How a Top American Beauty Brand Scaled Affiliate Enablement
3.5X
growth in active user count
80%
of new affiliates completed onboarding in 30 days
67%
of affiliates stated positive impact on their sales
About the Client
This global beauty and wellness company maintains an ongoing focus on developing innovative products. It has grown into a global leader in beauty and wellness, numbering hundreds of products in its portfolio under a personal care brand, a nutritional brand, and more.
The Challenge
As this company created an initiative to globally align and scale its onboarding and training initiatives to new geographies, they needed to ensure a smooth overall experience for new and existing brand affiliates. With a large, globally distributed team with varying languages, time zones, and regulatory requirements, the sheer variety of program and product differences posed a challenge. How could the company provide a space for brand affiliates to connect across borders and cultures?
In its quest to find the optimal onboarding and training tool, this company was looking to:
– Meet the needs of the customer
– Increase engagement, retention, and onboarding and training efficiency of brand affiliates
– Provide one centralized location for all educational materials and resources
Additionally, it was critical to provide all new brand affiliates with access to consistent, accurate, timely and compliant resources.
If one has little to no experience with entrepreneurship, getting started as an independent affiliate can be overwhelming, a process which involves juggling multiple sources of knowledge, onboarding, and learning. Among new-affiliate questions may be: How can they meet their sales and business goals? How do they set up an online store? What are the most efficient ways to follow up with the clients?
Prior to working with Rallyware, this company provided its brand affiliates with tools to help them identify their “why.” How could they be provided with even more robust tools and resources in order to become thoroughly engaged, reach their full potential and the highest-possible sales productivity in line with their personal goals?
The Solution
Rallyware worked with this company to create a branded learning resource, serving as a centralized hub for all onboarding, training, and learning activities and materials.
After getting started, new brand affiliates were encouraged to engage with the platform’s multiple programs. The central learning resource delivered the right learning activity to the right individual at the right time, sending the right business activity to enable what they had learned, which could then be implemented in their business building practice.
For instance, the ‘Lead’ program focused on learning – i.e., developing one’s Leadership Team. Meanwhile, the ‘Share’ program provided ways for brand affiliates to share products with their customers, optimize sales conversions and expand their customer base. An activity within the ‘Share’ program might encourage brand affiliates to share a personalized product post on social media. After learning the basic do’s and don’ts of social media, they were asked about their social media habits and preferences, and then provided with examples of customizable templates that could be used for posting. This social media posting activity is an example of a task, which are components of each program.
How are affiliates to know exactly what they are supposed to do, and when? The tasks feature gives them small, digestible units of either learning or actionable information, assigned to them in a predefined order or/and under predefined conditions. Brand affiliates were navigated through lessons in goal-based, personalized business building by completing such tasks as recruiting one’s first team member, contacting five people from their address book or sending out offers from their online store. These tasks were suited for each individual person’s goals and progress so far.
Ensuring full clarity, affiliates were provided with clear visibility of their personal progress, such as how far along they were in their personalized product training. This information was clearly displayed with a progress bar (for instance, whether they had completed 25% of a task thus far). This turned out to be a highly used tool that easily visualized various goals and objectives as well as progress toward them – such as anticipated sales volume for the next month.
Additionally, the learning resource housed important resources in a digital library. A key tool for this company, having 24/7 access from any device to a centralized hub of searchable information helped new and existing affiliates easily find whatever resources they were looking for and become fully immersed within the company’s product ecosystem.
The company’s learning resource has laid the foundation for a seamless onboarding process – ensuring that new brand affiliates are provided with all necessary information at their fingertips. By establishing trust and offering continuous support, the learning resource has been instrumental in welcoming new brand affiliates into the company’s community and giving them a greater opportunity for success.
The Results
- Rapid digital transformation
As this company rolls out a globally aligned training program, the past two years have been defined by several major milestones. In 2020, the United Kingdom, the first market of the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region, as well as Latin America (Argentina, Chile, Columbia, Mexico and Peru), joined the centralized learning resource. The company has since launched in more than 40 markets worldwide in 22 languages.
Alongside the company’s global rollout, there was also exponential growth and rapid expansion in the number of new users – in 2019, 33,370 users were created.
During the first two months of 2021, another four markets of the EMEA region joined the learning resource’s ecosystem, and a total of 22,226 new users were created.
This speed and ease of new market launches – for both them and their workforce – enables this company to be prepared for new product launches and global marketing campaigns, as well as more resilient to any market changes that might occur.
- Improved affiliate experience
For all markets, there has generally been an increase in the average number of tasks completed during the first week: nine in March 2020, compared to 9.8 in January 2021.
This data indicates the willingness and excitement of brand affiliates to get started and begin growing their businesses, armed with the necessary tools and resources that will support them in their success. For many affiliates, the centralized learning resource has influenced the success of their business building efforts – 67% of brand affiliates have seen a positive impact.
- Faster and easier onboarding for new brand affiliates
Upon getting started with the learning resource, new brand affiliates were quick to adapt and get up to speed. After implementing the learning resource, the company saw increased speed in onboarding time using this platform – in relation to the total number of those who completed onboarding, the proportion of those who completed onboarding within 30 days from the date of accepting the Rules & Regulations accounted for more than 80%. By March 2019, 79% of brand affiliates had completed onboarding during the first month, this number increased to 87% by June 2020.
- Increase in brand affiliate engagement and number of activities they perform
Previous correlation analysis conducted by Rallyware found that user activation typically has a positive effect, not only on the sales of the individual brand affiliate, but also on the company’s profits. That is, when users move from one less active segment, in which fewer tasks have been completed, to a more active segment, this usually drives sales, and by an average of 3X. Task completion is correlated to business results, and the number of activities an affiliate undertakes is directly connected to their success in sales and recruiting.
Based on platform engagement and number of tasks they completed in the Learning Center, users were categorized into groups. Over time, this company saw changes in user group size within their U.S. market, in that many transitioned to higher activity groups.
If in January 2020 the leading group was ‘non-active’, in January 2021 the ‘beginner’ group overtook this group, taking the lead. Moreover, the size of the ‘beginner’ group increased over the one year period, while the size of the ‘non-active’ group decreased, pointing to heightened brand affiliate activity in the centralized learning resource.
This being the company’s first time using a global, unified solution for learning and education, they have since employed Rallyware’s solution to onboard new brand affiliates, as well as provide ongoing education related to platforms, programs, products and compliance. For their brand affiliates, distance is no longer an obstacle. As a result of platform implementation and steps towards digital transformation, the company has seen measurable success in its global rollout, continuously covering more ground and supporting more international markets.
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