I know the experience all too well…you work so hard to find a potential affiliate, nurture the relationship, get them to commit to promoting, and then…NOTHING! They don’t promote, they send no traffic, and they make no sales. What do you do? How do you activate those inactive affiliates and turn them into superstar promoters? This episode will show you how!
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Affiliate Activation Email Templates
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy
Day in the Life of an Affiliate Manager
10 Lessons I Learned Launching a Bestselling Book
Listener Q&A: Finding Affiliates, What’s Working in Affiliate Recruiting, Email Templates, and More
How to Create Recurring Affiliate Revenue Promoting Membership Sites
How to Turn Inactive Affiliates Into Your Best Partners
I know the experience all too well, you work so hard to find a potential affiliate, you nurture the relationship, you get them to commit to promoting, and then nothing.
They don’t promote, they send no traffic, and they make no sales. So what do you do?
How do you activate those inactive affiliates and in fact, how do you turn them into superstar promoters? Well, this episode will show how.
So I got this email from a guy. He said he has over 1000 affiliates in his affiliate program. Right?
Got a really good product. The offer converts pretty well. Good start. He’s off to a great start.
But he said only 42 of them have ever made a sale. Just less than 4% of the affiliates have ever made a sale.
I’m like, yikes. Like, we’ve had programs where we only had, like, 15%.
Maybe it’s a big first promotion. Maybe we’re only a couple of months in.
We might be down around the 13 12% range, but 4%, that’s not good.
So his question, of course, was, how do I activate these inactive affiliates?
Even at 15%, 20%, 25%, like we’ve been in the past, or even north of that, that’s still a lot of inactive affiliates. A lot of people that we worked hard to get and we didn’t activate.
No matter how awesome your affiliate program is, if you have more than a few dozen affiliates, you’re going to have some become inactive.
You can have the best commissions, the best conversions, the best offer, the best affiliate manager, all that stuff.
But some of them just fall off the earth. So today, I want to share the reasons why this happens.
It’s important to understand why and then what to do about it. The question ultimately has two answers.
It really depends on whether your program is evergreen or if you’re doing a limited-time launch.
So if you’ve got an evergreen promo, it’s available 24/7-365 or kind of like I’ve talked about in past episodes.
You’ve got what we call a hybrid evergreen, where it’s available pretty much all year, but it’s typically in cycles like, you do a promo every three to five weeks, something like that.
So it’s not a launch and it’s not evergreen. So it depends if it’s evergreen or if you’re doing a limited time launch.
But first, why do they become inactive in the first place? I’m going to talk about that first. Then I’m going to talk about why you need to activate them.
I’m going to share some of the results of some campaigns we’ve run, and lastly, how to activate them and leverage their power.
The title of this podcast, at least as I’m recording this, we sometimes change is ‘How to turn inactive affiliates into your best partners.’
Into your best partners. This isn’t just about how to activate them, but how to turn them into your best partners.
So first of all, why are they inactive? I talked about this in my New Year’s Resolution episode, and people wanted more. People wanted more.
I talked about why are some affiliates inactive? Affiliates are just automatically promoting you. They need a gentle reminder to get active.
In other words, you need to take action to get them to take action. The whole thing throughout this whole episode you’ll hear is that activating affiliates requires intentional activity. Intentionality.
You can’t just cross your fingers and hope it happens. So why would an affiliate become inactive?
Got five reasons for you. I’m not going to go deep into these because I covered them in that episode.
If you’re looking, go back and listen to the New Year’s Resolutions episode.
But I talked about, number one, they signed up on a Whim. They saw somebody else promoting. They’re like, oh, that’s good.
Or maybe you’re on a network and they’re just like, oh, ‘I’m looking for programs in that niche.’
And then they realize, oh, this is not good for my audience.
Get my #1 affiliate recruiting email (the one I’ve personally used to recruit thousands of affiliates in dozens of niches). Grab your copy here!
I don’t know how to promote this. I don’t have time to promote this. There’s not much you can do.
If somebody mistakenly signed up, just remove them and move on. If they were like, no, I didn’t even mean to sign up. I don’t want to be in your program. No big deal.
