The Creatives
Affiliate programs are established to sell a merchant’s product or service. So one of the most important objectives of your program is to encourage visitors to your affiliate’s site to buy. After all, if you don’t generate sales, all the work you do perfecting your product or service, establishing an affiliate payment model, choosing a program model, and creating a workable affiliate agreement is for naught.
And besides, if your product doesn’t sell, you’ll lose your affiliates.
So the upshot is that you have to be able to sell your offer. Do you know what it takes to encourage a visitor at your affiliate’s site to take a specific action or encourage a sale? Put it this way. If you don’t know how to sell your own offer you can’t expect your affiliates to do it.
An affiliate program is only as strong as its weakest link. And that link in an affiliate program is the hyperlink from the creatives your affiliate places on its site that links to yours. The most important tools that you can give your affiliates are the creatives. These are the banners, buttons, pre-written text links, and pop-ups that they place on their Web sites. A successful affiliate program must provide a variety of these creative links.
At the very minimum, a good affiliate program should offer the following creative marketing materials to affiliates:
Text Links
Banner Ads
Text/Banner Ads—Button Ads plus Text Commentary
Ezine/E-mail Advertising Materials
Storefronts/Mini-Sites
Content
The Marketing Materials
Text links come first. You should supply affiliates with a half-dozen text links with marketing copy where the HTML is ready to cut and paste onto an affiliate’s Web page. Here is an example of a ClubMom text link:
“ClubMom: Rewarding and Celebrating Moms - Every Day.”
The words “Rewarding and Celebrating Moms - Every Day” are hyperlinked to the ClubMom Web site. The HTML code would look like this:
90
<TABLE width=400><TBODY><TR><TD> <P><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica size=-1>ClubMom: <A HREF="http://service.bfast.com/bfast/click?bfmid=26370742&siteid=27415909&bfpage=click_here" TARGET="_top">Rewarding and Celebrating Moms - Every Day</a><IMG SRC="http://service.bfast.com/bfast/serve?bfmid=26370742&siteid=27415909&bfpage=click_here" BORDER="0" WIDTH="1" HEIGHT="1" NOSAVE ></FONT></P></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
Next in importance are the graphic links. Keep them in mind when designing your banners and buttons.
First, according to Sandra Gassmann, President of Sage Marketing & Consulting (www.sage-marketing.com), the copy in the ads should coordinate with an affiliate’s content. You may also group similar products into a large graphic called a storefront (see Figure 5.13).
Do
| DO offer more than one type of graphic link to your affiliates. Develop four to six banners, buttons, or other graphic elements per offer. |
Storefronts increase the credibility of the offer by presenting a selection of products in one place. Storefronts usually take up more real estate on an affiliate’s Web site, but can be more effective than a simple banner ad (see Table 5.1).
| Links to Specific Products | 2.18% |
| General Text Links | 1.80% |
| Storefront Links | 1.43% |
| E-mail Links | 1.31% |
| SearchBox Links | 1.22% |
| Banner Links | 1.12% |
Source: eMarketer.com
According to Delcan Dunn, a good rule of thumb is to not offer more than 3–5 products in a storefront. Too many choices confuse the visitor.
Banner Design
Smaller than a storefront are banners. Like the storefront, they sit on an affiliate’s Web page. As for sizes, the most standard sizes for banners, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau (www.iab.net), are
Micro Button: 88 pixels long by 31 pixels high (88×31)
Square Button: 125 pixels long by 125 pixels high (125×125)
Button 1: 120 pixels long by 90 pixels high (120×90)
Button 2: 120 pixels long by 60 pixels high (120×60)
Vertical Banner: 120 pixels long by 240 pixels high (120×240)
Half Banner: 234 pixels long by 60 pixels high (234×60)
Full Banner with Vertical Navigation Bar: 392 pixels long by 72 pixels high (392×72)
Full Banner: 468 pixels long by 60 pixels high (468×60)
Sandra Gassmann emphasizes the importance of the file size of the graphic. You should keep it as small as possible to allow for a fast download. Slowing the download time of an affiliate’s site with intricate, fat graphics will not endear them to your program. The file size should be no larger than a few kilobytes (KB) for the small banners, no larger than 15KB for the largest banner, and 30KB for a storefront. A good rule of thumb is to keep most banners from 10–12KB.
