affiliate marketing efforts?

It’s easy to create an affiliate program; what’s more challenging is creating one that appeals to the right affiliates and motivates them to make sales.

In this post, we have shared affiliate program best practices, which can take your affiliate program to the next level, and make a big difference to your business.

What Is an Affiliate Marketing Program

An affiliate marketing program allows third parties to receive a commission for helping you sell your products or services.

When you create an affiliate program, you allow affiliates to help market your products and services, sending you referrals for a commission. With modern affiliate marketing software, you can track where your customers originated, so the affiliates who send you customers can get paid accordingly.

It’s a simple process:

Affiliates sign up for your affiliate marketing program.
Then they download personalized affiliate links that allow you to identify when your website visitors have been referred by one of your affiliates.
When an affiliate sends someone to your website, and they make a purchase, the affiliate receives an agreed-upon commission.

Essentially, you’re assembling a worldwide network of marketers to help promote your business.

Why Create an Affiliate Marketing Program

There’s very little to lose from creating an affiliate marketing program if you have the right software to help you run it. On the flip side, there are some powerful reasons to use affiliate marketing.

Only pay affiliates when they make a sale
Immediately expand your brand reach
Benefit from the expertise of innovative marketers
Focus on the things you excel at (SEO, landing pages, quality content, development of new products, whatever it might be) while affiliates nail their affiliate digital marketing campaigns

Once your affiliate marketing program is running, anyone worldwide can apply to market and share your affiliate products.

This can be a massive boost for your marketing strategy and result in sales for which you must do very little work. In fact, you can make money as you sleep.

Of course, nothing is that simple, though!

There are good affiliate marketing programs, and some sit there and do nothing. So, what best practices can you follow in your affiliate program to ensure you bring in a steady stream of sales?

Affiliate Program Best Practices to Skyrocket Your Business Growth

Now that we’ve worked out how to make your affiliate program (and found out that the first part is super easy) let’s talk about affiliate program best practices.

The classic line from Field of Dreams in internet marketing, “if you build it, they will come,” doesn’t ring true. You can write an amazing blog post, and nobody’s guaranteed to find it, and the same goes for your newly created affiliate program.

You know firsthand what it takes to make sales; it’s not easy, so how can you find people with what it takes and give them the tools to sell your product?

Here are the affiliate program best practices we’re going to look at:

Stay ahead of affiliate marketing trends
Carefully consider your commission rates
Create terms and conditions that work for you
Choose the right affiliates
Invest time in onboarding
Maintain open communication
Give affiliates access to your creatives
Share detailed analytics
Streamline your user experience
Incentivize beyond commission
Automate where possible

Following these affiliate program best practices and nailing every step will put your affiliate marketing strategy in a great position!

1. Stay Ahead of Affiliate Marketing Trends

Affiliate marketing moves pretty quickly.

If you maximize your return, you must always provide affiliates with the tools they need to succeed. Choosing the right affiliate software is a huge part of this!

The best way to ensure you stay ahead of the curve is with AffiliateWP.

Affiliate WP: best WordPress affiliate management plugin

AffiliateWP will help you set up a WordPress affiliate program in minutes, but most importantly, it’s constantly innovating. You’ll have access to powerful marketing tools designed to boost your conversion rates, but you’ll also see regular updates that help give you an edge over your competitors.

You need an affiliate management plugin you can grow with, and the best option is AffiliateWP!

2. Carefully Consider Your Commission Rates

The commission is the basic incentive you use to get people to sell your products (check out our in-depth guide on affiliate commissions.)

Higher commissions will be more attractive to high-performing affiliates, but at the same time, you need to balance it with your need to make a profit.

You need flexibility in this area, so make sure your affiliate marketing software gives you this.

You need the ability to:

Choose between a flat rate on each sale or a percentage of each sale
Create different commission tiers (this is a good way to incentivize affiliates to work hard and sell more products)
Offer recurring commissions on products with monthly payments (membership programs, SaaS)

Not every piece of affiliate marketing software is flexible in this area, so make sure you choose one that gives you what you need.

3. Create Terms and Conditions that Work for You

Make sure your affiliate terms and conditions are clearly defined. Again, the affiliate marketing software you use will offer a lot of help in this area, but there will be some elements you need to decide on.

One of the important questions you will have to answer is how many days your cookie tracking should be valid.

Essentially, how soon after the initial visit does a customer have to purchase your affiliate to be still eligible for a commission?

The thinking behind this is that if a referral lands on your website and buys right away, then it’s due in large part to the work of the affiliate.

However, if the person doesn’t purchase until three months after they were last referred by the affiliate, to what extent is the affiliate responsible?

By this time, you’ve likely engaged the customer in content marketing, email marketing, social media, and more, so is the affiliate still entitled to the commission?

You will have to answer these questions, and they’ll be reflected in your cookie policy.

4. Choose the Right Affiliates

You know that a lot of effort goes into making a sale. You’ve worked hard to build your exposure, streamline your sales process, and provide expert support, enabling you to grow your business.

Making affiliate sales isn’t any easier. Sure, your affiliates benefit from the systems you’ve put in place, but they have to be well-placed to reach new audiences and have enough authority to encourage people to take action.

Suppose you’re going to create an affiliate program that attracts bloggers, influencers, and other affiliates who can influence your target audience. In that case, you’ve got to be proactive.

Understand the most important details about your audience and find the people who are most likely to reach them:

What does your target audience look like? (Demographics, pain points, questions they need answering)
What marketing channels does your audience find their information on? (Search engines, social media platforms)
What content does your audience interact with? (Blogs, videos, webinars, podcasts, infographics)

When you have a clear picture of who your ideal customer is and how they’re likely to find your product, you have a better idea of who will likely make a good affiliate.

You can get a feel for this by checking out their website and social media posts.

