Keeping Your Program Fresh

One of the key challenges of an affiliate program is keeping it fresh and keeping it pertinent. If your stats tell you that your affiliate program is not measuring up like it used to, or if you feel you should be getting a better response from the offers placed on your affiliate partner site, then your creative and marketing copy may be getting old and tired or you may not be getting the most out of the traffic generated by your affiliate partners.

Ask yourself these questions: Are you using the same old creative you’ve used for the last few months? Do your offers reflect the needs of your potential customers? Do they reflect the season and are changed every few weeks to capitalize on seasonal events? And here’s a very important thought: Have you reaped the benefits of the traffic generated from your affiliate site whether or not they have bought something from you? If you are not doing all these things, you are not keeping your offer fresh to customers and building loyalty with your affiliates.

It’s not how many affiliates you have, it’s how productive they are. Making them more productive is the prime objective of your affiliate management team.

Test and Test Again

Your affiliate management team should have these two basic rules hung over their computer:

• Track Everything

• Try Everything

We’ve already talked about how there is gold in your affiliate tracking reports. Careful and detailed inspections of those reports gives you a window into the performance of your program in general and specific affiliate and affiliate types in particular. But once you know what’s happening in your affiliate network, how do you make changes to increase its effectiveness?

One way is to continuously test new creatives. The way to determine the best creative for a particular product or site is relentless experimentation and testing. You should be doing the following on a regular basis:

• If your affiliate links, such as banner ads, button promos, and text links, have not been updated in the past few weeks, change them. Affiliate links need to be regularly changed, analyzed, and refined. Just about any promotion’s effectiveness will get old and decline over a period of time.

• Test your types of links. Which works better on specific types of Web sites: banners, buttons, text, text with banners, or text positioning? Perhaps your offers work better on sidebars with promotional copy and not across the page. Test one featured product instead of a general promotion for the products or services you sell. Results will differ wildly depending upon your affiliate partner sites.

• Test and refresh promotions. Schedule and test different promotions for different affiliates and categories, and evaluate which are the most successful.

• Test specific offers. Some offers work better on some sites than others even if the audience is nearly the same. If you sell PCs, you may find that computers sold on education sites differ from those sold on business sites. Create computer configurations that focus on that audience.

• Along similar lines, test your pricing models. Change your price on certain sites and see whether sales increase. Perhaps you can use the same price but change the sales terms and see whether that changes the response to your offer.

• In addition to testing the tools of the affiliate program, test the results you are able to reap when paying extra attention to some of your up-and-comer affiliates.

Finally, start small. When you do a test, it’s just that, a test. Don’t run any test network wide. Run any test on a small handful of sites or on a small number of category sites. Try the test for a short time, such as a week or so. Use your reporting stats to judge whether it’s worth doing on your entire network. If so, roll it out to all your affiliates where appropriate.

Personalization

Affiliate marketing is young, and there will soon be a number of technology tools that can increase the performance of affiliate programs over the coming months and years. One technology that shows promise is personalization. Personalization tools will someday automatically select affiliate links and target promotions based on the content that the customer is viewing, the customer’s identity, and the customer’s preferences. Yo! (www.yo.com) (see Figure 11.3) is an example.

Yo! uses collaborative filtering technology to recommend the right product to the right person at the right time. By just adding a few lines of HTML code to your site, Yo! learns from each interaction on your site and the others in its network to continuously improve the accuracy of your product recommendations. This can help improve the targeting of your offer and increase your conversion rate of hits to sales.

BSELECT (www.befree.com/docs/merchant/person/index.htm) is a personalization technology available from Be Free. Completely hosted and supported by Be Free, BSELECT is quick and easy to implement. BSELECT learns with each customer interaction, capturing click-stream information to make personalized recommendations in real time. It’s a useful tool to enrich your customers’ online experience and turn them into loyal customers, and it’s completely anonymous.

BSELECT relies on customers’ actual Web site behavior, such as the things they access, choose, reject, and buy. It uses the patterns that emerge from those thousands (or millions) of visits to figure out what people are looking for, then instantly displays the most appropriate links as recommendations. The merchant is able to choose from banners, buttons, pop-ups, or text with this technology. The personalization technology of BSELECT is different from collaborative filtering or rules-based systems, because BSELECT does not require the maintenance of data. It learns from each interaction in real-time, correcting itself when it is wrong and reinforcing itself when correct with Adaptive Relationship Modeling (ARM).

