One of the biggest things an affiliate manager has to master is how to craft irresistible offers to entice affiliates to stay loyal and keep sending new customers. With a lot of competition in iGaming to contend with, finding ways to keep your affiliates coming back for more – helps build lasting relationships and secures recurring revenue.
What is an irresistible offer, though?
Put simply, it’s an offer that simply can’t be refused. It’s the proverbial no-brainer that an affiliate would feel silly passing up on. An irresistible offer goes beyond being merely financially appealing. It is designed to capture attention, generate interest, and prompt immediate actions.
What affiliates really want from Operators was also a discussion topic that influenced the Tracking Challenges Panel presented on at the recent London IGB Affiliate Conference where moderator – Lee-Ann Johnstone, put that question out to our CEO, Assaf Dor , Silvia Almeida (Clever Advertising) and Richard Dennys (Gamelounge) who all discussed what affiliates want from their tracking platforms beyond the commercial financials that help drive their decision making processes on what brands to promote!
Not surprisingly, the offer, the tracking and the data transparency were top of this list!
These things are just as important to potential affiliates when looking to extend relationships past an initial trial period.
In this guide, we’ll explore some simple yet effective tips to help you craft irresistible offers that affiliates will find impossible to resist.
1. Understand Your Affiliate Audience:
To be able to connect with your affiliate audience, you need to first really understand them. Take the time to know who your partners are, what they enjoy, and what motivates them. Take the time to target your offers to what resonates with their business and day to day administration preferences. The result will be that your promotions feel personalised and relevant to them and engage them to do more for your program vs other programs. For example – don’t offer a cashback incentive – if affiliates would rather have free spin initiatives to bring new customers in at the start of their brand awareness and testing journey. Tailor the promotions to them and their customers to help increase conversion rates and maintain consistency.
2. Highlight Your Unique Benefits:
Every online gaming platform and brand has something unique to offer. Whether it’s a diverse game selection, exclusive bonuses, or exceptional detailed reporting suites, highlight these distinct benefits in your promotions. Clearly communicate what sets you apart from other brands to really capture the affiliate’s interest. Can you provide data nobody else does? Can you show transparent real time reporting in your affiliate platform? Can you offer incentive models that help affiliates to grow? With Cellxpert you can easily craft campaigns that incentivise and promote your affiliates to stay loyal using the tools we’ve built into our platform to help affiliate managers develop these unique reference points.
3. Create a Sense of Urgency:
Don’t let your affiliates think about whether they want to be part of the offer or not. Include limits when it comes to time (“for the next 24 hours only”) or the number of partners who can take advantage of the promotion (“for the first 20 affiliates only”). FOMO is a powerful tool for affiliate managers to use to their advantage. Use it sparingly and specifically to drive rewards and campaigns that may be timely and unique. Doing random promotions that affiliates can’t get anywhere else, means they don’t go away and think about the other offers – instead, they are motivated to act quickly.
4. Keep things Simple and Clear:
Don’t make your offer complicated or hard to follow. Instead, keep it simple and easy to understand. When the affiliate can opt in and gain the competitive advantage without having to do a lot of administrative work – that’s the optimum time to start building a partnership and relationship with partners who have been inactive. You can offer to set up their promotion and send them the link to change on their site with an incentive to do that.
Make sure that you clearly outline the benefits and requirements of the promotion, ensuring that affiliates can quickly grasp the value of what you’re offering them and how it is unique and can help them convert more customers – without any confusion.
5. Offer Varied Incentives – Double Down on What Works:
People are motivated by different things, so make sure that you’re offering what a particular partner is looking for. Again this goes back to point 1 above – know your partners and what motivates them!
When starting out, diversify your offers to appeal to a broader affiliate audience. This could include bonuses, cashback, or even entry into exclusive tournaments or money can’t buy experiences.
Offering variety ensures that you cater to the diverse preferences of your potential affiliates.
As you convert affiliates into your program, though, use the data in reports to zero in on what’s working and double down on that in the future. If you’re able to identify individual partners and segment them based on the offer that converted them to your program or even down to the events you’ve attended to bring them in, you can personalise your promotions in future accordingly.
6. Be clear about your Terms and Conditions:
Building trust with your affiliates is crucial. Having a clear set of terms and conditions and setting expectations of what you need and want affiliate partners to do for you is paramount to your success.
Therefore, be clear and transparent about the terms and conditions of any offers that you’re promoting as well.
That means, you need to make sure you do a good job of communicating any requirements, such as minimum deposits or wagering conditions, so that affiliates feel confident and informed when engaging with your promotions and sharing them out to their potential customers. Affiliates with big brands want to promote partners that are transparent and will treat their customers with the same professionalism they experience from you in the affiliate team.
7. Use the latest and most attractive creatives:
They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, and this definitely holds true in the iGaming industry.
When setting up your promotions, ask your affiliates what they need to be successful in promoting them. Define the creative requirements they have and what sizes they need and ensure all your promotional offerings are geared for high-quality visuals to showcase the excitement and thrill of what is being offered. Visuals can convey the atmosphere of the program and evoke the desire to be a part of it in a way that your words simply can’t.
You may even be able to use a video in your program to show the affiliate what it would be like to work with you and present the promotion in a simplistic way so that they can get excitement from what you’re offering.
8. Leverage Your Social Proof:
According to eCommerce tool, Yotpo, displaying reviews from a user’s peers can increase conversion rates by up to 161%. Use affiliate testimonials to help with your outreach and onboarding process and to build reliability against your program offering. Include positive reviews and feedback from other affiliates in your site, emails and promotional campaigns.
You can also include success stories or testimonials from any other satisfied partners who have benefited from your affiliate program promotions. The point here is that social proof builds credibility and reinforces the value of the affiliate support experience you are giving to your partners and that will make your program campaigns more successful.
9. Personalised Communications:
Personalise your communications with your affiliates to stand out. Affiliates are receiving hundreds of outreach emails and messages daily. How are you going to make sure you stand out and drive partners to sign up? Tailor your communication to speak directly to your audience. If they want to promote slots, don’t talk about sports betting.
Use language and tone that resonates with them and creates a connection that goes beyond a transactional relationship. Build personalised segments from your newsletters. It’s pretty straightforward these days to be able to build segments from users who have clicked on particular types of links. Get hyper personalised in the way you speak to your partners so that they know you understand their business and can help them grow it too!
10. Keep your Affiliate Program content fresh:
Keep your promotions fresh and exciting by regularly updating your partnership offers. This not only maintains the interest of your existing audience but also attracts new affiliates who may have been hesitant to work with you before.
Stale program sign up offers can lead to a decline in engagement so make sure you’re in regular touch with your affiliates and that you’re sending them new content to promote at least once a quarter to keep their customers excited too.
Conclusion:
Crafting irresistible affiliate offers is an art that affiliate managers must master with a combination of understanding their audience, highlighting unique benefits, creating a sense of urgency, and maintaining transparency in the data and access to real time reporting and accurate tracking.
By offering varied incentives, using strong visuals, leveraging social proof, and personalising communication, affiliates can build lasting connections with players. Remember, the key is to keep offers clear, simple, and regularly refreshed to stay relevant in the ever-evolving iGaming landscape. Creating an Irresistible Offer is not as easy as it may sound. But, by implementing these tips, affiliates can create offers that not only attract and convert players but keep them coming back for more.
If you need help to revive your affiliate program, take a look at what Cellxpert can do to help you do that.
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