By Alicja Olko
Customer service creates a direct connection between your customers and your business. It is what makes your customers come back after buying a product from you. For affiliate marketers, this means higher customer loyalty, which can be the bane of their existence.
However, that’s not the only reason customer service matters in affiliate marketing. There are many more—but before we dig into these reasons, let’s quickly refresh our memory of what affiliate marketing truly is.
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a performance-based marketing strategy where affiliates earn a commission for driving sales or traffic to a merchant’s website. For example, an influencer might promote a company’s products on their site and earn a commission for every sale made through their referral link. This system involves three parties:
- Seller (who has the product)
- Affiliate (who promotes the product)
- Consumer (who buys the product)
The Link Between Affiliate Marketing and Customer Care
When customers have positive experiences, they are more likely to trust and return to your affiliate site. This helps you differentiate your brand from competitors—because you encourage positive conversations—and leads to higher click-through rates (CTR) and more sales.
In contrast, if you focus solely on driving traffic and making sales but don’t pay attention to customer service, visitors looking for answers to questions about product details, shipping, and returns will not get any.
As a result, these prospects will bounce from your blog and turn to competitors who offer better support. That’s your competitive advantage gone down the drain.
Your lack of customer service also:
- Damages your reputation
- Hurts your conversion rates
- Makes your customers unhappy and likely to leave negative reviews
The Importance of Customer Care in Affiliate Marketing
There are not many (or any) cons when it comes to customer care in affiliate marketing. There are only pros, such as:
1. It Helps You Build Trust
When affiliates provide support and help for every question or issue, customers feel valued and know that they can rely on assistance at any time in their customer journey. This confidence in their purchase decisions increases their level of trust.
Customers who trust you and believe you have their best interests in mind are willing to pay much more than those who don’t. Without this level of trust, more than 33% of your customers will shift to affiliates in pursuit of a better experience or product offer, according to Edelman.
So, to make sure customers trust your affiliates, create a customer experience that meets and exceeds customer expectations every single time. You need to make sure your customers always feel that you understand their concerns and take every possible action to help them.
2. It Helps You Retain Customers
Current customers tend to be more profitable than new ones. They have already shown a willingness to engage with your affiliates and are familiar with the products and services you offer.
Retaining these customers is six to seven times less expensive than acquiring new ones. They are also 60 to 70% more likely to make a purchase from you compared to 5 to 20% for new customers.
Unfortunately, customer retention isn’t effortless. You have to provide positive experiences that foster loyalty and listen to what customers say about your affiliates.
You can do this through excellent customer service that leaves no stone unturned to solve customer issues and answer questions. This will encourage your customers to make repeat purchases through affiliate links.
Plus, even a 5% improvement in customer retention will increase profits by 25% to 95%.
3. It Increases the Likelihood of Conversion
The quality of your customer service is linked to your profitability. For example, Groove found that trial users who emailed the company for support were nine times more likely to become paying customers.
Proposify, a SaaS company, also experienced something similar. They integrated customer support help widgets across their website, helping visitors easily contact the support team or find answers in the knowledge base.
After two months, the conversion rate of people interacting with customer support widgets on the website was 25.23%. Proposify made sure their customer knew they were listening, and this effort showed up on their balance sheets.
4. It Helps You Manage Negative Feedback
Approximately 70% of dissatisfied customers who have their issues resolved are willing to shop with a company again. Plus, 42% are likely to pay more for a friendly, welcoming customer service experience.
This means diffusing escalating situations and turning negative experiences into positive ones is essential if you want to retain customers.
Customer care is at the forefront of this effort. It helps you talk directly with your customers, understand their concerns, and address them as soon as possible.
For example, if a customer comes to you with negative feedback about an affiliate product you’re selling, get back to them as fast as possible—preferably within 24 hours—to create as good an experience as possible.
While this may seem tedious, consumers are 91% more likely to recommend a brand after a good customer service experience. And if they’ve been with you for a year or more, they’re 60% likely to forgive any mistakes you make. This can prevent harm to your brand’s reputation and affiliate sales.