Promotions and Special Events

One of the best ways to keep your program fresh is to align your promotions with seasonal and special events. By interspersing promotions that match well-known seasonal events with your special and general promotions, you make your program look new and timely and keep your affiliates happy by refreshing your content on their sites.

Start with the basic seasonal holidays. In the United States, plan promotions where appropriate around Christmas, New Years, Thanksgiving, Halloween, Labor Day, the Fourth of July, and Memorial Day. Include special events, such as Father’s Day, Mother’s Day, and St. Valentine’s Day. Then there are the seasonal periods, like summers and vacations, weddings, and the spring, and standing events, such as anniversaries, birthdays, and baby and wedding showers.

Be creative and think of how you can use events and certain times of the year to sell your products and services. How about using the anniversary date of the Michalangelo virus when it arrives each year to promote your virus-protection or back-up products and services? Computer products can be promoted specifically during back-to-school days in addition to the holiday gift-giving season. Tax season around March and April is a prime time to sell accounting and tax-preparation products and services.

Have your creative department make specific banners and other graphic links that reflect the season. A consumer’s eye will be better drawn to ads that promote St. Valentine’s Day cards for sale than a general link that says “Buy your greeting cards here” or to an offer for a PC configured specifically for the back-to-school set instead of just a common add for a Pentium III. If you look at just the preceding examples and use a little creativity about your products or service, you’ll see that there is the potential for changing your offer and creative nearly every few weeks (see Table 11.2).

Table 11.2. Potential Seasonal and Special-Event Calendar

Month	Possible Event Promotion
January	New Year’s Clearance Sales
February	St. Valentine’s Day, Winter Sports
March	Presidents’ Day
April	Taxes
May	Labor Day
June	Weddings
July	Fourth of July
August	Summer Vacations
September	Back to School, Memorial Day
October	Halloween, Fall Sales
November	Thanksgiving
December	Christmas, Kwanza, Hanukah

In addition to creating frequent promotions for the affiliates to use to market your site, it’s important to develop internal promotions for your affiliates to reward performance and loyalty.

One promotion that has received great results with ClubMom affiliates is a monthly drawing for a site makeover (performed by the affiliate team). This promotion was started as a test to encourage affiliates to improve their sites in order to improve their commissions. It all started with a targeted e-mail to 300 affiliates that had links up but were yielding very little performance. The following e-mail had a response rate of more than 50% and, since the initial e-mail, 45% of the affiliates have received commission checks—none of these affiliates had previously received a commission check.

Hi <<FIRST NAME>>

I was taking a look at your site and I think it has the potential to earn a lot more commission from ClubMom. Last month, you sent <<# OF CLICK IN PREVIOUS MONTH>> clicks to ClubMom for a total of $<<AMOUNT EARNED IN PREVIOUS MONTH>> in commissions.

I would like to invite you to submit your site for consideration for the ClubMom Site Makeover. This is an exclusive, new opportunity where I will personally work with one affiliate per month and provide assistance in marketing and design, including search engine optimization, homepage re-design, and site promotion.

If you are interested, reply to my e-mail by midnight on this coming Sunday (Sept. 10). I will contact the chosen affiliate by Wednesday, Sept. 13. Let me know if you have any questions.

GiftCertificates.com (www.giftcertificates.com) ran a contest for affiliates where it asked the affiliates to make a suggestion about its program and ways to improve it. According to Ryan Phelan, affiliate manager at GiftCertificates.com, the one-time promotion went off well, and it was a great way to have all its affiliates become consultants for it. In this contest, the top five suggestions received a $25 SuperCertificate.

Another successful promotion was run by enews.com (www.enews.com) where it sent a free enews.com keychain to affiliates for answering a survey on its HTML/non-HTML newsletter. Of its 75,000 affiliates, a few hundred responded to the survey, and it was considered a success because the prizes were low-cost and it made the affiliates feel heard, plus it helped shape the newsletter in a way the affiliates wanted it.

Build an E-mail Marketing List

If you check with some of your best affiliates, you’ll probably find that they have built an opt-in e-mail list that they use to sell the products and services of the affiliate programs they participate in. You should take a leaf out of their book and do the same.

E-mail marketing is one of the best marketing tools on the Net today—when done right. Getting the visitors to your affiliate sites to opt-in to a mailing list and obtaining their e-mail address with some demographic information and what their interests may be can be a powerful tool in your marketing efforts. One strategy is to present the opportunity to join the mailing list as an exclusive shoppers’ club. The club would promise to give members a first look at any new products, or special sales offered only to them. The club can also act as a vehicle to target offers to specific members thus personalizing your offer.

