Top Affiliate Marketing tips for luxury brands

Building bridges

Let’s kick off with arguably the most important point…it’s all about who you know.

By introducing yourself to key affiliates within your industry, be it luxury fashion or prestige beauty, you will put yourself firmly in place for when it comes to exposure, whether it be paid or free. Maintain these relationships and watch them flourish in the long term.

Taking that first step isn’t easy. At Silverbean, we’ve been working with luxury brands to grow their Affiliate Partner programs for over 15 years. In that time, we’ve built up strong relationships with content partners all over the world. By working with us on your program, you’ll make the most of these connections.

By building a great relationship and increasing the trust that you share, it often increases your chances of gaining exclusivity. This in turn, will give you insights you need to build future campaigns.

Quality over quantity

When it comes to luxury brands, picking your moment is key. Instead of jumping on every opportunity that crops up, you should aim for premium exposure.

If the exposure is the right fit, and you’ve bagged a quality affiliate partner who shows the brand in the right angle, you’ll see a better ROI.

For example, we work with luxury accessories client, MONNIER Frères. The brand only runs 3-4 pieces of paid exposure a year as opposed to non-luxury retail brands who will typically run multiple exposures per month – it’s all about quality over quantity.

Only recruit the best

One of the most important components of a strong campaign is a broad affiliate mix. Since protecting the brand is at the forefront of a luxury brand’s affiliate program, the campaign mix will be different from a typical retailer.

We’ll opt for content affiliates over voucher codes and cashback partners. This helps us reach the right people without potentially damaging the brand.

We also make sure to regularly recruit new, active, brand-appropriate affiliates, who are enthusiastic to promote and build mutually beneficial working relationships with aspirational brands.

Don’t feel restricted by the network your program is on. If the brand image is strong enough, you’ll be able to cross recruit from different platforms.

Recruiting the very best is an essential factor and should be maintained to ensure your affiliate mix is ever-changing. Always keep in mind that your affiliate mix is a vital area and represents the brand’s image and therefore, you should only recruit affiliate types which fit the brand’s business objectives. We can help determine what these are and how to fit your Affiliate Partner program around this.

Remain focused & organised

It’s important to always keep your eyes on what’s coming, way ahead of time. By devising a detailed strategy and calendar you’ll never miss an important date, period or upcoming opportunity for a great offer. We advise that you set up a shared document, which is accessible by your whole team, so that everyone is up to date, in the loop and stays focused at all times.

A luxury item is a considered purchase. In order to incentivise this, you need to be producing detailed useful content, which is delivered to the right affiliates and within the required time frame. Being organised makes this a simple and effective task.

Think outside the box

You can’t run an affiliate campaign for a luxury brand without creativity.

For a typical high-street retailer, you can get away with running regular promotions and offering strong exclusive codes to affiliates. But, because of the nature of high-end luxury brands, this isn’t an option.

Instead, you’ll need to be creative and resourceful, always thinking of unique ways to drive revenue, while maintaining brand reputation. Look at brand partnerships, codes that offer savings on higher AOV, rather than standard money-off vouchers that often derails the brand exclusivity.

Start off by identifying a target affiliate, and choose a relevant product from your line that matches their brand intentions. We recently worked with a content partner to run an exclusive 10% off code with a luxury retailer on a jacket featured in the latest James Bond film.

By offering an exclusive code to a specific affiliate, we found a niche market and audience. This affiliate has always driven strong traffic and we knew that we needed the right offer to engage and capture their audience.

The promotion ran for four months and drove a phenomenal 26,000 clicks, generating over £24,500 in additional revenue.

Hopefully, these tips give you a taster for how to run a successful luxury affiliate marketing campaign.Our parting words and final advice is to remember three key points above all else:

1. Brand Image
2. Effective exposure with the right audience
3. Stay creative to ensure you keep the program desirable for affiliates and their audiences.

Stick with these and you can’t go wrong. If you have any handy top tips of your own for managing a successful luxury affiliate campaign, share them with us over on our Twitter feed: @silverbean. We’d love to hear from you.

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