Affiliate Onboarding and Training: Everything You Need to Know

Once you accept affiliates into your program, the next step is to furnish them with the knowledge and tools to effectively promote your offerings, also known as affiliate onboarding. In this guide, we’ll discuss everything you need to know to successfully onboard affiliates to your program.

Good affiliate partners can grow into brand ambassadors, brand evangelists, or even collaborators. But that only happens when they feel valued from the start of the partnership.

Enter: Affiliate onboarding.

Programs with a solid onboarding strategy boast higher engaged affiliates and drive more revenue over the long haul compared to those who don’t.

This post outlines everything you need to know about how to onboard affiliates, including what it means, the benefits of onboarding affiliates properly, and a blueprint to guide you in designing an affiliate onboarding strategy that yields successful results.

Tools mentioned in this guide:

• Coupon Affiliates: A powerful affiliate program plugin that empowers you to automate several aspects of affiliate onboarding so you can free up your team’s bandwidth. You can automate sending welcome emails with the affiliate starter kit, auto-creating unique coupons for approved affiliates, providing affiliates instant access to their dedicated portal upon approval, and other tasks. Free and premium versions available.

Let’s get started.

What is affiliate onboarding?

Affiliate onboarding is the process of introducing new affiliates to your program and equipping them with everything they need to be effective at promoting your products.

A strong affiliate onboarding process typically comprises:

• Welcoming approved affiliates into your program.
• Verifying that each affiliate has signed your program’s terms and conditions contract detailing commission structures, cookie durations, payment terms, and other key information.
• Enabling access to training resources (whether written, audio, or video content) needed to familiarize affiliates with your offerings.
• Orienting affiliates to your affiliate program’s tool.
• Establishing direct communication with affiliates through email, webinars, and other channels.

Why invest in affiliate onboarding?

Affiliates don’t have as much context as you do on your product, business, and industry. Setting up a solid onboarding process demonstrates that your business is interested in partnering with them for the long term and sets them up for success.

Here are 3 major benefits of investing in affiliate onboarding.

Faster time to first sale

Affiliates who understand your products, tools, and expectations from day one start to promote sooner and more effectively. In comparison, someone who has to figure things all out alone might take weeks or never even start.

More brand-aligned promotions

Proper onboarding trains affiliates to adapt to your value propositions, marketing angles, and brand voice so that they can create authentic, targeted promotional content. This lowers the probability that they create off-brand content, use outdated messaging, or worse, violate your brand’s policies and alienate your target customers.

Lower affiliate churn

Showing affiliates that you’re invested in their success from the beginning of the relationship, for example, by providing access to robust training resources, sharing personalized tips, or establishing direct communication with someone from your team, makes them more likely to stick with your program over the long haul.

Bottom line: If you want affiliates who actually move the needle, don’t just focus on recruiting them, invest in onboarding.

How to onboard affiliates to your program

Want to set up a solid affiliate onboarding system? Here’s the blueprint to welcome affiliates to your program and get them up to speed so they can start referring customers in no time.

Supply an affiliate starter packet

A well-crafted affiliate starter kit sent via email can help jumpstart affiliates’ involvement with your program. This is your first touchpoint with affiliates after accepting them to your program, and it sets the tone for your entire partnership.

To make a positive and professional first impression, your affiliate starter kit should include these components:

• The welcome email should confirm the affiliate’s acceptance into your program, outline what they can expect next, and provide direct links to the affiliate dashboard and other resources they need to get started.
• A link to your affiliate program’s terms and conditions contract that details payment schedules, commission percentages, cookie duration, restricted promo methods (like bidding on branded keywords), content guidelines, and other important information. This makes it abundantly clear from the outset what’s allowed and what’s not.
• A quick-start guide or video. A brief written or video guide that walks affiliates through actionable steps to log in, access their affiliate dashboard, and use your affiliate software can save your team hours in support requests and help affiliates get started quicker.
• Success stories. Share case studies, a swipe file of high-performing emails or posts, or campaign examples that illustrate how existing affiliates have succeeded with your program. This gets affiliates excited to be part of your program and motivates them to achieve results.

Note: Aim to keep your affiliate starter packet brief to avoid overwhelming affiliates. It should be scannable, contain an overview of important information, and where applicable, link out to in-depth content.

Provide in-depth training resources

Even the most experienced affiliate marketers need direction to properly promote your offerings. Creating an in-depth resource center can help shorten the learning curve for affiliates to understand your product and target audience so they can start driving conversions faster.

