Increasing Commissions to Motivate Affiliates

[skuba]

Hi,
I would like to reward publishers for working hard for our CJ Affiliate program, but I am not sure of how much to reward them.
Taking in consideration that the program starts at 7%, would an increase to 8% motivate affs to try to reach the new sales threshold? The goals wouldn’t be impossible to reach. I was thinking in negotiating different terms with different affs.
For instance an aff that sells $750 a month would only need to reach $1000 to receive the extra 1%.
An aff that sells $4000, would have to reach $5000 to receive the extra 1%.

Would those terms motivate affs? Should it be more, like 2%, 2.5%.

Please be realistic.
There would be other thresholds. For instance, if they aff sells $750, he would get 8% over $1000, and then 9% over $2000, than maybe $12% over $5000

I am looking for suggestions. How to motivate affs?

Out of 2000 affs, only 800 get any click AT ALL, and out of the 800, only 80 SELL SOMETHING...

Thanks for your feedback.

Skuba

[e911]

Hi there,
a 1% increase isn't going to do much. I am both the affiliate manager for a well known site and owner of a popular site affiliated with several programs, and I can tell you frome experience it is hard to motivate affiliates. I don't know how flexible you are in terms of rate increase, but I found that you need to offer rate increase that looks important (in my case from 12% to 20%). As a busy site owner, if you were e-mailing me about just a 1% increase, I wouldn't even bother.

[hobbnet]

Well, on the other hand you can look at it like this...

A raise from 7% to 8% is actually a 14% increase in payout. So, if you have some affiliates doing decent volume giving them this increase will improve their revenues by 14% and that is pretty significant. I would say that is good motivation.

You can also try a totally different approach. Could you possibly flip your program into a CPA program instead of a pay per sale program? A lot of affiliates prefer CPA over a % of sale. Of course, you assume more risk running a CPA program but if you are creative and do the math you can keep a healthy profit.

[jomaxx]

14% increase, bah. The reason only 80 affiliates are selling anything at all is that 7% is pretty low in the first place. Giving them targets so that they can earn all the way up to 8% is really not much motivation. Give these webmasters a decent return and they'll be falling over themselves to promote your company.

Why not identify those sites sending you the most traffic with the highest conversion rate and the most room to grow, and offer them DOUBLE what they make now? See if that makes a difference.