What percentage of affiliates are active if your brand has an affiliate program?
80%? 70%? Or 50%
Our affiliate management team, says that most of the affiliate programs we’ve managed had more than 50% inactive affiliates when we started working on them.
81% of brands use affiliate programs to boost brand awareness and drive sales. But growing these programs takes a lot of work. Many don’t see the results they hope for, often because they have inactive affiliates.
Inactive affiliates are those who have stopped promoting the product or haven’t started promoting it yet. Inactive affiliates are a major cause of your affiliate program’s failure.
That is not unique to your program. It is the industry default.
It is also the largest untapped revenue opportunity in your affiliate channel. Reactivating affiliates costs a fraction of what recruiting new ones costs. And the affiliates you already have understand your brand, your product, and your offer. They just need the right activation trigger.
This guide covers exactly how to activate inactive affiliates. Every method here has been used by MonsterClaw’s team across real client programs. The methods that work are listed first.
What Is an Inactive Affiliate?
An inactive affiliate is a partner registered in your affiliate program who has either never made a sale or stopped promoting your product. Inactive affiliates fall into two distinct categories.
Dormant affiliates signed up, may have driven traffic or sales at some point, but have not promoted your product in 90 days or more.
Never-activated affiliates signed up but never sent a single click. They completed registration and then disappeared. Both groups need different activation strategies. Treating them the same is the most common mistake program managers make.
Why It’s Important to Activate Your New And Dormant Affiliates?
Activating new and stagnant affiliates is important for your business because it directly increases your marketing impact.
Here are some key reasons:
- Reactivating Inactive Affiliates
Affiliates who have stopped promoting your products still have potential. You can use their existing knowledge of your products to get quick sales by reactivating them. This is much more cost-effective than recruiting new affiliates. It’s because you’re utilizing resources that are already in place.
- Cost Efficiency
- Both activating new affiliates and reactivating dormant ones are cost-effective strategies. They maximize the output from your existing network. They reduce the need and expense of continually recruiting new affiliates. This approach saves money. And it also increases the overall performance of your affiliate program.
- Sustained Growth
Regularly updating and motivating your affiliate base helps maintain a productive affiliate program.
This effort keeps the program lively. It also helps adjust to new marketing trends and challenges. This is important for success over time.
By using these strategies, make sure every part of your affiliate network is working well. This will help your business grow and make your marketing stronger and more effective.
Who are New Affiliates?
New affiliates are people who just joined your affiliate program but haven’t started promoting your products yet.
They might not know much about your products and brand.
Activating new affiliates involves a few steps –
- Onboarding them effectively.
- Providing them with the necessary resources and support,
- And motivating them to start promoting your products.
Understanding the differences between these two groups helps you to tailor your strategies.
For inactive affiliates, the focus is on re-engagement and motivation. And for new affiliates, it’s about providing guidance and support to help them get started.
By addressing the needs of both groups, you can maximize the performance of your affiliate program and drive greater sales and revenue.
Why Active Affiliates Become Inactive?
Affiliates do not go inactive by accident. There is always a reason. Across the programs MonsterClaw has audited, these are the patterns that come up repeatedly:
1. Slow approval times: A study by Affise found 27% of affiliates feel discouraged when approval takes too long. They sign up enthusiastic. They wait. They lose the momentum that would have driven their first promotion.
2. No onboarding: New affiliates get added to the platform and forgotten. They do not know how the program works, what assets are available, or who to ask when they have questions. Confused affiliates do not promote.
3. Weak commission rates: Affiliates have options. If your commission is lower than what they can earn promoting a competing product, they will switch. They will not tell you. They will just stop sending traffic.
4. Zero communication from the program manager: Silence kills affiliate programs. Affiliates promote programs that stay in front of them. The program that emails them weekly with new offers, ideas, and updates wins their attention.
5. Early campaign failures: An affiliate tries one campaign, it fails, they assume the product does not convert. Without support to diagnose what went wrong, they move on.
6. Better competing offers: Affiliates evaluate programs constantly. If a competitor offers higher commissions, better conversion rates, or more support, your affiliates leave.
7. Product or brand changes: Repositions, pricing changes, or feature removals can break the campaigns affiliates already built. If they are not informed, their content goes stale and stops converting.
Most inactive affiliates can be reactivated by addressing one or two of these root causes. The methods below are organized around solving them.
