Now that you have active partnerships in place and your tracking implementation is getting you what you need, it's time to engage with your partners. Getting a partnerships program off the ground is hard work. But once it's up and running, shift your focus to help every partner actively deliver as much value as possible.
Invest time to ensure that partners have what they need to stay active. Keep the line of communication open: personalize outreach, provide fresh content and offers they can promote, and evaluate their progress with performance from the impact.com reporting suite.
Try the following best practices to increase partner productivity and get the most out of your partnerships program.
- Personalize your outreach
Keep your program top-of-mind through proactive, personalized partner outreach. Setting up partner groups can help you quickly offer different kinds of partners unique ad content that will relate more to their audience and specialized content terms that more closely relate to their audiences and business practices. Partners groups can be based on different factors, like performance or promotional method, and partners can fall into more than 1 group.
- Use the 80/20 rule
Identify your top partners—those that generate the top 80 percent of your revenue—and commit to providing them with customized communication. Consider sending newsletters to partners that drive the remaining 20 percent.
- Constantly update partners
Send frequent updates on the latest offers, best categories, and hottest products to nurture relationships and keep partners active.
- Pay attention to dips in performance
Develop a communication strategy for partners that experience a drop in performance. Re-engage with them to understand what's happening and to help them get going again.
- Develop relationships with partners
On the other side of the screen are actual people. Take the time to build direct relationships with all partners so your partnerships can withstand the hard times and celebrate the good ones!
Recommeneded: One of the best tactics at the beginning of a partnership is to introduce yourself to your new partner. Send an email, ask what they need, and get them excited about your brand. (It never hurts to provide a little incentive to get them to start promoting you or secure their first conversion.) Learn more about engaging with specific types of partners like influencers, mobile apps, traditional affiliates, and content.
Work with your partners to set achievable performance goals, then help them reach those goals with a steady stream of updates. Provide information about the latest offers, best-selling products, and hottest categories.
Run informational campaigns or feeds that share educational and promotional assets to nurture your relationships and incentivize partners to push your products. Different types of partnerships require different types of actions and engagement methods, so prioritize creativity when deciding how you want each partner to promote you.
For mobile partners, set up automated data flows to ensure that directly integrated apps have the latest information. Also, consider sharing unique data assets that help partners create better experiences for their users and offer complete visibility into what drives success for your business. Providing your partners with this information can help them tailor their app experience for their users—and drive more value back to you.
Influencers are a unique partner type, so equipping them for success looks a bit different from most other types of partners:
Automate creative review, approval, and submission processes to maintain the authenticity of each post and to create a level of accountability between parties.
Create and maintain product catalogs. Include images, names, and prices in each listing.
Deploy automated messaging workflows when necessary and offer incentives to influencers whose activity has stalled.
Always build with mobile in mind. Make sign-ups, post submissions, performance tracking, and payments easy for partners to use.
Deploy your influencers' user-generated content on product pages to add authenticity and drive conversion rates.
Sometimes, partners struggle to achieve agreed-upon performance goals. Remain invested in learning where the issues lie, and provide support in any area you can. Monitoring performance reports makes it easier to spot performance dips so you can help your partners get back on track. Refer to impact.com's collection of curated performance reports or create your own reports to measure performance as you see fit.
Explore the following in-app guides, help articles, and ebooks to supplement what you've learned above.