The second reason is they’re promoting a competitor. Now, again, I dove into this, and I talked about what to do in this situation.
The key here is you got to understand their why. Why did they switch to a competitor and then fix that thing, whatever it is.
If it’s commissions, try to offer a better commission. If you’re not offering the right tools, offer the right tools.
Give them what they need. I dove into that in that episode. If it’s conversions, figure out how to improve your conversions.
If it’s your funnel, work on your funnel. If you’re just being cheap, stop being cheap. Pay a better commission.
If it’s that you can’t do a reciprocal promotion, then maybe reconsider that. It might be worth promoting them just to keep them or figure out some alternatives.
I talk about these like, there are so many things if you can’t promote somebody directly, maybe it’s not a good fit for you.
You can refer people to them. Maybe you can introduce them to your affiliates.
Say ‘I can’t promote you, but I’d love to connect you with our top couple of affiliates or maybe just some other affiliates and that’s worth it to them as well.’
So number three, they went out of business.
Not much you can do about that. If they are inactive because they went out of business, I don’t even count those.
If they are not in business anymore, we just remove them and move on.
Number four reason they become inactive is they get overwhelmed. They don’t know how to promote.
Sometimes they just don’t know how to promote your product or service.
Maybe they haven’t done a good job of adapting to the fact that marketing has changed.
Maybe they haven’t figured out how to promote you on certain platforms and that’s maybe they’re huge on Instagram.
They got half a million Instagram followers, but they’ve only got an email list of 6000, and they haven’t figured out how to promote you on Instagram.
Well, then help them. Help them. Your job is to help your affiliates succeed. So you need to train them.
You need to get on calls with them. You need to show them how other people are doing it.
They’ll tell them to subscribe to my site. I’m being serious. Like, we’ll give them a ton of good advice. Give them promo checklists.
Make sure maybe they have half a million on Instagram and they only have 40,000 on Facebook or are they not promoting on Facebook?
Maybe they could get a little bit of traction there. Your job is to help your affiliates.
And then the fifth reason is that they say they’ll get around to it later.
All right, this is probably not true. They are never going to get around to it, so you’ve got to give them a nudge.
Often all it takes to activate an inactive affiliate is just to remind them, remind them that you exist.
They’re never going to take action unless you give them a nudge. So we’re going to talk about the how in a little while.
I’m going to share specific stuff that you can send. But the idea here is come up with a reason. Incentivize them.
Incentivize them. They’re going to get around to it later. Well, how do you make later today?
How do you make later next week or the week after?
Second part here is, why do you need to activate affiliates?
A lot of people like well, duh, you know, like, it’s obvious why I need to activate affiliates. I’ll have more active affiliates.
But a lot of people I know a lot of people who don’t do it on purpose, they just assume the effort is not worth it.
They think that if someone signs up and doesn’t promote, it must just be like, this person is just crazy.
They change their mind. They’re not a good fit. Maybe they’re just lazy. Maybe they’re just a spy. They’re from the competition.
Now, that’s the case with maybe 5 to 10% of them. Most of the time, it’s just because they got busy.
They signed up on January 17, and then on January 20, they had a life event happen.
I just went through this myself in our family, as I’m recording this. I mentioned in the last episode, I was coming off COVID.
What I didn’t mention was we had a daughter with three broken toes, a son who got sick. I had COVID.
My wife was in the hospital and then had surgery for kidney stones and we had the before that and the after that, all while I was dealing with COVID Those things happen.
And our brakes went out in our car, which makes no sense because they were like they had like, another 18,000 miles, relatively new car, and then the brakes just like, Bring it.
Oh, we’re going to stop working. So we had to go get those fixed. All these things are happening.
Sometimes that happens. They got busy, they got sick. In other words, life got in the way and they need that gentle reminder.
So to say that you shouldn’t activate them because they shouldn’t need that, that’s ridiculous.
When I came back, I had podcast episodes to record, a team to lead who’d been missing me for a couple of weeks.