How to Activate Inactive Affiliates?
1. Approve The Affiliate Applicants Promptly
Approving affiliates quickly can greatly encourage them to promote your products.
Fast approval shows you value their eagerness and boosts their motivation. A smooth and quick approval process lets new affiliates start without delays.
This improves their first experiences and helps them make their first sale faster. This is good for both the affiliate and your business.
2. Do Onboarding Meetings With Affiliates
Onboarding meetings are key to preparing your affiliates for success. These first meetings help you explain how your affiliate program works.
You can show affiliates how to use the available tools and resources. Also, the meeting will help them to get answers to their queries faster.
Effective onboarding reduces confusion and creates a solid start for new affiliates.
Statistics reveal that well-onboarded affiliates are more likely to be active and successful. This shows how important it is to spend time on these early interactions.
You need to make sure affiliates know every needed thing. This will help you create a productive relationship right away.
3. Set up An Automated Email Drip Campaign
Automated email drip campaigns are a great way to keep affiliates interested from the start. You set up a series of emails in advance to give new affiliates important information when they need it.
These emails teach them about your products, offer marketing tips, and remind them of the resources they have.
A good email campaign keeps communication going and helps stop new affiliates from becoming inactive.
According to Campaign Monitor, targeted emails often get a 58% open rate. This shows how effective personalized and automated emails are in keeping affiliates engaged.
4. Send Personalized Follow Ups
Personalized follow-ups are crucial for keeping new and inactive affiliates engaged. Sending personalized emails or messages makes affiliates feel important and noticed.
This tailored approach helps you get their attention quickly.
For example, you could mention their previous promotions or talk about new opportunities that suit their audience. This can revive their interest in your program.
A study by Experian shows that personalized emails have 6 times higher transaction rates.
This proves that a custom approach can greatly improve affiliate engagement and productivity.
5. Provide Them With Promotional Materials
Providing promotional materials to your affiliates is a crucial step.
You can provide them with –
- High-quality banners.
- Product images.
- Pre-written content.
- Email Templates.
- Social Media Posts.
- Product Promotional Videos.
- Content Ideas that are Suitable for his audience etc.
This support not only saves them time but also helps them get started quickly.
According to a HubSpot report, using professional visual content can increase engagement rates by up to 94%.
6. Help Them With Campaign Creation
Helping your affiliates create effective marketing campaigns helps you improve the program’s performance.
By advising on best practices, audience targeting strategies, and promotional materials, you help affiliates create powerful promotions.
This support boosts their confidence and improves your affiliate program’s results. This leads to more sales and stronger partnerships.
7. Share Other Affiliates’ Success Stories With Them
Sharing the success stories of other affiliates can be a strong motivator.
When affiliates learn about the achievements of others, it inspires them to promote.
This approach not only motivates but also offers a practical guide for success.
A Nielsen study found that peer recommendations and success stories can boost marketing effectiveness by up to 35%.
By showcasing these stories, you provide affiliates with clear examples of success. This encourages them to use similar strategies and work harder.
8. Create Urgency
When you create urgency in your promotions, you give people a reason to act fast.
It’s like saying, “This offer won’t last forever, so don’t miss out!” By offering limited-time deals, you encourage customers to make a decision quickly.
Research by Digital Commerce 360 shows that adding urgency to promotions can boost sales by up to 10%.
This tactic not only drives more sales but also motivates affiliates to promote your products more actively. And they can also capitalize on time-sensitive opportunities.
9. Provide One-Time Sponsorship Fee
Offering a one-time sponsorship fee can motivate inactive affiliates or attract new ones.
This fee is a bonus given to affiliates when they reach specific goals. For example – the goal can be making a certain number of sales in a set period.
It acts as a reward for their efforts and encourages them to start promoting or joining your program.
Providing Financial incentives means you appreciate their work. The incentives work as an encouragement to them to promote your products more actively.
This approach can lead to higher earnings for your business.
10. Host Webinars To Educate Them
Hosting webinars is an excellent way to teach and engage your affiliates. These online events let you share important insights, tips, and updates about your products and affiliate program.
They offer a place for interactive discussions. In these events, affiliates can ask questions and learn from each other.
Research by InsideSales.com shows that webinars can boost engagement by up to 40%.
