You may fail without an effective communication system
You may lose a giant affiliate if you fail to listen to or ignore an affiliate’s need. You may miss a zillion dollar deal if you cannot maintain effective communication with one of your promising affiliates.
Affiliate marketing is network marketing. You need to build a network of promising people (affiliates) who will refer visitors (prospective buyers of your product) to your website. Visitors will buy if your products appear genuine to them. At the same time, they must trust you and they will trust you if they trust the referring affiliate.
Your affiliate will never refer prospective customers to your site until he trusts you first.
To make yourself trustworthy you should include testimonials, credentials, demos, etc., on your website. These do help to build trust but they alone are not sufficient. Your affiliate may have many questions to ask before referring his customers to you. If he cannot get his questions answered, he will not take the risk of referring you for fear he will lose credibility with his own customers and visitors.
Once your affiliate is satisfied about you and your product he will start asking what he has to gain by driving visitors to your site. He may have hundreds of questions about the promos, custom promos, link types, commission rates, etc.
Once the affiliate gets the initial information from you, he will start bargaining. Promising affiliates tend to bargain more than passive affiliates (who may never qualify for payment). Even after the deal is made and he is registered, your affiliate may be stuck not knowing what he needs to do or how to do it. You must help him out.
To ensure that everything runs smoothly, you must communicate effectively with your affiliate and make sure he gets the right answer at the right time. Otherwise, you may lose a lot of future business.
If you try to communicate with an affiliate who has a lot of questions and needs them answered right away, do not depend upon email. If you do, you will likely lose the affiliate. The reasons for this are:
�Most of the discussion may span several days. You have a good chance of missing one message among thousands of spam messages. If you miss his important email, you kill any future discussion.
�Sometimes more than one person is involved in the discussion. It is simply impossible to organize views of different people effectively using email as the mode of communication.
�The status of any query cannot be managed automatically (e.g., which queries have been replied to, closed, or cancelled, etc.)
�It is very difficult to retrieve and organize desired older messages when needed.
What is an affiliate support system? How can it solve the communication issue with affiliates?
An affiliate support system is simply a ticket based CRM tool which will
�gather queries or support requests through different submission forms
�manage the requests on the basis of status and urgency
�hold communication with the respective affiliate for each support request until the problem is resolved
�alert each member in the communication when someone has posted a new view
�find and display desired requests in a friendly and polite manner
�track the request status and ensure all requests are taken care until there is resolution of the problem.
If you use an affiliate support system, you will not have to worry about losing any message requiring a reply. You can easily find any communication with any affiliate for any date range, or on any subject. The same will be true for your affiliate. With this system, everything moves smoothly, quickly and efficiently.
Are all affiliate software products powered with this tool?
No, most popular affiliate software products are not. Before you purchase any affiliate software, always watch a demo first to ensure that it is powered with a good affiliate support system.
Affiliate support system is built in feature of Euraffiliates affiliate software. The ticket based support system may reduce your support time & hassle up to 80%.
Read more articles on affiliate marketing at http://www.euraffiliates.com/articles.php
