How to grow & scale an affiliate marketing program

November 8, 2024

Growing and Scaling Your Affiliate Marketing Program: What to Know

As you likely know, affiliate marketing is relatively low-risk and highly scalable. The marketing strategy leverages an affiliate partner’s existing audience to increase conversions, boost brand awareness and expand your reach to new users or geographic regions.

Once you’ve enjoyed initial success with your affiliate marketing campaign, it’s time to move on to the next step: expansion. Learn more about how to grow and scale your affiliate marketing program to achieve even stronger results. Plus, get a look at some of the benefits of expanding your programs and strategies to take your affiliate tactics to the next level.

Why Scaling Your Affiliate Program is Essential for Growth

Scaling your affiliate program takes what’s working with an already successful campaign and expands it to encompass new types of affiliate partners, different marketing channels or even untapped regions across the globe. In doing so, you open your brand up to new customers and more sales — while still maintaining relatively low costs.

Essentially, scaling an affiliate program has the same benefits as scaling your business. By growing your reach, you’re able to establish more touchpoints with customers at all stages of the journey. With a scaling affiliate program, you’ll gain more than customers and have the opportunity to build relationships with new publishing partners.

Understanding the Basics of Affiliate Program Growth

Affiliate program growth can happen in a few ways. First, you could expand campaigns with current affiliates. For instance, if you work with an affiliate partner who promotes your products on social media already, you could strike a deal and include newsletter promotion as well.

Alternatively, growing your affiliate program could mean finding new partners to work with. For example, if you’ve historically worked with bloggers, consider finding a newsletter affiliate partner or traditional media partner to work with as well.

The Benefits of Scaling Your Affiliate Marketing Efforts

Scaling your affiliate marketing campaigns has several benefits — both for your brand and your affiliate partners:

Expanded reach: Scaling your affiliate program to new marketing channels or new partners allows you to reach more potential customers and new markets through your affiliate partners’ audiences.
More traffic — and higher conversion rates: Scaling your affiliate program can increase traffic to your site and boost conversions, thanks to amplified affiliate partner promotion.
Greater brand awareness: As more affiliate partners promote your brand, more potential buyers will become aware of your products, brand story and unique selling points.
Increased sales without higher investments: Because affiliate partners are only paid if their ads convert, you can expand your campaign at little or no extra costs.
Highly motivated partners: Scaling your affiliate program enables top converters to make more commissions on sales through enhanced promotion and advertising efforts.

How to Scale an Affiliate Marketing Program: Key Strategies to Grow Your Affiliate Program

There are numerous strategies to consider, each with its own benefits. Many of them can work in tandem, too. But keep in mind: Every strategy may not be a good fit for your brand. Keep your voice, vision and program KPIs in mind as you review the following eight affiliate marketing strategies and begin scaling your program.

1. Build Strong Relationships with Affiliates

Your affiliate partners are just that: partners. With that in mind, it’s crucial to nurture the relationship with both long-term and new affiliates.

If that sounds like a lot of work, don’t worry. You don’t need to schedule 1:1 meetings with each affiliate on a weekly basis. Instead, focus on clear, consistent communication. Keep your affiliates updated on new launches or special events within your business. When branding or imaging preferences change, send easily accessible resources to your partners to keep content consistent on- and off-site. If possible, look for ways to leverage the audiences of top performers by providing exclusive coupon codes or opportunities to foster additional loyalty.

2. Launch Multiple Affiliate Programs

Once you’ve achieved sustained success with one type of affiliate marketing program, consider another.

For instance, if you’re satisfied with the results of your deal site partnerships, it may be time to expand into partnerships with newsletter affiliates. Bloggers and content creators can also offer access to large audiences — and make user-generated content you can potentially leverage for in-house marketing.

Partnering with another brand can also be an innovative way to expand reach. Consider, for example, Starbucks and Spotify’s co-branding partnership. The brands partnered to create playlists on Spotify that invoke the coffee shop music experience, while Starbucks offered rewards points to Spotify listeners who upgraded to a premium account.

Just remember: It’s vital not to overextend yourself. While working with an experienced affiliate marketing program management group can make scaling simpler, managing the growth process in-house may require smaller steps.

3. Expand Into Email Affiliate Marketing

Generally speaking, email newsletter conversion rates are higher than average for one key reason: Subscribers have to opt into the newsletter, indicating an initial interest in whatever product or service the newsletter provides.

With that said, exploring email affiliate partners can be a highly profitable channel for your brand. Research newsletters from individuals, other brands and media outlets that have audiences that overlap with yours. For instance, if you’re a tech startup offering remote healthcare services, a podcasting doctor’s newsletter might be a good fit for your brand.

4. Automate As Much As Possible

Automation reduces the busy work you and your team must complete each day. Automation can look different for every brand and affiliate marketing campaign, but the end goal should be simplifying, streamlining and preserving valuable resources.

Consider your biggest bottlenecks, then explore tech that can make your affiliate programs work more efficiently. That may mean creating email automations that send out brand updates to your partners on a weekly, monthly or quarterly basis. On the other hand, it may look like leveraging search engine optimization (SEO) and social media planning tools to improve the performance of your partners’ content.

5. Create High-Quality Content

In the day of digital marketing, content is everything — and high-quality content is non-negotiable. In many cases, your affiliate partners’ content will be potential buyers’ first impression of your brand, product or service, so it pays to focus on establishing a network that produces authoritative, professional-quality work.

To ensure your brand’s partners put out consistent, quality content, establish guidelines internally and share with partners. You may also undertake regular reviews of content and discuss what’s working and what’s not with your partners, looking for ways to optimize across your affiliate partner network.

6. Leverage Specialized Software

Some software platforms can perform multiple functions that help optimize performance, identify opportunities to make your brand stand out and even highlight potential partners that could be a good fit for your brand. It’s not always easy to find the right software platform, though.

That’s why our team at Acceleration Partners leverages our proprietary APVision. We built the technology to aggregate data from thousands of global publishers, allowing our team and clients to stay ahead of trends and improve performance in real-time.

7. Track and Optimize Campaign Performance

If you’re not able to track your existing affiliate marketing campaign, it may be more difficult to grow and scale it. Ensure adequate tracking, whether through your website or another integrated platform, to monitor sales, track affiliate success and reward top performers.

This data can help you keep tabs on program growth while helping you identify the types of content that work best for your brand. You can then make strategic decisions that boost performance and drive more sales.

8. Partner With an Experienced Affiliate Marketing Program Management Team

There’s no doubt that affiliate marketing campaigns can be wildly successful — especially if you have the right team at your side. Working with an experienced group like ours at Acceleration Partners enables brands to outpace their competitors and compete at scale with speed and quality without exhausting internal resources.

To learn more about how we can help, contact us today.