The 4 Pillars of Affiliate Marketing Success

Adam explains that the outcome of your affiliate marketing boils down to 4 key principles:

• A desire for your affiliates to make money, not resentment when you have to pay them

• Treating affiliates like partners by giving them access to your best-performing assets

• Delivering and supporting early success, ideally within the first 500 clicks of testing your offer

• Thinking of CPA as the cost per acquisition of data rather than of customers

These core components hold true regardless of whether you're working with content producers or media buyers.

Creating an Attractive EPC

Affiliate marketers look for great earnings-per-click (EPC) rates, and you'll build more fruitful networks by offering one. Use this formula to calculate the EPC:

EPC = Conversion rate (CVR%) x Cost per acquisition ($CPA)

Adam recommends aiming for a minimum EPC of $2. If you're new to affiliate marketing or currently offer an unattractive EPC, remember that you're in control of this particular metric.

For example, you can strengthen your conversion rate by improving your assets, funnels, copy, pages, and offers. If you want to pay more, you can work to increase customer lifetime value (LTV) and average order value (AOV).

Leveraging Your CPA Data

Every brand's job is to maximize the value of the CPA they pay. Adam recommends these tactics to get the most from your data:

• Collect emails for cart abandonment and close those deals yourself

• Increase LTV with new products and loyalty programs for customers

• Market other people's products and earn affiliate commissions

• Have refer-a-friend promos

• Have customers create user-generated content and write reviews

• Learn from what your affiliates are doing to generate new ad concepts, content angles, and channels

• Create lookalike audiences based on your new customers and visitors

• Survey your customers to gain insight

Using one or more of these methods can make your overall affiliate marketing program more valuable.

Building a Foundation for Affiliate Marketing Programs

Your ability to increase sales with affiliate programs begins with the viability of your system. To put your program on the path to better sales, Adam recommends these steps:

• Build a hero offer and avoid starting and stopping offers, which makes you unreliable

• Engage with your top-performing affiliates regularly

• Ensure you have solid analytics in place that show how to engage with different affiliates

• Keep creating to give affiliates winning assets consistently

While all these points are vital, the number one mistake that Adam sees brands make is launching an offer and assuming that affiliates will fix it. Remember that affiliates' purpose isn't to solve your marketing woes. Rather, it's to amplify your already viable offers and make a profit. As such, Adam says that you should only roll out an affiliate program after you've sufficiently tested and optimized your offers.

Top Tips and Tricks to Optimize Affiliate Offers

Many brands struggle with affiliate programs because they are unsure how to create higher-converting offers. Adam breaks down the answer in his affiliate offer optimization guide.

First and foremost, he underscores that people don't buy features; they buy benefits. That means you should think about end results, transformation, and customers' pain points rather than focus on features.

One way to make that shift in thinking is by completing an exercise that Adam refers to as the "why behind the why." Look at a product or service you offer, ask yourself why twice, and then flip the answers. The resulting statement demonstrates how your offer solves a customer's problem rather than simply trying to sell them something.

Expand Your Program With Affiliate Summit

Boosting affiliate sales isn't always easy, but creating stellar offers, connecting with and cheering on affiliates, and leveraging your data is a great place to start. Adam's affiliate sales growth hacks from Affiliate Summit West 2024 are just the beginning of what you can learn to scale your affiliate marketing program. Head to the website to buy tickets for Affiliate Summit West 2025 and learn more tactics and strategies from industry experts!