How to Use Affiliate Partnerships: 6 Tactics for Customer Retention

Retaining customers as an online brand is not always an easy task. As the competition mounts up online, introducing new strategies to maintain customer loyalty is essential.

Over 20% of brand marketers consider affiliate partnerships as their most successful method for driving customer loyalty and retention.

Affiliate marketing enables you to build trust with customers using familiar influencers and top-performing brand partnerships. As a result, creating an affiliate partnership program for your ecommerce brand could generate a continuous flow of conversions.

With this in mind, we’re exploring the benefits of affiliate partnerships for customer retention and sharing six fool-proof tactics to add to your own affiliate strategy for loyalty success.

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What is an Affiliate Marketing Program?

Affiliate marketing is the process of employing an affiliate to market your brand’s products for a commission of the profit. 

Working as a monetization model, affiliate partnerships can exist between a brand and one influencer/blogger/publisher in a one-way approach or between a brand and a brand in a two-way approach.

Let’s call the brand selling their products the advertiser and the person promoting them for a cut of the cost, the publisher.

The advertising, in this case, your ecommerce store, can leverage an affiliate’s influence or status within their shared industry to attract more sales. 

For example, if your brand has a small following on TikTok but wants to advertise to a TikTok-dominated demographic, partnering with a key influencer within that demographic could improve awareness of your store and its products.

An influencer is likely to have a larger platform following, loyal fans, and a built-in trust factor that makes their recommendation of a product a golden ticket to guaranteed conversions.

If you’re an ecommerce business looking to start an affiliate partnership program, there are plenty of factors to consider:

• What platforms are your audience operating on? Where will you see the most return on an influencer or brand partnership?
• Do your audience regularly make purchases via social media? Should you focus on building social checkout affiliate links? Or should you point customers to your online store?
• Does your website have an affiliate plugin? If you operate on Woocommerce or Shopify, choosing the right affiliate plugin can streamline the consumer journey from an affiliate link to the checkout and drive significant sales growth.

Each time your chosen publisher promotes your products/services and encourages a target customer to perform a specific action, we see a win-win for both parties.

These actions can include direct purchases, filling out a form, or simply clicking on the link. All of these actions result in a payout to the publisher.

Can Affiliate Partnerships Improve Customer Retention?

Now that we are familiar with affiliate partnership basics, let’s delve deeper into customer retention.

Working with affiliates continues to become more and more popular in the ecommerce world, especially due to its low-cost-low-risk features. 

In fact, 84% of brands now opt for affiliate marketing to increase their brand awareness and exposure. 

The question is, can you use affiliate partnerships to retain your customer base?

Affiliate marketing turns one-time customers into quality leads. Leveraging continued coverage of new product releases from trusted influencers and brand partners ensures that your brand remains in the conversation.

Creating an affiliate program that aims to provide returning customers with incentives to shop again, such as loyalty discount codes, themed influencer campaigns, and continued coverage on engagement-rich platforms, is the key to driving retention long term.

“We do not ignore the affiliate channel as an area to help with our retention marketing efforts. We offer our current promotions, and even offer exclusive affiliate promotions to our partners, knowing that new and returning customers will be able to view a particular deal,” says Hank Kvamme, Affiliate Manager at Bodybuilding.com.

“It is, in a way, a hybrid channel for our company. Our goals are oriented toward growing with new customers, but the channel’s structure allows us to execute on promoting attractive content and products to those who have already interacted with our site.”

With this in mind, let’s have a closer look at how you can build customer retention with your own ecommerce affiliate marketing strategy.

6 Tips for Building Customer Loyalty Using Affiliate Marketing  

Improving your customer loyalty has endless benefits for your brand, especially the fact that the chance of repeat purchases all but doubles. 

According to experts at Smile, there is a 1 in 3 chance that a one-time purchaser will convert again. However, after two purchases, that statistic rises to a 50% chance.

This demonstrates the power of customer loyalty marketing. If you can convince your leads to purchase just once more, their chances of remaining loyal to your products and services only increase.

Here are a few ways to build loyalty using affiliate partnerships for a higher customer retention rate.

1. Stay Up-To-Date With Customer Trends

One of the easiest ways to maintain your customer base as an affiliate marketer is to stay up-to-date with customer trends. 

The question is, how and where do you promote your affiliate marketing program? 

If you are hot on viral content formats, product trends, and traffic-driving platforms, your affiliate ads will be better placed for continued engagement.

In order to keep your customers hooked, switch up your affiliate partners, too. Research the influencers who are currently going viral in your niche and get them on board. 

If your customers purchased a product through you using an affiliate link from one influencer, they are likely to do it again if another one of their idols begins promoting the same brand.

Take Hello Fresh, for example. With a whopping 3.2 million followers over a number of social platforms, they frequently chop and change their affiliates and ambassadors to appeal to a diverse demographic.

For instance, in the past, they have worked with a range of influencers and media personalities from a number of trending backgrounds. From Jamie Oliver to T-Pain to Keke Palmer, each affiliate is specifically chosen to appeal to a certain target group of people. This widens the new for affiliate purchasing and improves the company’s chance of converting customers from numerous niches.

