Affiliate Relationships: How to Keep Affiliates Active After They Join

The short answer: affiliates stay active when promoting you is easy and working with you feels fair. Pay on time and explain any commission you reject. Talk to your top few affiliates personally, keep everyone else updated with a short monthly email, and send quiet affiliates one useful nudge before you decide whether to keep them.

Most affiliate programs have the same shape. A handful of affiliates bring in most of the sales, a larger group makes the odd sale, and many never make one at all. Recruiting more people doesn’t change that much. What does change it is how you treat the affiliates you already have once the welcome email has gone out.

This guide is about that stretch: the months after someone joins. If you’re still setting up how new affiliates start, read our guide to affiliate onboarding first.

Disclosure: we make Coupon Affiliates, a WooCommerce affiliate plugin. There’s a short section on doing this with it near the end, including what it doesn’t do. Everything else applies to any program.

Key takeaways

• Don’t give every affiliate the same attention. Your best few deserve a personal relationship; the rest need clear, regular updates.
• Reliable payments and visible stats do more for trust than any perk.
• Give notice before changing commission rates or terms, and explain every rejected commission.
• Ask for feedback, especially from affiliates who stop promoting you.

In this guide

• Why affiliates go quiet
• Split your time by affiliate
• Pay on time and show your working
• Get to know your top affiliates
• Keep everyone else in the loop
• Reward results
• Ask for feedback
• Win back quiet affiliates
• Managing affiliate relationships in WooCommerce
• FAQ

Why affiliates go quiet

Affiliates rarely leave with a message saying why. They just stop posting your link. When you ask, the reasons tend to be ordinary:

• They made no sales in the first few weeks and decided it wasn’t worth it.
• They forgot about you. Nothing reminded them your program existed.
• A payment was late, or a commission disappeared and nobody explained why.
• They had nothing new to say about your products, so there was nothing to post.
• Another brand made it easier, or paid more, or simply got in touch more often.

Only the last one is about money. The rest come down to attention and trust, and those you can do something about without raising your commission rate.

Split your time by affiliate

If you have more than a couple of dozen affiliates, you can’t have a personal relationship with all of them, and you don’t need to. Sort them into rough groups and decide what each group gets from you. Look at the last three months of sales to do it.

Revisit the groups every quarter. People move between them, and the affiliate who made one sale in spring might be your best partner by Christmas.

Pay on time and show your working

Nothing damages an affiliate relationship faster than money going missing. Most of the trust in a program comes from a few boring habits:

• Publish your payout schedule and stick to it. Say when payouts happen, what the minimum is, and how long commission is held for refunds.
• Let affiliates see their own numbers. Clicks, orders, commission earned and commission paid, without having to email you to ask.
• Explain every rejected commission. A refund or a self-referral is a fair reason to remove one, but a commission that vanishes with no message looks like a mistake or worse. Our post on awkward affiliate conversations has a template for this email.
• Give notice before cutting rates. If you have to lower a commission rate, tell affiliates a few weeks ahead and say why. A surprise cut is the quickest way to lose your best people.

Get to know your top affiliates

Your best affiliates should hear from a person, not just a newsletter. Send them a real email, or suggest a quick call, and ask a few plain questions. Who follows them, and what have they posted about you that worked? Is anything making it harder to promote you than it should be?

Their answers usually point to something small you can do. That might be a custom coupon code that matches their name, an exclusive offer for their audience, or product samples before a launch so they can post on day one. Some want a landing page that greets their followers by name, which you can set up with personalized affiliate landing pages.

Keep notes on what each one told you, even in a simple spreadsheet. When you contact them again in three months, you’ll remember that they’re launching a YouTube channel or that they hate getting emails on Mondays.

Keep everyone else in the loop

For the rest of your affiliates, regular and useful beats personal. A short email once or twice a month keeps you on their radar. Tell them about upcoming sales, new products and any changes to the program, and put their link or code in the email so they can act on it straight away. Our guide to writing an affiliate newsletter covers what to include and has a template.

