To ensure your affiliate marketing programme is effective, it’s important to start at the campaign grass roots; ensuring your affiliate have everything they need to promote your brand. Each affiliate will have unique requirements in terms of content, images, links etc that will reflect their site and target audience – understanding these requirements is of paramount importance in building a successful programme.
We’ve compiled a quick guide to help you understand the main affiliates types are their needs when promoting your brand.
Content
Content affiliates do exactly what it says on the tin, they provide content heavy sites. These may be review sites or niche sites, they tend to focus their efforts on SEO to attain good rankings throughout the SERPS. The content affiliates don’t like to have their sales cannibilised by other sites such as voucher code sites so will often list codes on site too.
Likes – Exclusive content, Press releases, Codes, Exclusive Images from press shoots or of new products, Keywords, Commission Increases, Tenancy Placements, Top Sellers,
Voucher Code
Voucher sites or Coupon sites are sites that list discounts and offers from merchants. They focus their efforts on SEO, PPC and email along with a growing social media presence. Voucher sites will have a loyal following and often have high levels of email data that they frequently mail. Voucher sites have many rules and regulations they must adhere to, designed by the IAB and some have been known to break a few rules in the past, although most now play fair.
Likes – Exclusive codes, Commission Increases, Regular updates of offers, Content for blog posts, Tenancy Placements, Top Sellers,
Cashback/Incentive/Loyalty
Cashback and incentive sites are sites with a loyal following offering their users some form of reward for shopping through them. This might be cash or sweets or points to redeem online. They have large user bases that are emailed frequently along with additional blogs and forums for their users to participate on. Some incentive sites have neen hit in the past by fraudulent users, but most have now clamped down and are fast to stop this happening.
Likes – Commission Increases, Voucher Codes, Content to use for blogs, Tenancy Placements, Top Sellers,
PPC Affiliates
PPC affiliates are affiliates who will concentrate their efforts on driving traffic via PPC. There are a number of affiliates who have made successful businesses from doing PPC for merchants. This can be based on allowing the affiliate to bid upon your brand, generic terms or long tail searches. Quite often when allowed to bid upon a brand, there are deals done to ensure the affiliate puts a percent of their profits back into expanding the campaign to generic terms. PPC affiliates are still paid on a CPA so can be a low risk solution to increasing your search engine exposure.
Likes - Brand Rights, Top Sellers, Voucher Codes, Commission Increases,
Competition/Freebie
Competition sites and freebie sites are sites that offer their users something interesting or appealing – this may be a competition to enter or a free giveaway. They often have high volumes of users who are online savvy and love a bargain! These types of site can be rewarded for passing new users on, or for incremental sales.
Likes – Competitions hosted on merchant sites, Free gifts, Commission Increases, Voucher Codes, Exclusive content, Top Sellers,
Price Comparison/Shopping Directory
Price comparison sites do pretty much what they say on the tin, they compare prices of items or holidays or banks and much more. They use product feeds from multiple retailers or merchants to create a site filled with content. This is then sorted to show the best price or offer first. Most price comparison sites will take delivery costs and voucher codes into their listings. To get
Likes – Full Product Feed, Voucher Codes, Increased Commissions, Details of offers,
Email
Email affiliates are affiliates with large lists of data either of their own or through 3rd parties. They are highly skilled in sending email, delivery and converting email creative into buyers. They often have large lists that are segmented and will often test your creative first.
Likes – Email creative, Voucher codes, Increased commission,
If you want to discuss your affiliate strategy further or would like to know how we can help, please get in touch today.
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Whether you already work in affiliate marketing or are new to the industry, there are a few things to avoid to keep your programme running successfully and to ensure you get the best productivity from your affiliates.
Red Star Digital has put together a few examples of common mistakes some organisations make with their affiliate programmes to help you avoid these pitfalls in the future;
1. Set Unrealistic Targets
Don’t expect each and every affiliate on your campaign to send you hundreds of sales per month. Each and every affiliate is different with a varying capacity to send sales. Setting overly high tiers for commissions and incentives will mean that the smaller, but equally as important affiliates will not find it easy to hit any targets. This can mean they will become dis-heartened and could give up on the campaign all together. Equally, remember affiliate programmes will take time to set up and to iron out any teething problems before it starts to function at a decent rate. As with most things in life, the more effort you put in, the greater the result you will get out.
2. Cull Affiliates
It is a common mistake in affiliate marketing to suddenly decide to remove all the affiliates from a programme who have never made a sale for you. These affiliates are still relevant to you and your campaign – they may start in the future to set up niche websites around your products or they may even need help from you promoting your products. For those affiliates that only deliver one to two sales per month, these are still valuable sales and should not be snubbed. Keeping the inactive affiliates on the campaign does no harm. – Top Tip – why not set yourself a monthly goal to get a certain number of inactive affiliates active?
3. Failing To Understand Your Affiliates
Affiliates are humans too. Often working a stressful full time job, looking after a family and running their affiliate business, they can be very busy people with many demands upon each and every minute of their day. Running anywhere between 1 and 1000 sites with thousands of merchants to promote, they can often be under immense pressure. If you understand the affiliate mindset and what they need, you will find yourself in a much happier and evidently more profitable relationship. Taking them for granted and placing unrealistic demands on their time with little or no reward will do little for your campaign performance. Try to make things easier for your affiliate by providing a deeplink or code expiration date. By providing them with what they need; they are more likely to promote you and your products.
4. Did Not Do The Maths
When setting up your programme or planning for a key promotion in the year, ensure you fully understand all your costs, from the affiliate commissions, to the incentive bonuses to your network costs. Factor in all the costs to your profit margin and make sure you can afford to run the promotion. If you are running offline promotions, be aware these are leaked into the digital world and although you can do your best to monitor it, these promotions will still be used online. Stopping a promotion half way through or withdrawing voucher codes because you did not do the maths properly, will only have a detrimental effect on your campaign.
5. Leakage
Leakage points can include site elements such as; ‘contact us’ or ‘call us now on…’ across your home page. Similarly, using banners to promote other merchants on your home page is also a big ‘no no’ for a successful affiliate program. If an affiliate spends time and money sending customers to your site for them to then call a free phone number or be taken to another site, this means the affiliate loses out and will eventually stop promoting you all together. By using simple technology, you can hide your contact us/call us now messages when your site recognises that the customer has come through an affiliate link.
If you want to find out more about affiliate marketing and it’s benefits to your overall marketing strategy, then why not get in touch with Red Star Digital today and find out more about their affiliate marketing consultation packages.
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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.
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