Red Star Digital

Top Tips For Your Affiliate Campaign

Affiliate marketing is a powerful route to market that if set up, managed and analysed correctly can provide an uncapped source of high quality leads, sales or clicks depending upon your requirements at a minimum cost.
To help you manage your programme efficiently and in a constructive manner, Red Star Digital have put together a few handy tips to help you run a successful programme and ensure you don’t make any huge mistakes;

1. Monitor Conversions
First set your conversion parameters, is it clicks to sales, clicks to order value or something else? Once that is in place you need to closely monitor conversions across all your marketing channels and ensure your affiliate channel falls in line. If your conversion suddenly drops or jumps through the roof, you need to find out why, and either fix the issue or replicate it with other affiliates. You also need to ensure you take into account that different affiliate types will deliver varied conversion levels; incentivised traffic and traffic coming from voucher code sites will often have higher conversion rates, so bare this in mind when working out your averages. Benchmark against competitor conversions (where the data is possible) and make sure you communicate the conversion levels to affiliates if they are above the average or sit level with others. Good conversions = more sales = more money = happy affiliates.

2. Pro-active Recruitment
Use the tools available to you such as various search engines to find key affiliates to partner with. Spending a few hours a week researching sites you want your products placed on will not only give you the opportunity for increased sales, but it will also educate you in the different types of affiliate site out there and how they operate. Using handy tools like Whois.net can often help you gather contact details for the site owners.
- Important – When you are recruiting, remember that affiliates often read hundreds to thousands of emails a day, so make yours stand out. Offer them unique content, voucher codes, increased commissions, banners or whatever else you feel will entice them into not only joining your programme, but pushing it to deliver sales.

3. Regular Communication
Providing fresh and regular communications to your affiliates will not only inspire them to promote you, it will also give you the opportunity to advise them which products to promote and why, what new products you have, any offers you have and much more. Take some time to work on the format in which you send your affiliates tthis information, and consider what they may need. Some affiliates like a deeplink built in, some prefer a list, some like images, some like fresh banners. Find a way of communicating that best fits you and your affiliates and make tweaks where necessary. Find out how your key affiliates like to be communicated with, msn, email, phone or another means and how often. – Top Tip – Don’t flood them with 10 emails a day, they’ll soon get annoyed!

4. Provide The Affiliates With The Correct Resources
Different affiliates need different resources to help them drive sales for you, from feeds, banners, email creative, voucher codes and unique content to seasonal incentives and promotions. When planning a promotion or setting up your affiliate campaign, try to cover all the varying types of affiliate to make sure they have what they need to start and continue promoting you. Remember – when creating banners and email creative, remove any ‘leakage’ points like phone numbers and URL’s.

5. Build Relationships
Building relationships is key within affiliate marketing, from getting to know the network or agency staff to getting to know your affiliates. Many of the most famous deals in affiliate marketing were done, sitting face to face around a pub table whilst having a drink and a chat. By attending events and get-togethers frequently you will be able to meet your key affiliates and potential affiliates face to face, offering them and you chance to give and receive feedback thus enabling you to work together more closely to deliver the results you both need.

Here at Red Star Digital, we offer Affiliate Marketing Consultation, so if you have any questions or want to discuss our services further, please get in touch.

Top Tips For Setting Up Your Data Collection Campaigns

Many clients that we advise with their online data collection have already had some experience with generating leads in this way; however, these experiences are not always positive. Quite a few of the issues clients experience with online lead generation centre around how the campaign was set up at the beginning – which is often caused by miscommunication with suppliers.

To make things a little clearer in the foggy world of online data collection, Red Star Digital have put a few tips together designed to assist with the setting up online lead generation campaigns and also to ensure you get the most from them.

Specify Your Exact Requirements

Ask yourself what data you require. If you have exclusions based on gender, age , annual income or something else appropriate to your needs, ensure you state this at the set up stage of the data generation.
It’s also important to specify your data delivery needs from the outset too. Do you require data to be delivered through a live data feed or through a CSV file? When would you like the data to be delivered to you, daily, weekly or monthly and would a certain time suit your needs? These are the key questions you need to answer before you set up any data capture campaign with a data supplier. The more questions you ask yourself at the beginning, the less time you will have to spend stripping out useless information or chasing the data to be delivered.
Make sure you also specify what constitutes a valid lead not only to your supplier, but also on any paperwork you draw up with them. By setting these parameters in place at the start, you can ensure you do not have to pay for invalid data.

Specify A Test Budget And Cap It

Don’t blow your entire budget on one day with one supplier. Try using a variety of suppliers and cap their leads on a daily basis – this avoids being flooded with leads and burning the budget too quickly. If you spread your data capture requirements with a number of suppliers, this will assist in optimising your campaign in the future with the best converting data.

Specify Your Reasons For Returning Data With An Accurate Returns Timeframe

By specifying your reasons for returning data that did not meet your needs or standards, you can work more closely with your suppliers to optimise your campaign. If you fully explain the reasons for returns, you and your supplier will be able to draw up some ideas of improving your data sources in a prompt and efficient timescale. You should also make sure that your paperwork includes a deadline for when returns will be provided, for example the 5th working days after month end.

Read And Re-Read Your Paperwork

It seems too many organisations do not read their paperwork properly. To avoid any issues further down the line, make sure you read your paperwork not once, but twice. This way you will fully understand exactly what you will be receiving, in what format and on what days, as well as the policies for returning data. Make sure you keep your paper work in a safe place and do not be afraid to ask questions if you do not understand any terminology on it. It is better to have a clear and defined picture at the outset rather than find difficulties later on.

Shameless plug:
Red Star Digital offers a range of service to assist clients with their current online data collection campaigns or designing and collating new prospect lists – if this is of interest or you’d like to chat further with a member of our team, please feel free to get in touch.

We’re Finally Live!

Finally, a year after Red Star Digital was set up, our site is now live!

We’ve set the site up to not only outline and present our services but to provide updates on all our recent projects and successes. They’ll be regular features and ramblings from Red Barrington on our blog as well as some guest posts to look forward to.

We’re really excited about our new site development and are always keen to hear any feedback you have about the design, content and features – so please feel free to get in touch.