5. It Improves the Overall Perception of Your Brand
Given that more customers expect better service than ever before, customer service isn’t only about satisfying one customer anymore. It’s also about the positive impact happy customers can have on your business after they’ve walked away.
For example, 60% of customers post a review after making a purchase, and almost 33% “always” read these reviews when shopping online.
Plus, a survey from BrightLocal shows that 50% of consumers trust reviews as much as personal recommendations from family and friends. This means reviews can make or break your business perception.
How to Implement Excellent Customer Care in Affiliate Marketing
Now that you understand why customer care is so important, let’s look at how you can implement it in affiliate marketing:
1. Give Customers Access to Multiple Communication Channels
The goal of an affiliate program is to reach as many potential customers as possible. A consequence of this stretch is people looking to contact you. You may think you could get away with one channel in this case, but those days are gone.
Email support isn’t enough when 90% of customers expect and prefer multi-channel interactions because they help them resolve issues faster. These channels include calls, mobile messaging, live chat, forums, chatbots, and social media platforms.
It is critical to ensure the customer experience is seamless across all the channels you’re using. You don’t want your customers to constantly have to relay the same information to a call center agent or into an app on their phone.
One of the easiest ways to do this is to use multi-channel contact center software. This software helps support agents keep track of their past interactions within and across multiple channels, so they always have information on hand to ease customer worries.
Call center software also improves call quality, increases productivity, and helps you respond to all inbound queries from customers. It can also help you find urgent calls, which means customers with the most pressing issues will get answers first, increasing their satisfaction.
2. Follow Up After Issues Are Resolved
After resolving a customer’s issue, you need to follow up to ensure they are satisfied with the solution. This can turn a neutral or negative experience into a positive one. But you don’t necessarily have to do this over a phone call.
If you’re using multi-channel call center software to manage customer interactions, you can send an email or a message to your customers asking about their experience and ways they could help you make your service better.
This will make them feel included, build trust, and enable you to gather data that you can use to improve your customer support process.
3. Respond Quickly
About 33% of customers feel frustrated when they have to wait on hold or have to repeat themselves to multiple support reps. This means efficiency is the most important factor in customer experience.
Efficiency in customer service means responding to customer inquiries and resolving issues as quickly as possible. It helps customers feel heard, prevents small problems from escalating, and can mean the difference between a one-time buyer and a long-time customer.
You can do this by setting up a call center— especially if you have hundreds of calls per day. Sales call centers will help you manage and keep track of past customer service interactions. You can also use a Facebook Messenger chatbot if that’s where your target audience hangs out.
4. Create a Comprehensive FAQ and Resource Section
Some customers aren’t comfortable contacting you directly until they absolutely have to. In fact, over 67% of customers prefer self-service instead of talking to a customer service representative.
An online knowledge base, such as a comprehensive FAQ section, helps customers find answers to common questions quickly. Here’s how to create one:
- Use customer interaction data to find issues that commonly pop up
- Answer these questions in formats like video, audio, and writing
- Structure your FAQ according to topic
- Make the FAQ design simple (the information is the focus, not the website)
- Ensure your FAQ is placed somewhere on your website with high visibility. You should also make sure the URL slug of the FAQ is relevant to the query so Google can recommend it
5. Gather and Act on Customer Service Data
If you’re using enterprise contact center software to keep track of all customer interactions, you can analyze the data collected to learn about how you can improve your support process and the overall customer service journey.
For example, you could track customer satisfaction using a post-service WhatsApp chatbot survey to understand how customers felt about the support they received. This could show customers that their opinions matter and increase loyalty.
Some other metrics you could track include ticket backlogs, first response time, average ticket count, average response time, and ticket resolution rate.
Customer Care Is the Backbone of Affiliate Marketing
Happy and loyal customers make affiliate marketing work and help grow your business. To ensure they feel that way, you have to talk to them and listen to their concerns. Customer service is what makes that happen.
Customer care ensures that your customers get all their questions answered, understand your service or products inside out, and understand that you truly care about them. This increases loyalty, builds trust, and keeps people coming back for more.
So, if you’re scratching your head wondering how you could make your customers happy, the clue is in the thought.