You may even add additional value to the e-mails you send out by including an eZine in the club benefits. The eZine could contain informative and entertaining material on your product or service and how it can be of use to recipients. An eZine adds value to your marketing message and can help increase revenue. To have your eZine rise above the normal marketing e-mail, you need to make sure it includes good content. Although an eZine is a promotional vehicle for your product or service, to get it read you need to include useful information that your target audience can use and appreciate.

Pick a topic or an issue that matches your product offering. For example, if your company sells outdoor apparel, information about the features and specifications of the apparel may not be very interesting. But telling your audience where to use that apparel is another matter. Your periodic eZine containing your marketing message about a particular hunting jacket could be well received if you also write about hunting lodges or hunting trips where the consumer can wear it.

So how do you build such a list?

Get your affiliates to build it for you. You already rely on your affiliates to draw traffic to your site, so why not ask them to help you find subscribers? After all, their visitors are already viewing your offer whether or not they click it and come to the site. Why not give their site visitors a chance to not only buy your merchandise but also sign up for your shoppers’ club and subscribe to your eZine? And if you are able to tag the subscriber or the member with the name of the affiliate site they came from and market to them in their name, you are well on your way to creating a strong and loyal relationship with your affiliates.

Imagine if you told your affiliates that you’ll be collecting names and e-mail addresses of their visitors. Suppose you tell them that you’ll use these email addresses to actively market to their opt-in subscribers in the affiliates’ name. Inform your affiliates that in the future all sales generated from these efforts will be added to the affiliates’ earnings. Do you think that they’d be happy knowing that you’re sending personalized messages to each prospect they send you and earning a commission if the prospect buys?

There are a number of ways to collect names and e-mail addresses of prospects to market to later on. First, place not one, but two links on your graphic banners. One part of your banner would display the latest promotional offer you have at the time and link to that page on your site. The other part of the graphic—or a separate graphic entirely that’s not even connected with an offer—would link to your shoppers’ club and/or eZine sign-up page. Another way is to offer a contest, free sample, or gift to entice a customer to join or subscribe.

Setting up an opt-in e-mail list takes some understanding of how a listserv works. You need your IT people to program the process of sign-up, confirmation, and the sending of your promotional newsletter or eZine.

An alternative to creating this program in-house is to purchase one off the shelf. Mail Master Pro (www.bizpromo.com/mmp.html) is a CGI script that you host on your server to build, maintain, and send out your newsletter or eZine. With Mail Master Pro you can send out a personalized text-based newsletter (and even create it in HTML format if you want). Another product is Postmaster General (www.postmastergeneral.com). It’s a Web-based e-mail management-and-delivery service that will automatically subscribe and unsubscribe people from your e-mail list in addition to sending out your newsletter.

Sandy BayNetworks (www.sandybay.com) offers a suite of integrated e-marketing solutions in its E-Marketing Service Partner (ESP) strategy to maximize the ability of merchants to acquire, retain, and create loyal affiliates. The suite includes a Membership Engine (opt-in e-mail/site registration), E-mail Engine (including list management), and a Newsletter Engine.

Marketing through e-mail on a periodic basis is a great way to keep your offers and your business in front of your customers and prospects—and a method that keeps your program timely and fresh.

Get the FAQ

One component of your program that can be a great efficiency tool is the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) file for your affiliate program (see Figure 11.5). Your FAQ should be comprehensive, with an overview of your program, information on commission payments, basic instructions on setting up links and maintaining the affiliate account, marketing and promotion policies, and any other relevant questions that affiliates often ask directly of the affiliate manager. Because most affiliates will not bother to visit the FAQ on your site, make it a practice to e-mail it to affiliates multiple times each year. This will help provide a more informed pool of affiliates, and it will cut down on affiliate inquiries.

Because staffing a program is a perennial issue, an affiliate manager needs as much help as possible to analyze performance and consult affiliates. Although all affiliate managers covet more data and resources, these are luxuries for too many. However, WebPartner (www.webpartner.com) offers a very helpful product called Affiliate Advantage that helps translate all the data you receive on your affiliate sites into business intelligence that you can leverage to increase revenue.

Some of the ways that Affiliate Advantage can help an affiliate manager to measure and improve the effectiveness of her affiliate program are to show how affiliates are merchandising your site, provide insights into the quality of customer experience at their affiliate sites, measure and rank affiliate performance to better assess ROI, and identify a set of best practices in performance and merchandising that can be deployed across their affiliate network.