By having regular webinars, you keep affiliates informed and motivated. They gain the knowledge they need to successfully promote your products.
11. Provide Guided Guidelines
Here are the corrected sentences:
Guided guidelines act like roadmaps that lead affiliates to success.
These clear, step-by-step instructions can help affiliates with:
- Setting up campaigns
- Effectively promoting products
- Increasing their earnings
- Choosing the right promotional strategies, etc.
Research by Statista shows that detailed guidelines can boost affiliate satisfaction and performance by up to 25%.
By providing these guidelines, you help affiliates confidently navigate affiliate marketing. This ensures they fully benefit from their partnership with your business.
The Activation Sequence That Works: 90-Day Plan
Here is the activation sequence MonsterClaw’s affiliate management team uses with client programs:
Days 1-7: Diagnostic
- Segment your inactive affiliates into never-activated vs dormant
- Identify your top 50 historical performers who are now inactive
- Audit your creative assets and refresh anything older than 90 days
- Set up your automated drip sequence in your email tool
Days 8-30: Foundation
- Launch the drip email campaign to all inactive affiliates
- Send personalized 1-on-1 outreach to your top 50 high-potential dormant affiliates
- Publish your refreshed creative asset library
- Announce a 30-day activation bonus tied to a specific promotion
Days 31-60: Engagement
- Host an affiliate-only webinar with current program performance data
- Share 3 success stories from currently active affiliates
- Offer 1-on-1 campaign building calls to your top 20 responding affiliates
- Track which affiliates engaged with emails, webinars, or new assets
Days 61-90: Conversion
- Send a final call-to-action to all engaged-but-not-yet-converted affiliates
- Reward the activated affiliates publicly to reinforce the program social proof
- Archive affiliates who showed zero engagement across the 90 days
- Document what worked for future activation campaigns
Expected outcome: 30 to 50% of dormant affiliates re-engage at some level. 15 to 25% drive at least one sale within the 90-day window. These rates depend on your starting point, niche, and offer quality.
Final Thoughts: How to Activate Your Inactive Affiliates?
Reactivating affiliates isn’t just about increasing sales; it’s about building lasting relationships.
By figuring out why affiliates stop being active and using tested strategies to bring them back, businesses can use untapped potential.
This can lead to significant growth in their affiliate programs.
In this process, it’s important to focus on clear communication, provide useful resources, and celebrate the achievements of affiliates.
These actions not only encourage affiliates to actively promote but also create a sense of community and loyalty in the program.
Reactivating affiliates is a continuous effort to develop a mutually beneficial partnership.
By keeping up good communication, offering valuable resources, and celebrating their achievements, you help build a successful environment where everyone benefits. If you need help activating new and inactive affiliates to expand your affiliate program, contact our affiliate management team.
Frequently Asked Questions
An inactive affiliate is a partner registered in your affiliate program who has not promoted your product in 90 days or more. There are two subtypes: dormant affiliates (drove activity at some point but stopped) and never-activated affiliates (signed up but never sent a click). The activation strategy differs significantly between the two groups.
Across the programs MonsterClaw has managed, over 50% of registered affiliates are inactive. The primary causes are slow approval times, no onboarding process, weak commission rates, zero communication from the program manager, early campaign failures, and better offers from competing programs. Most of these causes are operational issues a program manager can directly fix.
A structured 90-day activation campaign typically reactivates 30 to 50% of dormant affiliates to some level of engagement and 15 to 25% to driving at least one sale. New (never-activated) affiliates can be activated within their first 30 days using structured onboarding, with 30 to 50% activation rates being typical when onboarding is done well.
Activating existing affiliates is significantly cheaper. The cost of acquiring a new qualified affiliate ranges from $25 to $200 depending on niche and recruitment method. Activating an existing affiliate costs primarily time and minor incentives. The ROI on reactivation campaigns typically exceeds recruitment ROI by 3 to 5 times.
No. Inactive affiliates are not a cost to keep registered (most platforms charge per active affiliate, not per registered affiliate). They represent reactivation potential. Only archive affiliates who have been completely unresponsive across multiple sustained activation efforts over 6+ months.
The highest-performing reactivation subject lines reference specific value rather than generic check-ins. “New [Brand] creatives are live – here is what is converting” outperforms “We miss you” by 4 to 6 times in open rates across the campaigns MonsterClaw has tracked.