Fresh material helps too. When you add new banners or product photos, say so. Affiliates who have run out of things to post will often pick up a new creative the week it arrives. See affiliate banners and creatives for what to make.

Reward results

Recognition matters as much as the reward itself. A thank-you email when someone passes their tenth sale costs nothing. A bonus for hitting a monthly target, a higher commission tier for your best performers, or a public shout-out on your social accounts all tell affiliates their work is noticed.

Keep rewards tied to results you can measure, and write the rules down so nobody feels favoritism is involved. Our post on gamifying your affiliate program goes through bonuses, tiers and leaderboards in more detail.

Ask for feedback

Affiliates see things you don’t. They know which products their audience asks about, which offers fall flat, and where your checkout loses people. A two or three question survey every six months will turn up most of it. Ask what’s working for them and what gets in the way.

The most useful feedback comes from affiliates who have gone quiet, so ask them directly. Then tell affiliates what you changed because of what they said. People keep giving feedback when they can see it being used.

Win back quiet affiliates

Pick a definition of “quiet” that suits your sales cycle, such as no clicks or sales in 90 days. Then send those affiliates one email with a specific reason to come back. A generic “we miss you” won’t do much. Something concrete works better: a sale starting next week, a new product that suits their audience, or a ready-made caption they can post in two minutes.

If a second email a month later gets no response, stop chasing. You can leave them in the program in case they come back, or remove them to keep your list clean. If you do remove anyone, pay what they’re owed and tell them politely. The awkward conversations post linked above has an email for that too.

Managing affiliate relationships in WooCommerce

If you run your program with Coupon Affiliates (our plugin), a fair amount of the routine side is built in. The free version gives each affiliate a dashboard with their own stats and commission, and it can email them automatically when they earn a commission or when an order they referred is refunded, so a removed commission never comes as a surprise.

The PRO version adds a few tools that help with the rest of this guide:

• Affiliate email newsletters, sent from your WordPress dashboard to all affiliates or to one group. There are ready-made templates, including one for re-engaging inactive affiliates and one for announcing new creatives.
• Affiliate email reports that send each affiliate their own stats every week, month or quarter.
• Scheduled payout requests, which create payout requests for affiliates on a fixed daily, weekly or monthly schedule, so they don’t have to remember to ask.
• Performance bonuses for rewarding affiliates who hit targets.

It won’t do the personal side for you. There’s no place to keep notes on each affiliate, so those still live in your own spreadsheet or CRM. And there’s no automatic “quiet affiliates” list to send the re-engagement email to. You’d need to find them in your reports and put them in their own group first.

PRO is $23.99 a month or $179.99 a year for one site at list price, with 25% off the first payment (see our pricing page).

FAQ

What is an affiliate relationship?

It’s the working partnership between a brand and the people promoting it for commission. On paper it’s a set of terms and a commission rate. In practice it’s whether the affiliate trusts you to pay them and finds it worth their time to keep promoting you.

How often should I contact my affiliates?

A newsletter once or twice a month suits most programs. Top affiliates can hear from you personally every few weeks. Automatic emails about sales and payouts don’t count toward this, because they’re notifications rather than conversations.

How do I keep affiliates happy without raising commission?

Pay reliably, let them see their own stats, give them new things to promote, and thank them when they do well. Exclusive codes or offers for their audience are often worth more to an affiliate than a small rate increase.

Should I remove inactive affiliates?

Not straight away. Try one or two re-engagement emails first. After that, removing them is mostly housekeeping. It keeps your reports and newsletter list tidy, but an inactive affiliate doesn’t cost you anything by staying.

Wrapping up

Good affiliate relationships aren’t complicated. Pay people when you said you would and keep them up to date. Your personal time is best spent on the few affiliates who matter most. The tools you use can take care of reports and reminders, and ours is one option for that in WooCommerce. Answering emails quickly and remembering what your affiliates told you last time is still down to you.

Elliot Sowersby

Elliot Sowersby is a WordPress developer from Yorkshire, United Kingdom. He is the founder and lead developer of Coupon Affiliates and RelyWP.