Outreach never ends — 4 tips to keep recruitment going strong

Getting your impact.com partnership program off the ground may have involved an exciting flurry of recruiting or onboarding activity to get those first key partners up and running. But recruitment is by no means once-and-done. 

Continual partner recruitment is essential to any healthy partnership program, especially if your brand isn’t a household name yet.  Constantly recruiting new partners into your program keeps revenue growing, ensures your brand reaches new audiences, and backfills for the waning performers that are a natural part of the partnership life cycle.  

But ongoing outreach doesn’t have to be burdensome. The impact.com platform is designed to help you automate the process with tools like practical templates yet personalize your outreach with branded elements and dynamic fields. Take advantage of impact.com tools, and you can easily sustain momentum and growth without getting bogged down or burnt out.

Here are four ways impact.com users can make outreach efforts more successful and efficient:

1. Perfect your pitch. Especially if you’re a smaller advertiser or market newcomer, you’ll need to educate and sell potential partners on both your brand and your program. Just like you do with customers, you need to emphasize the benefits you offer from the very first outreach, what makes your brand unique, and what sets you apart from competitors. 
   
   Make it easy on them and yourself by creating an at-a-glance one-sheet that describes your best-selling products, your brand, and the benefits the potential partner can count on. It’s marketing 101: Make the message clear, make it consistent, and repeat it frequently.

2. Tailor your rate offers. Rates aren’t one-size-fits-all. The rates you offer in your outreach should reflect the size and promotional methods of each publisher. Consider using the impact.com Discover Recommendations tool to identify candidates deserving of a little extra incentive. The tool uses machine learning to recommend ideal partners and can help guide your rate offers. 
   
   

   

   For example, you might boost rates for prospects identified by the tool as “high-revenue partners” — those recommended because they already generate high revenue in other programs. Similarly, the partners recommended as “partners you will love” might be worth extra motivation because the AI has identified them as most likely to have productive partnerships with you.
   

3. Cast a wide net. A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting in 2020 on behalf of impact.com showed that partner diversity is a key characteristic of the most mature and high-performing partnerships. Furthermore, those mature programs grow faster and outperform their low-maturity peers on a number of key business metrics. 
   
   Keep that fact in mind in your outreach to be sure you’re targeting a wide array of partner types, a mix of micro and macro partners, and partners who contribute at every phase of the purchase funnel. The impact.com platform is designed to manage a virtually endless array of partner types and terms, so you can really push the envelope when it comes to partner diversity.

4. Roll out the (branded) welcome mat. Take advantage of branded signup links (which feature your brand’s look and feel instead of the impact.com default) in your outreach communications. These links will shepherd partners to contract details and to your program sign-up landing page. You can also customize the landing page for a fully branded sign-up experience.

To make sign-up frictionless, consider including FAQs at the landing page with details about signing up for your program, creating tracking links, how payouts are handled, etc.

Once your outreach efforts bear fruit, and you have a new partner on board, it’s your job to set them up for success and optimal performance. That is a great time to take advantage of impact.com’s tools for constant communication and ongoing relationship-building. Check out this help center article for tips on getting new partners off to a great start!