So, what about your company? Would an Affiliate Program be a good idea? Here are the first five questions we ask when anyone comes to us for a program. There are always variations and exceptions to every rule, but these answers should quickly help you decide if you wish to explore further or not.

1. Are you currently promoting or selling your product or service online?

❏ Yes Great. By already being online and successfully (hopefully) driving traffic to your site you’re off to a great start. You may not see a positive ROI if you’re buying the traffic, and maybe the traffic is low if you’re relying on only Social or SEO traffic, but that’s okay.

❏ No This isn’t a deal breaker, but it does beg the question as to why not. There may be a very good reason and it is something which can be easily addressed and fixed, but affiliates are going to ask you about how the offer performs. If you can’t answer that question, they will be less likely to want to spend their time and money promoting your offer.

2. Do you own your product?

❏ Yes Excellent. This means you should have total control of how it is promoted and you likely have the margins necessary to offer an affiliate a good deal for sending you more sales, customers, clients, etc.

❏ No This doesn’t mean you can’t have an affiliate program, but there are usually other circumstances you’ll need to review before moving forward. For example, does the actual creator/owner have an affiliate program? Do they allow you to use affiliate marketing for the promotion of the product or service? Do you have enough margin to build a competitive and attractive program?

3. Do you know your targeted acquisition cost?

❏ Yes Fantastic. This is a fundamental component of any marketing channel. Knowing how much you can spend to make a sale, or get a new customer or client will help you make all media buying decisions down the road.

❏ No That’s okay, this is something you can pretty easily figure out and is related to question #4.

4. Do you know the average lifetime value of your customer?

❏ Yes Perfect. Knowing this number is a huge advantage for all your business decisions.

❏ No You may actually already have a number. Remember, this isn’t just about them buying one thing from you only one time. Maybe you offer a monthly subscription and they stay for 5 or 6 months. Maybe they need to renew or buy multiples of your product. Maybe, now that they’ve purchased one thing from you one time, you can sell them other complementary products and services.

5. Do your competitors have an Affiliate Program?

❏ Yes Outstanding. This really gives you a boost as well as an easy model to see what is or isn’t working. If you offer a better product or a better program, you can get those affiliates to switch over and start sending their traffic to your site instead of your competition. This is a double win.

❏ No Not a problem. Maybe your competition just hasn’t figured it out or you don’t have competitors because you offer something truly unique and exclusive. This is more often a good thing than any sort of drawback.

If you’ve already answered Yes to all these, we very much recommend you consider adding an Affiliate Program to your marketing mix. If you have a mixture of Yes and No answers, or most likely have some unique variables which need to be considered, give us a call and we can help you sort through it.

Everyone’s business in unique, and we build custom in-house programs specifically for you and your business. If it’s not a good idea for you at this time, we’ll tell you so. We don’t build programs to fail. More importantly, we should be able to tell you what steps you’ll want to take next to turn any of those No’s into a Yes so you are ready in the near future.