May I know when is the best time to drop inactive affiliates? How do you usually deal with inactive affiliates before completely dropping them from the network or from the program?
Maybe you should wait atleast 3 months than write them a polite mail asking if they still want to promote your products and if answer is no or no response - drop them.
Thanks for that information Wolfolus. But are there any considerations to think before dropping an inactive affiliate? I'm thinking of reasons that will make any inactivation action valid.
Just set out what you like in your Terms of Service, so when they sign up it's already there. The way I see it as long as the inactive affiliate isn't taking up any resources, then there is no reason to drop them. Never know when a luck or relative sale comes in from these inactive affiliates.
I think you should see someone as inactive once they have not logged into their account or given their account any traffic in at least 2 years or so. CJ suspends accounts or use to suspend accounts after 6 months of no sales, which is well to strict and they loose a lot of small publishers over it. Some people join affiliate programs first and then make their sites. The reasons for this is because if they are making a site about coffee, then they would want to probably signup to the affiliate program/s first just to make sure they get approved and then make their site about coffee. There is no point in making a site about coffee and then finding out that you can't get approved for any of the coffee affiliate programs, or they signup to the affiliate programs and write reviews of products and stuff with their referrals links in each review. In other words, all of this takes time and sometimes it can take over 6 months before a new affiliate becomes active in an affiliate program. I joined ShareASale around 10 years ago which was on of my first affiliate networks I joined. When I joined it I was still learning a lot of stuff and didn't actually start promoting any of it's merchants products until about 2 years later as I was developing my sites still. Although I have come a long way now and normally become active in a program within a week or so, but there are many affiliates out there that are probably like how I first started out.