Your affiliate resource hub doesn’t have to be fancy. It can be a simple landing page that links to information stored in a central, easy-to-access Google Drive folder, Notion page, or your affiliate platform’s backend.

Alternatively, you could include a custom tab/section on the affiliate dashboard with your training center.

At a minimum, here’s what to include in your affiliate training center:

• Product training that highlights your best sellers, explains their key features, and shares unique selling points and angles.
• Brand voice and messaging guidelines. Share tone of voice guidelines, words to avoid, core messaging pillars, and examples of high-performing content so affiliates know what “good” looks like.
• Detailed affiliate marketing software walkthroughs. Record short videos showing how to navigate and use the affiliate dashboard. Cover actions like generating custom links and coupon codes, reviewing reports, accessing creative assets, and more.
• Answers to frequently asked questions.

Note: Unlike the affiliate starter kit, affiliate resource hubs should contain in-depth information to equip affiliates with the expertise to promote your offerings effectively.

Create custom affiliate portals

An affiliate portal is a personalized workspace where affiliates can log in, generate unique coupons and links, grab creative assets, track their performance, monitor commissions and payments, and stay updated on your program.

Coupon Affiliates includes a modern and professional “Affiliate Portal” feature which is super user-friendly for your affiliates and includes all the details and statistics they need.

Affiliates shouldn’t have to reach out to your team to request support for basic things like their tracking link or payment schedule. Providing a self-serve portal for each affiliate eliminates friction, builds trust, and reduces the manual effort needed to manage your program.

Through their dedicated portal, affiliates should be able to:

• Track their performance in real time, such as clicks, conversions, commissions, and payment status.
• Generate custom tracking links and campaigns.
• Access creative assets like banners, logos, product images, campaign updates, etc.
• Review your affiliate program’s terms and conditions, brand guidelines, and do’s and don’ts.
• Request payouts for their unpaid commission and be able to easily set their payment details.
• Access training materials on demand.
• View contact information to get in touch with your team.

Automate affiliate onboarding

Manually onboarding the first set of affiliates can help you refine your systems. After that, automating repeatable steps can help you save time and get affiliates up and running faster.

Affiliate management software like Coupon Affiliates include tons of built-in automation features to tackle most of the heavy lifting of affiliate onboarding. You can, for instance:

• Send automated welcome emails that include the affiliate starter kit.
• Auto-create a unique coupon upon affiliate approval.
• Provide instant access to the affiliate portal upon approval.

Plus, Coupon Affiliates pairs well with third-party tools like email marketing platforms like FluentCRM, MailPoet, Klaviyo, and others, so you can further reduce your manual workload.

A quick note: This is a brief overview of Coupon Affiliates’ key capabilities when it comes to automating affiliate onboarding. Check out this dedicated page for more details.

FAQs about affiliate onboarding

How do you start affiliate onboarding?

Affiliate onboarding starts the moment someone is accepted into your program. What happens in the first 24 to 72 hours after affiliate approval determines how fast they’ll begin promoting or if they’ll drop off entirely. The goal is to make sure every new affiliate knows what to do, where to find what they need, and how to start earning commissions right away.

How long does affiliate onboarding take?

Affiliate onboarding can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few days. It depends on how your program is structured, how much of the process is automated, and how quickly affiliates receive the tools they need to start promoting.

Using a plugin like Coupon Affiliates, you can get the right systems in place, such as auto-approval, automatic coupon creation, and pre-scheduled email sequences, affiliates can be onboarded and ready to promote within 15-30 minutes.

If you’re approving affiliates manually, assigning coupon codes or links by hand, and sending onboarding materials individually, expect onboarding to take 1 to 3 business days per affiliate on average.

Strong affiliate onboarding can drive affiliate performance

Affiliate onboarding isn’t just admin work. When executed well, it’s an integral part of your affiliate program’s growth strategy. A solid affiliate onboarding strategy helps affiliates sell better, faster, and more in line with your brand.

As a bonus, it saves you from spending time fixing issues down the road that could have been prevented upfront.

Want to automate affiliate onboarding and free up your team’s bandwidth?

Get Coupon Affiliates and automatically send welcome emails with the affiliate starter kit, auto-create unique coupons for approved affiliates, provide affiliates instant access to their dedicated portal upon approval, and more. Free and premium versions available.

Priyanka Okidi

Priyanka is a writer for WordPress and eCommerce companies. She loves breaking down complex ideas into simple concepts.