I’m not thinking about your affiliate program. No offense. It is just not high on my priority list.
So for basically the two weeks that was going on in my life and the two weeks after, I don’t give a crap about your affiliate program.
So then a couple of weeks later, like, ‘hey, you reach out to me, you get me fired up again.’
That’s all it takes. All it takes is just that gentle reminder sometimes.
All right, so before I show you the who and the how and the when and the what and all that of an activation effort, let me share some of the results that we’ve seen.
We did this with Shutterfly and Tiny Prints a few years ago.
So when I took over Shutterfly Tiny Prints as one of their brands program in 2013, we had more than 15,000 inactive affiliates.
Now, I mentioned before, we grew that program from roughly about 15, 16 million.
A couple of years later, we were over 200 million, then over 300 million and it started with this activation campaign.
We did a little push, lasted less than a week. We were able to activate nearly 1400 of them, 1400 affiliates.
This was midway through the year. Just the rest of that year, those affiliates produced over 400,000 in revenue.
Now, it wasn’t just about that 400,000 the next year. They were well over a million just from those affiliates that were previously inactive.
And one of the things that also did is as we were growing this program, not only did that juice the program and get some additional revenue in a 6-7% growth just from that one activation campaign, I’m not even talking about all the other ones we did.
But that one activation campaign got another 1400 of them active, which produced additional affiliates because now they’re promoting, and more people are seeing them, more people are seeing us everywhere and I shared a few episodes ago how it almost became like if you were in certain niches, that it was like, step one, register your domain. Step two, set up WordPress. Step three, sign up with Shutterfly as an affiliate.
I joke when I say that, but that’s what it became like, because we were everywhere.
Part of being everywhere was activating 1400 affiliates in a week. One week, we activated 1400 affiliates.
We did one for Michael Hyatt, so that was Evergreen. Michael Hyatt had a big launch in 2016.
We had 944 affiliates who had not sent traffic after the first week. Now, this was about a three-week launch, to be clear.
So one week, we gave them a week. I’ll talk about later about the timing.
And I typically don’t recommend waiting a week in a launch because your launches are usually shorter.
But this one was a long one. Three days later, 944 were inactive. Three days later, 291 of them were sending traffic.
In total, those 291 who otherwise would have been completely inactive would have accounted for $0 in sales. Those affiliates produced over $104,000 in sales. Almost 10% of all sales in that launch came from affiliates who did nothing in the first week.
One of my favorite activation campaigns was my very first one I ever ran for Learning Master Guitar and when I took over, I came on board and I said, Actually, it was my first one.
I technically run them before for my company, but it was the first one I ever ran for, like a client or an employer, and I took over.
We had 704 inactive affiliates. Most of them had been a part of the program for more than a year.
They were basically just considered dormant. Within a month of taking over, we had activated 261 of them combined, they helped the affiliate program grow from 2.2 million a year to more than $6 million within a year of the top ten affiliates by the year end, by the end of that year, four of them were from that group of inactive affiliates, including the second and third largest affiliates.
So we had 704 inactive. We activated 261 of them. Two of the top three, four of the top ten were from that group. They had been completely abandoned.
The previous affiliate manager who was the CEO of the company, he didn’t get them active just because he didn’t do it.
He didn’t know how to do it. That was all it was. He didn’t know how to do it.
So in a launch, let’s look at who is considering inactive. Well, it’s people who aren’t active, right? No.
There’s a little bit more to think about here. We consider an inactive affiliate to be anyone with less than three hits or one opt-in by roughly day three. Okay?
Sometimes we’ll do. If it’s a longer campaign, depending on exactly how long it is, we might extend that as far as day five.
So why three? Why one? Why three for hits? And why one opt-in?
Most people with only one to three hits or one opt-in, they tested their link. So I don’t do zero. You can send one hit, and I’ll still consider you inactive. You can send one opt in, one lead.
I will still consider you inactive. So the reason we do that is because that was probably a test.
So I’ll show you a little bit when we reach out to them. Now, sometimes we’ll raise that three number to five or seven. There’s no perfect number.