Now, it’s just a question of building bridges and showcasing the value of your affiliate program.

5. Invest Time in Onboarding

When your affiliates succeed, you succeed. This means ensuring your affiliates have everything they need to make sales right from the beginning is in your interest.

You’ve spent years learning how to sell your product, so why not share your pearls of wisdom?

Create an onboarding process that explains the affiliate’s responsibilities and the terms of your program. Just as importantly, give them helpful information on how to make sales.

If your affiliate software is just a link generator and sales tracker, then this isn’t easy to achieve.

Ideally, you want a dedicated affiliate dashboard you can fill with things like target audience information, creatives, product information, frequently asked questions, and more helpful tips to optimize performance.

Whether your affiliates are beginners or seasoned pros, this will help them hit the ground running.

6. Maintain Open Communication

There are few incentives like money!

However, with so many affiliate programs, it’s easy for affiliates to get distracted by the next shiny new offer.

You want to keep your affiliates engaged, motivated, and bringing in the sales, so you’ve got to communicate. You have a wealth of knowledge to share about your products, your customers, and your business, and not only can this keep your affiliates entertained, but it can also help them make more money.

When you create your affiliate program, look for software that facilitates clear communication between you and your affiliates. For instance, if you use AffiliateWP’s integration with WPForms to create your affiliate registration forms, you can effortlessly sync all your affiliates to your email marketing software.

Customizable email templates will help you start the conversation, but don’t be afraid to take this further and actively market to your affiliates.

Bring them into your email marketing platform and build out an engaging series. Use this to entertain, inform, and update your affiliates with everything they need to know so you can continue to build your relationships.

7. Give Affiliates Access to Your Creatives

Some successful affiliates have so much authority with their audience that they can put a link to their email list, and their followers will buy the product.

As you might expect, these affiliates are few and far between.

Affiliates have to work hard to engage their audience, and it takes good marketing to get someone to follow a link to a third-party website and buy a product. This takes more than pretty words; it also requires creatives, and your affiliates will rely on you.

The better your images, videos, podcasts, and infographics are, the more tools your affiliates have at their disposal to try and sell your products.

The chances are you probably wouldn’t make many sales without your images and videos, so it’s unrealistic to expect your affiliates to do so. Invest in your creatives and share them on your affiliate platform.

This is one affiliate program best practice that can instantly impact your results.

8. Share Detailed Analytics

If you look at some affiliate programs, they only give the affiliate the number of clicks, sales, total revenue, and commission earned. Data is key to improving performance, so you want your affiliates to have access to more detailed metrics than this.

When you create your affiliate program, look at the affiliate area and ask yourself if there are enough insights to help affiliates drive sales. If you want more data as a seller, then the chances are your affiliates will, too.

For instance, rather than simply following the number of referrals an affiliate makes, knowing what products they are for is important. Rather than showing the total number of sales, affiliates will want to know which products are selling well and which aren’t.

The more information you give your top affiliates, the more sales they are likely to make for you.

9. Streamline Your User Experience

There’s only so much your affiliates can do. They can send you potential new customers, but ultimately, it’s up to you to make the sale.

If your store’s user experience is poor or your checkout process is clunky, it will significantly impact your conversion rate and make your affiliate program seem like it’s not working. People often ask if affiliate programs are profitable; a big part of the answer lies in your website.

Streamlining your e-commerce store’s user experience (here are some helpful tips) will give your affiliate marketing program a good chance of success.

Affiliates can drive traffic to your website, but it’s up to you to do the a/b testing and ensure you’re converting as much traffic as possible.

10. Incentivize Beyond Commission

You’re already giving people a nice sale cut, so what more can you offer?

Creating community and friendly competition is a great way to encourage your affiliates.

You can do this through leaderboards and awards that keep people motivated to succeed.

It’s a lot like being a salesperson: everyone wants to be the top earner, and by sharing leaderboards, you enable your affiliates to aspire to be the top dog.

You’ll often see awards and different tiers in huge affiliate networks like ClickBank, and there’s no reason why you can’t incorporate them into your own program.

11. Automate Where Possible

You can’t afford to manage all aspects of your affiliate marketing program manually.

This is somewhat manageable if you have a handful of affiliate partners, but if you’re following these affiliate marketing best practices, your program will be a lot bigger than just a few people.

This is where you need to research and plan exactly what you need from your affiliate marketing software.

Integrated payouts (pay into affiliates’ bank accounts or credit cards in 1 click)
Innovative integrations with apps like Zapier
Automated tracking for affiliate links, coupons, and more
Smart affiliate commission rules

If you’re creating an affiliate program on WordPress, the best option is AffiliateWP because it’s specifically built for the WordPress platform. This means you can effortlessly automate processes and quickly integrate your favorite WP plugins.

An effective affiliate program should run like clockwork; you need the right software to ensure this happens.

Now Set Up Your Affiliate Program

We’ve armed you with some important affiliate program best practices, and now it’s time for you to put them to use.

Now is the time if you’ve not set up your affiliate marketing program yet. You can start in as little as 10 minutes and immediately make sales.

All you’ve got to do is head to our pricing page and choose the plan that best fits your needs.

Once you’ve installed the plugin (here’s a simple guide), the easy setup wizard will walk you through every step, and you’ll soon be able to put these affiliate marketing best practices to good use.

Build your affiliate marketing program today!

Affiliate Program Best Practices Can Take You to Your Goals

These affiliate program best practices are easy to implement and can make all the difference to your affiliate program.

You can always take more steps to help take things to the next level, though, and we’ve got even more resources to help you. Here are some related articles you might want to look at:

If your affiliate program is already set up, you have some fresh ideas to help you improve it.

If you’re considering setting up your affiliate program, now’s the time.

Get AffiliateWP Today!