Don’t
| DON’T create graphical links that are so large they slow down the loading of your affiliate’s site. Keep the image size small. |
Terry Dean, Webmaster for BizPromo.com (www.bizpromo.com), offers several techniques for banner ad design that have proven effective for marketing efforts:
Use the words “Click Here” or “Enter” every time you design a banner. Tests have proven that these simple words can increase the click-through rate of a banner ad by 20%–30% without changing anything else in the banner.
Animating your banners will increase click-through another 30%–40%. The key in using animation in your banner is keeping it small. The reason for this, of course, is the download time. If your animation file is too large, the viewer will not wait around to see it fully download. Try and keep your animated banner under 15KB. The way to do this is to keep your animation simple—maybe only one or two movements. Also decrease the number of colors in your graphic. According to Dean, a banner that may have been 15KB can often be decreased down to 3 or 4KB when you decrease the colors to 16 or 256 colors.
Use an awesome, eye-catching headline in your banner. A pretty banner will not make buyers click through. You need a good headline to entice them to do that. According to Dean, a good technique to use is to keep the same headline on your banner ad that you have on your product page. When they click through the banner, they will come to see the same headline that sparked an interest in them in the first place.
Use the word “FREE.” It works when you use the word and then tell them exactly what they will be getting FREE (see Figure 5.16). Using the word “FREE” in virtually any headline will make your response rate increase dramatically. And speaking of free, this is a good way to get consumers to use your product. Offering free trials, samples, or contests if they supply their e-mail address is a great way to get a potential customer to sell to in the future.
Figure 5.15. Yahoo! is an example of putting the hyperlink of Art.com’s offer in blue.
Dean believes that a blue underlined text link will often increase your response rate. If you add a text link below your banners or in conjunction with a button ad, make sure the hyperlink is in blue (see Figure 5.17). When Internet users see blue underlined text, they know they are links. When you place your headline in this type of format, more people will realize that it is a link to another site. It will achieve a higher click-through rate.
Figure 5.17. This is an example of trick banner that gives the impression that there is an e-mail message waiting for the user.
Do
DO join the banner Ad Discussion List (http://www.musictus.com/webmaster/bannerad.html). It focuses on strategies and results of advertising and pay-per-lead networks, banner exchange services, and commission based sales. The list encourages sharing of practical experiences between subscribers.
The combination of a small banner button with some promotional text is an effective way to present an offer. Affiliates like this kind of hyperlink because the banner button can sit within the side bar of their Web page and not dominate it. Usually, to the right of the small banner button is text that describes the benefits of clicking on the banner button. The text is a link, the banner is a link, and by combining a visual with a short text description, affiliates can group a number of affiliate programs on a single Web Page. It is an effective method of offering more than one product on a page, without overwhelming the visitor or using a space-consuming storefront banner. Words explain what pictures can not and a picture tells a thousand words. Together, they make a potent advertising tool.
Another tip from Dean is that a blue border will give you a better response rate than any other color border for a banner. A detail this small may not seem like much but it does increase the clicks on your banner.
Do
DO use your company logo in your graphical links. Branding is important even if a viewer doesn’t click on your banner.
It is often a good idea to use your company logo in the banner. Branding is important even if a viewer doesn’t click on your banner. Placing your company logo on your banner helps produce a branding effect in people’s minds. If you can’t get a sale through your banner right then and there, you can at least build brand awareness on your affiliate sites.
If you don’t have the resources to do the creatives in-house, check out the services of BannerWorkz.com (www.bannerworkz.com) (see Figure 5.16), or you can look for a freelancer at places like elance (www.elance.com) and guru.com (www.guru.com).
One warning when you design your banners: Don’t use cheap tricks to get people to click on your graphic. Never sacrifice your brand integrity for a cheap click. You’re trying to build a relationship with a customer and your affiliate. Fake user interfaces are among the biggest offenders of those going after the cheap click. You’ve seen them—fake HTML or interactive-looking banners that don’t work or operating systems warning boxes alerting you to a problem with your PC (see Figure 5.17). These types of banners degrade the credibility of your brand in the eyes of both consumers and your affiliates.
