For today’s partner and affiliate marketers, one of the biggest challenges is finding the time to do it all – whether it’s devising strategic promotions, building and maintaining relationships with top partners, or analyzing and reporting on results. Due to this, for the average performance marketer, it can be challenging to allocate time effectively to strategic initiatives that drive actual business growth.
So how can you become more efficient with the ‘everyday’ management of your program, and allocate your time where it matters most?
Here are five tips and tricks to make your partner program more productive:
1. Focus your energy on marketing partners that will drive impact
There are a myriad of partners and partner types, so it’s important to understand which partners drive the audiences you’re targeting, which partners can help you best achieve current business objectives, and which partners have the capacity to drive the strongest revenue.
It’s not unusual to see two of three ‘super-partners’ driving over 50% of your revenue, so one tactic is to focus your efforts on maximizing the efforts of these top partners to drive true scalable growth.
Alternatively, you can focus on the right types of customers, and which partners are driving these. With this approach you can maximize reach to the right consumers with a more concentrated approach, that actually requires less output.
A third approach is to analyze which partners are steadily performing in the areas that match your business objectives e.g. a higher average order value, or repeat customers.
Spending a little time analyzing the partner types that drive the most impact to your business, in whichever way you measure that impact, can save you a lot of time and energy further down the track.
2. Centralize Your Partner Communication
It’s important to maintain direct relationships with partners as it helps you really maximize the value of the channel. These relationships can be managed by scheduled face-to-face meetings or calls, which can be time-consuming, so to minimize partner management efforts for the remainder of your time it’s a good idea to centralize and automate as much of your partner communication as possible.
You can start by utilizing a mailing platform that will allow you to send bulk emails and mass updates to partners, all from one central location. On top of this, you can create a ready-to-go email template that you can use each time you communicate to partners, meaning you reduce the amount of work that needs to be repeated.
When it comes to managing partner emails, setup a dedicated folder in your inbox to separate these emails from the everyday, so that you can dedicate time in your day to respond, ultimately saving effort and time.
3. Automate Your Sales Validation Process
Sales validations are a large part of any partner marketing program, and can take multiple hours per month to manage. Utilizing a technology platform like Partnerize allows you to automate this validations process, meaning you can decrease your manual efforts and and Excel downloads required. The best way to automate this process is via direct API-based connection. With only a couple of developer hours required to set it up, automating your sales validations process can save your hours per month, and multiple days of the year.
4. Better Manage Creative Assets
One of the most important parts of running a successful partner program is ensuring that your partners always have the most up-to-date creative assets, such as banner creatives, product feeds and email templates. Sharing these manually, with associated tracking links for each partner, can be an extremely time-consuming task.
The best way around this is to centralize these tasks through your partner management platform, and there are two ways you can do this:
- You can add creative to your Partnerize console, which then automatically includes the required tracking links. This saves significant time in having to manually associate tracking links with creative.
- Alternatively, you can utilize dynamic creative links. This means partners only have to embed a promotional banner once, which is automatically updated as your creative assets are. Utilizing dynamic creative links means you can avoid excess back-and-forth communications with partners when updating creative, resulting in significant time savings.
5. Streamline your Payments and Invoicing Process
Managing payments and invoicing is often one of the least-favorite elements of running a partner program. This largely comes down to the fact that it can be a time-consuming task, particularly if you are working with multiple partners across multiple regions. It gets even harder if you’re having to make payments in multiple currencies.
Working with the Partnerize payments solution can make this once disliked process, a much simpler and user-friendly task. You can simply send one invoice, in your chosen currency, and Partnerize will pay your partners in their desired currency. This can help you to be much more productive and is one of the best things you can implement to save yourself considerable amounts of time.
With brands putting more focus and energy into the partnerships channel than ever before, it’s important to remember that there are always simple ways to automate tasks and improve processes so that you have more time to focus on what matters: growing your program.
If you’d like to learn more about ways to make your partner program more productive, check out partnerize.com or reach out to us at info@partnerize.com.
