How to Activate Your Inactive Affiliates (And Make Them Lifelong Partners)

You’ve been there, right? You spend weeks—or even months—finding the perfect affiliate, building the relationship, getting them excited to promote…and then…crickets. No traffic, no sales, no effort. So, what now? How do you turn those inactive affiliates into your top promoters? In this episode, I’m sharing the secrets to wake them up and get them in the game! You won’t want to miss this.

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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 you how. Let’s get started. 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 months in, we might be down around the 13, 12% range, about 4%. That’s not good. So his question, of course was, how do I activate these inactive affiliates? And I mean, 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, you have 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 7365 or kind of like I’ve talked about in past episodes, you’ve got what we call a hybrid evergreen wherever I, 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.

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. And so I’ll show you in 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 of. They’ve never sent traffic or, again, three, five hits or less. Maybe one or two leads. Zero sales like that. Is an inactive inactive, the second version of inactive. Sometimes they 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.