Affiliate Onboarding Guide: Tips for a Seamless Experience

Investing in longer employee onboarding allows companies to shape how their new employees work on a day-to-day basis. It allows organizations to support their new investments with better resources and performance support. An effective onboarding process equips your affiliates for success and sets them up to be as effective as possible.

This is especially important for new affiliate programs that are still trying to recruit partners. Creating a truly effective onboarding process isn’t difficult, but it does require some thoughtful consideration of the needs of your affiliates. Affiliate marketing represents an enormous opportunity for brands. In fact, it’s responsible for 16 percent of all e-commerce sales in the United States and Canada.

Outline where their autonomy begins and ends – this will help you avoid misunderstandings. Plus, the only cost you’ll incur is your expert’s time – but the point isn’t to have a newbie and an experienced employee https://xcritical.com/ working together all the time. Once a week for the first month and 1-2 times a month after that is a reasonable choice. It’s equally important to familiarize a new employee with your company’s language.

You can teach ongoing soft and technical skills

It’s also a chance for you to get ideas on improving the program experience for affiliates. Send out a survey to program participants after they generate their first conversion or earn a commission. A longer onboarding timeline allows for new employees to not feel pressured to become highly productive right away. Across 2,300+ HR professionals, 72% said the length of their employee onboarding time is less than one month. This lets the affiliate know that a person at the company actually cares about the success of their affiliates and willing to reach out and communicate that the affiliate program is well managed and active.

„If we don’t worry about onboarding before the employee starts, then we’re way behind,” said Ben Peterson, CEO of BambooHR, an HR technology company. It’s ok to give affiliates a little nudge or set a goal that will help prioritize promoting your product or services over other offerings. By default, Tapfiliate sends an email to each affiliate who joins your affiliate program with their affiliate link and how to sign in to the tapfiliate dashboard. To get the most out of your check-ins, decide on a schedule and let your new affiliates know when they’ll hear from you and what to expect.

Personalize the experience

Too often, onboarding consists of handing a new employee a pile of forms and having a supervisor or HR professional walk the employee around the premises, making introductions on an ad hoc basis. When onboarding is done well, however, it lays a foundation for long-term success for the employee and the employer. It can improve productivity, build loyalty and engagement, and help employees become successful early in their careers with the new organization. An effective onboarding process connects several new hires together, ensuring that new hires can share the onboarding experience together from the beginning.

“New employees need to get to know the job and get to know their new co-workers. New employees at BambooHR are taken out to lunch on the first day. “We cared enough to hire them, we want them to know we care enough to build rapport,” Peterson said.

Monitor Employee Retention

However, it could be useful to provide this information in more detail so affiliates are absolutely clear about your affiliate policies. Whether your workplace is fully in-person, fully remote or a hybrid model, online onboarding has become mainstream. Offering online orientation activities streamlines the process, supports paperless documentation, and offers a way for employees and their families to access benefits and other company information at any time.

Together with our curators, we have created a library of actionable digital marketing resources. “That means the average company is losing 1 in 6 of their new hires each month for the first three months,” said Peterson. Onboarding new hires at an organization should be a strategic process and last at least one year to ensure high retention, say staffing and HR experts.

Walk Your Affiliates Through Their First Sales

Don’t let new remote employees fall into the out-of-sight, out-of-mind category. Make sure managers know to check in on their new team members frequently, through whatever communication method is most efficient, whether by instant message, e-mail, phone call or video call, Swersky says. “Many managers are working managers, so they don’t have a lot of extra time to take on all of the responsibilities of onboarding,” Ritchie says. Introducing team members and others within the organization, reviewing informal rules and policies, answering day-to-day questions. Completing and collecting employee paperwork (e.g., forms, benefits); reviewing work hours, the history and background of the organization, and the organizational chart; touring the facility.

1 in every 3 new hires will start searching for a new job within six months. 23% of those who began looking for a new job within six months said that a lack of clear job responsibilities and guidelines was their number one reason for leaving. It’s important to remember that not all companies will require the same amount of onboarding time – some will require longer, and some will require less. The same type of thinking should be applied for various roles inside a company.

They can refer to both the basics of your business and your organization’s values. For the first three months, assign your new employee as affiliate onboarding many productivity-oriented tasks as possible. These early successes will help build confidence and gradually increase responsibility.

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Often a combination of the two proves effective as well, offering the visitor more than one instance that affords clicking. Widgets offer the opportunity to add a variety of information, like a product image, prizes and more. These load information dynamically, so that a change in price would be immediately adopted in the Widget. Another possibility is writing a review for products, weighing their advantages and disadvantages. A comparative test of several products also helps inspire trust with your visitors.

Measurable data will help you address the problem you have, whether it’s higher turnover or fighting the competition. Without data, you’ll have endless conversations that won’t lead to improving employee performance,” adds Daniel Aduszkiewicz. That costs money, because every new employee who quits means additional costs to hire and onboard a new employee. Alone, about $37 billion is spent annually to keep unproductive employees who do not understand their jobs. If you notice engagement dropping off, reach out to that affiliate to figure out the disconnect.

New Employee Onboarding Guide

Now it’s time for affiliate onboarding so they can start promoting your products and services. This is the process of getting new affiliates acquainted with your program and prepared to start promoting your products and services. An effective affiliate onboarding involves communication, guidance, and support from the moment they sign up to important milestones such as their first conversion.

Leaders at Suffolk Construction, a national construction firm based in Boston, invite entry-level hires to participate in a variety of team-building exercises, including rowing the Charles River. Gain the intel you need now to successfully anticipate and navigate employment laws, stay compliant and mitigate legal risks. The latest insights & best practices on L&D and employee experience – delivered right to your inbox. What’s more, the new hires go to lunch with new colleagues in the first week and attend informal meetings.

• Understanding the different onboarding phases will help you create a strong strategy to engage new employees, improve retention, and help them adapt to your company’s culture and procedures.
• Generally, this is best to do on a personal level rather than setting general email triggers.
• Creating a truly effective onboarding process isn’t difficult, but it does require some thoughtful consideration of the needs of your affiliates.
• Reboarding employees already have knowledge of the organization’s culture, benefits and administrative processes.
• This helps to break the ice, enabling them to integrate more quickly and seamlessly into the organization.

Others might be your existing customers new to the world of affiliate marketing. Also consider additional materials that will enhance your affiliate’s promotions such as providing a branding kit. A branding kit will ensure that affiliate promotions are consistent and recognizable to audiences. This includes your brand’s logos, color profiles, typography, slogans, company images etc. Once you upload assets to your program, your affiliates will have access to these on their “Assets Wall” and be able to share them directly to their social channels, or embed them on their websites.

Still, your onboarding process should frontload the core essentials, bringing new hires up to speed within the first six months. Plus, they’re a cost-effective way for companies to onboard employees. A one to many approach works for many of the topics you need to discuss during onboarding including health insurance, PTO, dress code, employee benefits, and more. At the end of six months, your employee should have been successfully onboarded. Of course, the process may be shorter or longer based on the factors we explained above—the above timeline just represents what we think are the most important milestones in a successful onboarding journey.

Relational Onboarding

„We cared enough to hire them, we want them to know we care enough to build rapport,” Peterson said. When employers consider building an online onboarding portal, they should first think about the core messages the website will impart to new hires and integrate those ideas into the design components. „The worst thing for a new employee is being wooed through the recruiting process and then arriving on the job and the receptionist isn’t even expecting you or your office isn’t set up,” he said. In fact, the best time to do it is within 30 days of an affiliate signing up . It’s really important you go through this process to make sure everything is setup correctly and that there are no gaps or confusion points for affiliates.