Activating the Non-Participating Affiliate
With enough work, you can even change your onesie affiliates into up-and comer affiliates or even activate affiliates that have signed up for your program but have not placed your links on their site.
So, what are the reasons why many affiliates sign up for your program but don’t put up your links on their site? Neil Durrant of Affiliate Marketing.com in the UK suggests you consider the following:
Are your instructions clear?
Are your banners and text links properly designed?
Does the Affiliate understand your product or service’s benefits?
Don’t
| DON’T make the mistake of assuming that just because an affiliate has a Web site they understand the ins and outs of Web programming. Keep your set-up instructions to the new affiliate free of techno-babble. |
Your affiliate’s problem may be as simple as the linking instructions—the “how to” you send just isn’t clear enough. Are your instructions clear, and do they make sense? Remember that many of your potential best-performing sites are not maintained by programmers, or even those who know a lot about coding a page in HTML. Make your instructions for placing your linking code on their pages simple and easy to understand from a non-programmer’s point of view. Drop the techno-jargon and speak in everyday language.
The second question you need to ask yourself is whether banners and text links are properly designed. Will they provide the response they are designed to give? Are they designed to sell or just to promote your company image with a simple logo—a corporate billboard, so to speak? Do you offer a nice variety of links, both graphical and textual, both general and for specific products, and in different shapes and sizes?
Finally, have you given the new affiliate a clear list of your product or service’s benefits and merchandising and marketing tips (see Figure 7.7) that the affiliate can use within the copy of his site to promote your offer and monetize his site traffic?
Figure 7.7. Art.com gives merchandising tips to its affiliates to drive sales.
Initial Contact with an Affiliate
Declan Dunn advises that you put together a quick-start guide that goes out to each affiliate when they join your program. But instead of sending out a single welcoming e-mail, the quick-start guide should be sent out in seven easy-to-understand parts at different intervals. I remember, when I was a precocious metals and currency broker years back, using the same technique with my customers. Unlike stocks and bonds that were mostly understood at the time, prospective customers for commodities, such as precious metals and currencies, needed more education before they could make a buying decision. SI would send out a multi-part information packet over a period of several weeks, educating them on how the metals and currencies could be used as an investment vehicle.
Why split these mailings? First of all, I found that regular communications built up familiarity and credibility. It would do the same for your new affiliates. The multi-mailings also break a lot of important and detailed information into manageable chunks and helps keep the affiliate motivated and believing in your program, which is crucial over the first few weeks.
What’s an Auto-Responder?
| An auto-responder is an e-mail feature that automatically sends an e-mail message to anyone who sends you a message. |
A useful tool for this process is the auto-responder. The auto-responder allows you to send a series of personalized messages with the affiliate’s name and a specific subject included the e-mail. Using an auto-responder like the one from AWeber Communications (www.aweber.com) (see Figure 7.8) allows messages to be set-up so they are sent at pre-determined intervals. Take time to create a useful series of e-mails that teach the new affiliates how to implement your links, offer merchandising tips, educate them about your product range, and offer general affiliate tips and advice with links to helpful resources. And here’s an important point to keep in mind. Make sure you allow the affiliate recipient to opt-out of your mailing at any time by including the opt out information in each e-mail.
Figure 7.8. AWeber Communications offers an auto-responder program made for affiliate programs.
Another useful technique is to publicize the earnings of your top 5, 10, or 20 affiliates in your series of e-mails. This demonstrates to your inactive affiliates that others are making real money—and that they can, too.
Sometimes it’s not just an inactive affiliate’s laziness that’s to blame for poor performance. If could be that she was not given the necessary information to make activation a more distinct possibility. When you send out your activation e-mail to the affiliate, write to her as an individual with a reference to her site—don’t just send out a dry, corporate e-mail with a lot of promotional hype telling her what to do. Offer help and advice and invite the affiliate to contact you if she needs help.
Here’s an example of the activation e-mail that is sent to new ClubMom affiliates:
Dear <<FIRST_NAME>>:
Welcome to the ClubMom Affiliate Program! As an affiliate of ClubMom, <<SITE_NAME>> will enjoy the benefits of partnering with the top Mom site on the Internet. We are committed to providing our members with a variety of tools and resources, and we’re pleased to have you join the team.
GETTING STARTED
You can start referring new members (and earning commissions) today. Just go to our affiliate site at http://clubmom.reporting.net and you’ll find everything you need, including a variety of ClubMom banners, text links, mini-site code, e-mail code, and content to place on your site.
COMMUNITY
We’ve started up a group where our affiliates can communicate with each other to share ideas and strategies, interact and learn how to earn higher commissions. Just go to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/clubmom-affiliates/join to sign up for this group.
QUESTIONS?
If you have general questions, please refer to our FAQ at http://www.clubmom.com/corporate/affiliates_faqs.jhtml. If you cannot find your answer there, e-mail [email protected] and I will get back to you within 24 hours.
Thank you for joining the team—and here’s to a lasting, creative, and profitable relationship!
Sincerely,
Shawn Collins
Affiliate Manager
ClubMom, Inc.
200 Madison Avenue, 6th Floor
New York, New York 10016
tel 646.435.6513
fax 646.435.6600
http://www.clubmom.comP.S.
If you are interested in getting your site ranked better in the search engines, go to http://www.usamc.org/sesebook.htm to download my free E-Book, Search Engine School.
You should be very personal and accessible when you are recruiting affiliates, and this should stay consistent after the affiliates have joined your program.