Many business owners understand about onboarding new clients. However, they don’t often think of the process of onboarding affiliates and how that might look. It really isn’t any different from the method you’d use if you hired an employee even if they are essentially contractors who get paid only if they make a sale. Let’s investigate what it will take to create an onboarding process, don’t worry, once you have it set up, it’s automatic.
When you bring on a new affiliate, you want to encourage and motivate them to make their first sale as fast as they can. By having a robust onboarding process, you’ll help them succeed and when they succeed, you succeed.
Set Up an Autoresponder Just for Your Affiliates
Depending on the system you use for your affiliate management, you may use that or you may want to use a separate autoresponder system like Aweber.com to handle the onboarding process. If you do use a different system, you will want to integrate the two so that it’s an automatic procedure and not something you have to explain to them with a bunch of extra steps.
Brainstorm the Types of Messages You Need to Send Them
Once you set up your autoresponder system to automatically add your new affiliates to the general affiliate list, now you need to set up messages that you want to send to them. You’ll need welcome messages, training messages, and promotional messages. You can set that up to deliver the information via the email either by including it all in email or by linking to the information in the affiliate dashboard or backend.
Segment Your Affiliates
This again depends on your autoresponder and affiliate management platform on how you do it. For some, segmenting means moving a person from one list to another. For some systems, it means to tag them with a keyword based on their actions. For example, if your new affiliate makes a sale, you’ll want to move them to a list or tag them so that they receive a congratulations email for making a sale with tips on how to do it again.
Check in with Them Often
Set up enough messages so that they’ll get the ones they need right away, a couple a day (and always tell them what and when to expect more messages) and then after that, you can mail them a tip a week that’s in the autoresponder. Then, when you create a new product, you’ll have more material to add to the autoresponder. If it’s something that will work a year from now, add it to the rotation for each segment, if it’s just current, send it on broadcast.
Bring Them into a Group or Forum
Another way to work with your affiliates and one that is proving popular and effective is to create a Facebook Group or a Forum for your affiliates to congregate, converse, and learn about new promotions, contests, and so forth. Of course, all that will be in your email messages too, but having them in the group is another way to build your relationship with them.
Onboarding is the process by which you bring someone into your system. It can happen with employees, contractors, and customers. When you onboard someone, you want to give them an introduction to your business, what they can expect, and how things work. Plus, you want a method to keep everyone informed and up-to-date on the information they need to know to do their part.
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