I just figure most people aren’t testing their link more than three times, and so that’s why we do that.
And so depending upon the system you use, you just run a traffic report. It’ll show you exactly who is inactive.
I know with some reports, what we have to do is we have our master list of affiliates. So we’ve got our, let’s say 300 affiliates, right?
And then we’ve got the list of their traffic, and we basically have to run it against Excel.
And we take the ones that have zero hits through three hits and we dedupe it. And then it takes like five minutes. It’s not that complicated.
So that’s who’s inactive in a launch, inactive in an Evergreen program, there’s really two types of inactives. We got your inactives and your inactive inactives.
So your inactive inactives are they’ve never sent traffic or again, three, five hits or less, maybe one or two leads, zero sales.
That is an inactive-inactive. The second version of inactive, sometimes we call them stagnant affiliates or dormant affiliates.
There’s somebody who may overall, they may have any number of hits and leads and possibly even sales.
They could have done $100,000 in 2021, and now in 2023, they’re completely inactive.
They haven’t sent a sale in two years. They haven’t sent any traffic in 18 months and so we’ll look at those as well.
So typically we’ll run it for some period of time. Depending upon the program, it could be anywhere from as little as three months to as much as a year.
And we’ll look at those periods of time for being inactive. So it’s not just the total.
Now, if you’re on some funky system and there are some out there where you don’t have access to reports by period of time, one of the things I recommend doing, and I’m not going to mention Kajabi here, but I am an image I’m just kidding.
Their reporting is terrible. There is no thing that says, like, show me how many hits or leads or sales this person has in a period of time. It’s total. Everything is total.
So what we do when we have one client that’s on Kajabi is we basically go in and grab the stats every month.
So now we can compare let’s just say this affiliate on January 1st had 200 hits, 50 opt-ins and ten sales.
And then in March, they have 300 hits, 75 opt-ins and 15 sales. They’re active.
Now, if we get to June and they still have whatever I said, 375 and 15, now they’re inactive. They’ve been inactive for 90-plus days.
We need to do something to activate them. So that’s the who. When do we reach out to inactive affiliates?
Well, typically with Evergreen, we’re going to reach out roughly every quarter.
We want to do this in a way where we’re not kind of doing it willy-nilly and one-off.
If we do it every quarter, sometimes every two months, then we’re able to hit a lot of people at once and really get into a rhythm with an Evergreen program.
So you might do it every month, depending upon the number of affiliates you have.
If it’s a small number, 50 to 100, I mean, you can do it every month in a launch. Typically launches last about an average of 15 days now.
They used to be a little bit longer, but now they’re about 15 days. We will reach out the day after the second day of pre-launch content.
So if it’s a PLF product launch, formula style launch, where you’ve got like maybe three days of a workshop or three videos and then a webinar, and that takes you through about day ten or eleven, and then you have five, six days of open cart, we will reach out the day after the second piece of content.
So the day after the second workshop, so they’ve had time to promote the first one and a little bit of time to promote the second one, but not so much time that if we get them active that day or the next day, they don’t have time to promote the second piece of content.
Now, for some reason, the calendar is a little funky and the second piece is, or there’s just kind of weird timing. We time that roughly around day three to day five.
So typically that second piece of content will drop maybe on the third day. We’ll reach out on the fourth day.
So they’ve had basically no hits, no traffic. Again, three and one. Three hits and one opt-in, but that’s basically nothing.
So we balance that out, then we’ll reach out. Again, this thing, we don’t just reach out once.
We reach out again the day after the third piece of content, you still haven’t sent any traffic, basically and again, we’ll talk about the messaging in a moment.
We’ll reach out then, and then we reach out usually the day after open cart as well.
This allows us to reach out three times, which is kind of a good balance between getting results and getting on their nerves and so we reach out at different points and try to get them active.
Now, if the promotion you can use your judgment there. If the promotion you’re running is different, if it’s a five-day challenge, then we’re looking at you want to get people registered before the challenge.
So let’s just say starting about seven to ten days before we’ll reach out, let’s say we start the promo seven days before the challenge or summit or whatever, or the workshop even, there’s time before the challenge to promote, we will reach out.