Hello Fresh also regularly switches up their affiliate content strategy to align with consumer trends. Choosing influencers from multiple platforms allows Hello Fresh to target customers from all angles. 

For example, Keke Palmer has more than 8 million followers on TikTok, rendering her the perfect star for affiliate TikTok content that appeals to a trending algorithm. On the flip side, UK-based TV chef Jamie Oliver remains a brilliant TV-based ambassador of the brand, appealing to those who are not on younger social platforms such as TikTok or Instagram.

2. Try a Brand Partnership Program

While affiliate partnerships are most commonly associated with influencer partnerships, brand-to-brand partnerships are also a great option for ecommerce sellers.

Partnering with brands that can also offer your customers a helpful product/service can build customer trust and loyalty as these partnerships not only reinforce your credibility but also tell the customer that you plan to reward them for their purchase with discounts and offers on related purchases.

Take this example from Wolverhampton Wanderers. Their brand partnership program recognizes that traveling fans may need to stay overnight, so they have partnered with local hotels in the area to provide their customers with a discounted stay.

As a result, Wolverhampton Wanderers increased fan subscription retention and generated +510% inbound revenue through brand partnerships.

3. Use Affiliates With A Built In Trust Factor

Word-of-mouth marketing is the key to building loyalty as a brand. If your fans trust the recommendations of the affiliates you select, you increase your chances of an initial and repeat purchase.

Choose your affiliate partnerships wisely. These are often influencers with the highest social following, but there are plenty of other factors to consider.

Select influencers with a built-in trust factor. These are option leaders who have existed in your industry for a long period of time and are likely to have thousands, if not millions, of highly engaged, loyal followers. 

Recruiting influencers who are only just entering the scene can be more risky. While they may be the hottest name on TikTok today, their 15 minutes of fame could be short-lived, meaning that your affiliate promotion will hold less credibility in the long run.

YouTube fan favorite Zoella is a great example of an influencer with a built-in trust factor. With more than 10 years of experience as a content creator and more than 5 million loyal followers, she is a ‘low-risk’ influencer to choose when looking to partner with a social media personality.

Working with brands such as Aveeno, Carrie Elizabeth, Elizabeth Arden, Lush, and ASOS, Zoe Sugg has a long list of lasting partnerships, which also reinforces that all-important trust factor for brands looking to invest in affiliate collaboration.

When choosing your own affiliate partnerships, look for traits such as stable, loyal followership, steady growth over a number of years, and previous positive partnerships with other brands.

4. Create Compelling Content

It’s important to create content that resonates with your audience on a deeper level than simply providing them with an affiliate link.

If you want to nurture your relationships for increased loyalty, create helpful content based on keyword research that establishes your brand and its affiliates as key thought leaders in your industry, as well as an e-commerce brand. 

A great example of this is Amazon’s affiliate partnership with the internet media group BuzzFeed.

As a popular content source for producing fun quizzes and news, BuzzFeed remains a great avenue for affiliate marketing.

Working with Amazon, Buzzfeed creates quality, helpful content surrounding Amazon’s Prime Day deals. This content encourages consumers to shop while avoiding looking too promotional.

In order to attract consumers organically, use your affiliate partnerships to produce helpful product reviews and tutorials and release informative campaigns that directly tackle customer pain points.

5. Optimize The Purchase Experience

If you’re using an affiliate link to send customers straight to the checkout, ensure that this journey is optimized for a streamlined experience with your ecommerce brand.

The key here is to regularly test and optimize your navigation paths to eliminate any potential friction along the way. 

Ensure links work, and implement new features such as a guest checkout for a quick and easy sale. This positive experience will encourage the customer to come back and engage with your brand again. 

6. Offer New Deals and Promotions

The easiest way to retain customers using affiliate marketing is to offer them continued deals and promotions.

These can be in the form of codes, discounts, and coupons. As long as you promise to save your lead money, they’ll likely engage with your affiliate link. 

In order to retain customers, keep releasing new discounts and codes for repeat purchasers. You can create a rewards-based affiliate program that unlocks greater benefits for loyal customers.

This encourages your customer base to keep interacting with your brand for a chance to have access to discount codes, store prizes, and loyalty points.

Could Affiliate Partnerships Up Your Retention Game? 

Affiliate marketing constitutes transforming the e-commerce sector. As we open up new opportunities for advertisers and publishers to collaborate on a range of social channels, affiliate marketing stands to dominate online selling strategies in 2025.

The key to creating a successful affiliate marketing plan, however, is staying ahead of the consumer curve. This means staying on top of changing content trends, tracking rising influencers, and constantly adapting your offers and rewards.

Following in the footsteps of successful affiliate brands such as HelloFresh, Amazon, and Wolverhampton Wanderers, it’s time to create an affiliate partnership that targets your demographic from all angles. 

Feed your loyal customers something engaging to click on and watch your sales double.

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