All in all, you have the responsibility of giving your affiliates the marketing tools to succeed by creating good sales and generating creatives, such as banner ads, endorsements/testimonials from affiliates, pictures of the product or service, and free reports.
Don’t
| DON’T harm your offer or your reputation with cheap tricks that trick people into clicking on your banner links. |
Finally, remember that the graphics must give some indication to the viewer what type of products can be bought on the site. Appropriate linking increases sales.
Your text and graphic links should link to various pages, categories, or even individual products on your site. While linking to categories are okay, linking to individual products—when you can—is much more effective. For example, provide a cut-and-paste text link code that connects directly to one of your top-selling products instead of just to the main page of your Web site.
Endorsements and E-mail Copy
Graphic banners and text links are an important part of your creatives and how you present offers to potential customers. But make sure you don’t assume that banner ads are the only way to go. Graphic and text links are simple ways to link from affiliate sites to the products and services you sell, but there are other ways to entice consumers to buy from you.
One very good way is by asking affiliates for a written endorsement. Affiliates have a reputation and credibility with their site visitors—or else why do visitors come at all? You can use this credibility to make sales. If the affiliate promotes your product or service on their Web site, your sales—and your affiliate’s commissions—will increase.
Do
| DO ask for personal endorsements from the affiliate site encouraging their visitors to buy your product or service. |
Finally, selling from an affiliate’s Web site is not the only way to get sales. An affiliate can increase the sales of your products by communicating with his site visitors through e-mail. Many Web site owners publish a newsletter, or at least, collect e-mail addresses for periodic mailings. Some even publish an eZine for subscribers.
Opt-in e-mail is one of the most powerful tools of e-commerce trade. According to eMarketer.com (www.emarketer.com), on average, people receive 25 e-mails a day. They check their e-mail everyday, but they rarely go to a Web site everyday. A successful affiliate program rests on trust and credibility. Both of these can be built by your affiliates through the use of e-mail. If they write articles favorably recommending a product in their e-mails to their site visitors, sales will increase.
Why is e-mail marketing important? Studies have shown that people do not make a sale on their first viewing of an offer. It can take up to three or four exposures to an offer before a consumer makes a purchase. E-mail and eZine promotions to a qualified list follows up on the initial contact with repeated messages to buy. E-mail is the best means to conduct this kind of marketing, because the real power of e-mail comes in the endorsement in the e-mail from the affiliate. When an eZine or mailing list has been developed with a trust between the writer and the audience, the endorsement goes a long way to increase sales for you and commissions for your affiliate. It moves people from being strangers to being introduced to you and your products personally by your affiliate. The unfamiliar is replaced by a recommendation from someone they trust.
By providing pre-written marketing copy to your affiliates that they can place in their electronic communications with their site visitors, you can both help your affiliate increase his revenue and add to your sales. Also, be sure to provide your affiliates with the simple browser redirect code for marketing via e-mail.
Storefronts and mini-sites are great tools to offer to your affiliates that are not quite as savvy when it comes to Web design. Basically, both of these affiliate links are chunks of HTML that create a ready-made page for the affiliate. To achieve optimal performance, these affiliate links should be tweaked to fit the look and feel of the affiliate’s site.
And of course, content is a fantastic creative marketing material for affiliates. It’s easier for content and community sites to produce this sort of creative, but even if you do not have an editorial team in-house, you should produce some content for your affiliates. Affiliate content is most common in the form of an article that is integrated with affiliate links. For instance, a drugstore site might offer an article during allergy season on how to alleviate allergy conditions. This article would feature suggested products with direct product links.
Remember that affiliate programs and affiliate selling are not about technology—they’re about marketing. That is why your creative materials are of upmost importance in creating a successful affiliate program. Scott Horst, Vice President of Marketing for Commission Junction, says “It is not enough to simply stick banner ads on a site and expect huge gains. It is about placement, context, marketing strategy and working together for optimal success.”