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After about three days, usually we’ll do it mid to late afternoon on the third day. You’ve now had two and a half days to get active and you’re not.
We want to reach out and then we’ll reach out again, usually the morning of the 6th day, and then usually the day that the afternoon that the challenge starts.
Like, hey, it’s not too late to join. It’s not too late to join, come join us, stuff like that.
So again, two, possibly three times if you can and don’t worry about the being annoying part.
Kind of like said, it’s a balance. Don’t worry about being annoying. They can’t send you less traffic than they’re already sending you.
Like you can’t send us less traffic than your zero traffic, basically. So what if you get on their nerves? Who cares?
But we do want to balance. We don’t want to be like every day. Like why are you active, why are you active?
That kind of stuff. So how do you reach out to inactive affiliates? The answer is very simple. You use any means necessary.
Email, text, DMs, Voxer, Skype phone, smoke signals, carrier pigeons, like whatever you can think of, you use. Now we typically use email.
It’s the easiest one, especially if you got a huge affiliate program I mentioned before, 900 or 15,000.
I can send 900 emails in 10 seconds using GMass or something like that.
So we’ll use that usually for that first one, and then I’ll take a look at it for the second one, and I’ll reach out and maybe identify, let’s say 20 or 30 or 40 that we have other contact information for.
We’re friends on Facebook, I’ll DM them, that kind of thing. The key over time, you got to learn their preferred method of communication.
So if they prefer text, use text. If they like chatting on Skype, you can do so much more with a 32nd Skype message and you can’t send them 15 emails.
That’s why we keep tabs on everyone’s preferred methods of communication. We always keep that on hand.
And I know for me there are just people I know, if I DM them, I’ll hear back from them in 2 hours.
If I email them, it could be days. I’m the same way you text me, I’ll respond pretty quickly.
I can’t stand seeing that’s. The only thing I see, I don’t have email. I don’t put email on my phone and I check email about once a day.
Typically I check it four times a week. I’ll put it that way. I usually miss a day.
And I don’t get very many emails to me because most of them are handled by my assistant.
So because of that, it may take 36, 48 hours for me to respond to an email.
Now our clients, we have a different way of communicating. My team, we communicate using Slack.
But my friends and people that I know very well text me. Don’t email me.
So if you text me, I can’t stand seeing that I have I’ve got one right now. I got texted about ten minutes ago.
It’s driving me nuts. It’s like an OCD thing, right? I’m, like, ready to click on, pause the recording and go answer this text.
I don’t even know what it’s about. It could be spam for all I know, but I have to respond to that text Email.
I’m like, I’ll get around to it whenever, so keep tabs on those preferred methods of communication.
All right, so that’s the how. What do we send to these inactive affiliates?
Now, I’m going to share one of the most effective emails I have ever used to activate affiliates. All right?
With a larger program, like I mentioned, 95% of your communication is going to be via email, so we’re going to focus on that, get you some ideas.
Just to get you started, this was an email I first used about eight years ago during Jeff Goyge Tribe writer’s affiliate launch.
It was sent on day five of the launch to every affiliate who had three or less hits and one or less opt in.
All right, I’m going to read this email to you real quick here. All right?
So the subject line was, everything okay first name. So I use their first name, but everything okay?
“Hey, first name.
Just check in to make sure everything was okay.
I had you down to support Jeff’s Tribe riders launch, but haven’t seen anything yet.
There’s still plenty of time to join in.
The launch is going amazingly well, but it’s not too late for you.
Get started.
Let me know how I can help.
That’s what I’m here for.
All the best, Matt.”
Now, there’s five elements here, all right? First of all, it grabs their attention if your name is Tim and it’s everything.
Okay, Tim. It stands out. Stands out. Secondly, it reminds them of a commitment.
I say I had you down to support Jeff’s Tribe writer’s launch, but I haven’t seen any activity yet as Robert Chaldini, the book influence. Right?
My team and I just finished reading the revised edition. It’s the first time I’ve read that, but I’ve read the book overall, I think four or five times.
