Targeted E-mail

In addition to the affiliate newsletter, targeted e-mail is an excellent tool to increase your percentage of active affiliates, and may assist and improve some of your lower-level affiliates.

The unfortunate truth is that the majority of your affiliates will never bother to put up links. So make it easier. Send out an e-mail to the inactive affiliates with code for one of your links. Tell them you are available to help and include your contact information. Odds are that if an affiliate has not put up your link within a week of joining your program, then that link is never going up on their site.

How do you know which affiliates are inactive? Check your reports. If they are not serving up any impressions or clicks, they’re not going to be able to generate any commissionable activity. Be Free offers an Inactive Affiliates report that makes it easy to identify which affiliates have not recorded any impressions. This report is based on whether an affiliate has served up any impressions, so it’s not foolproof, because some affiliates remove the 1×1 pixel (which tracks the impressions) from their affiliate code.

Also, targeted e-mail is ideal for identifying underperformers and offering advice on how they could improve their results with your program. Segment out those affiliates that have a lower click-through rate than the average affiliate. Provided that you have a quality creative that is rotated every four weeks, you can expect to see a click-through rate of about 3% or so.

According to Nielsen Netratings, banner ads had a click-through ratio of .36% in March 2000. But click-through rates for the Commission Junction network are between 3% and 4%. Comb through your affiliate stats and when you find affiliates with a high rate of impressions with a low rate of clicks, you’ve got to check out their sites and help them.

Bear in mind that most affiliates are not marketing experts, and the reason many affiliate sites do not perform well is because of ad placement. Just look at the affiliate sites and locate your links. Odds are that the low performers do not have your ads “above the fold.” Let them know this and their/your numbers will improve.

As mentioned in Chapter 11, “Managing Your Program,” one targeted e-mail to ClubMom affiliates 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.

This e-mail was targeted to sites that had affiliate links on their sites, but were not generating any results. The premise of the e-mail was that anybody who responded would be eligible for a free site makeover from the ClubMom affiliate team.

An important principle of the success of a targeted e-mail is to write a compelling subject line. Affiliates already receive too many e-mails, and it’s a struggle to even get e-mail opened by your affiliates. Be sure to mention the name of your company and ask a question that you think the affiliate would be likely to answer yes. The subject line for the makeover e-mail was, “Would you like a site makeover from ClubMom?”