Listened to it a few times as well. He says, nothing is as powerful as the principle of commitment.
We have a natural desire to do what we said we would do, right? So I make sure to remind them of their commitment.
Hey, I had you down to support this promotion, but I haven’t seen anything yet. Now, a lot of people ask me, like, isn’t that a bit of a guilt trip?
And I’m like, yep, it is a little bit of a guilt trip, but it’s also going to make them and us a lot of money, so I don’t really care.
The third thing it does is it encourages them twice. I say there is still time.
There’s still plenty of time to join in and plenty I usually put in all caps.
I say the launch is going amazingly well, but it’s not too late for you to get started.
I make sure to point out that there’s time, like day five when we said that there’s people might think it’s too late to join in.
Oh, you’re a third of the way through. No, I make sure to tell them that there’s still plenty of time.
So there’s an encouragement in there. The fourth thing it has is social proof. People want to be a part of something successful.
I make sure to point out that things are going great and I want them to be a part of it.
It says in there, as I just said, the launch is going amazingly well. We did this with my book launch.
When we did the activation campaign, we did it right on the heels of hitting some of the best seller lists, the early bestseller list.
And so we pointed out, like, the book is already a bestseller. It’s already a bestseller.
Don’t you want to be a part of promoting a bestseller? That’s social proof.
People want to be a part of something successful. And that works really, really well.
We only had something like 110 inactive affiliates. We got like a third of them active just from that.
Just because we’re like, hey, we’re a best seller, go promote. And fifth, it offers help. Let me know how I can help. That’s what I’m here for is how the email ends.
Make sure that you are clear, that you are there to answer questions and hold their hand if needed.
Be able and willing to jump on a call with them to give them tips, strategize with them and all that.
I’ve probably sent, I don’t know, 200, 300 different versions of activation emails.
I’ve been doing this for 18 years now, here in a couple of months, and this is the one that worked the best.
Now, I’ve also cataloged. We’ve got some others that work amazingly well, and they are available. We open them up.
I mentioned this in that episode back in the day for the New Year’s one, that we made these available.
So if you want to get all of my best activation email templates, all right, go to Mattmcwilliams.com/Activate. We will put that in the show notes.
Go there, and you can grab all of the templates. All right, I gave you the best one here, but there’s so many more.
They’re scenario based, like that’s one that works, but it’s not going to work for everybody because it might not be relevant.
And you can only use that one once. The everything okay and the guilt trip kind of thing, you can use that one time.
What do you do on the next one? Well, there’s plenty more templates.
If you are ready to take your business to the next level and start an affiliate program, start with my free report, Your First 100 Affiliates. This report takes nearly two decades of experience, trial and error, and lessons learned about finding top affiliates in nearly every conceivable niche and puts them all into one report. Grab your copy here!
So Mattmcwilliams.com/Activate to get those templates. Also, we’ve got a training coming up soon. Talked about it last week.
How I built the million-dollar-a-month affiliate program in only two years without any connections or credentials.
So none of the I’m going to show you how to do this. If you literally know no one mattmcwilliams.com/millionamonth, that’s where to go for that.
We’ll put that in the show notes as well. That’s going to be a live training, so you want to make sure you get registered for that. So there you have it.
How to turn your inactive affiliates into rock stars, into some of your best affiliates.
I’d love to hear from you. What your biggest takeaway from this is?
What are you going to do with this information? Text me anytime at 260-217-4619. I’d love to hear from you.
We’ve got links to everything in the show notes that we talked about today.
And lastly, make sure you hit subscribe because you do not want to miss the next episode.
I want to share with you 15 of the biggest affiliate program challenges and how to solve them.
That’s a big thing. These are challenges. I’ve faced every one of these 15 and almost everybody I coach has faced every one of these 15.
Every client we’ve got has faced every single one of these 15. We’re going to talk about what they are and how to solve them.
So make sure you join us for the next episode. Hit subscribe so you don’t miss it.
I’ll see you then.
Questions?
Text me anytime at (260) 217-4619.
Or…check out some of my free reports to help you get on the right track:
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