Affiliate Marketing Monday – Managing Your Affiliates

In this week’s edition of Affiliate Marketing Monday, we are going to discuss managing your affiliates.  There are two main types of affiliate management that we will get into as well as how to manage them.  Let’s just jump right into it.

The two main forms of managing your affiliates can either be done in-house by yourself or through an OPM(outsourced program manager).  For some, using an OPM is the easiest way to manage because you just may not have the time or resources to do so.  Below are some tips if you are going to manage your program in-house, and also what your OPM is most likely doing as well.

Relationship

Building a relationship with your affiliates can be just as important as building a relationship with your customer.  Having a good relationship with a large affiliate may put your offers at the top of the list as opposed to not having a relationship with them at all.  Of course if your offer and your commission rates suck then the relationship may not matter as much, but if it comes down to two merchants with similiar offers, who do you think the affiliate is going to list higher on their site?  Your affiliates are the ones that are using their own website real estate to promote your offers, so not having a relationship with them can become damaging to your brand.  How do you build this relationship?

• Phone call – this form of communication is talked about frequently if whether your affiliates want to talk to you on the phone.  Some don’t like to use a phone and prefer e-mail.  If you’re not sure, simply ask them in an e-mail what the best time to call them is to speak about furthering their revenue with your program.
• Thank You Notes – every month or any time a large sale comes in from that particular affiliate, send them a hand written thank you note in the mail.  Handwritten notes can go very far now a days, think about it, when is the last time you had a hand written letter or note?
• Frequent Communication – you don’t want to be annoying, but stay in front of them.  Make sure they remember you when they are making some updates to their homepage and adding a new banner to their most heavily visited page.  This could be a weekly / bi-weekly e-mail just to touch base.  You will be able to determine which affiliates that may be too often for, adjust accordingly.
• Special Offers – this one is pretty self-explanatory.  If you are willing to give an exclusive, special offer to your affiliate, then you are building a relationship right there.

Newsletter

Your company may already have a weekly, bi-weekly, monthly newsletter that goes out to customers or those interested in your company updates.  Why not create a monthly newsletter for your affiliates?  This monthly communication is a great way to motivate affiliates.  Spotlight a few affiliates that may have had an excellent previous monthly performance.  This could potentially motivate some of your smaller affiliates to do more the next month to be mentioned in the newsletter.  You can also include any new or updated banners that you may have recently uploaded.  If you have any upcoming promotions, this would be a great opportunity to get this information to the affiliate now so they can start to plan ahead.  Promotions will be the focus of next week’s Affiliate Marketing Monday.

Customization

When creating new banners, speak to some of your better performing affiliates or ones that you are trying to build a better relationship with and find out exactly what size banner they are looking for.  It shouldn’t take you very long to resize your banner.  The 5 minutes that it may take you to do that can go a long way in the relationship process.  Most of your larger affiliates are going to require a specific size, so make sure you have it.  A lot of smaller, niche affiliates may need sizes different then a 125×125, reach out and ask what kind they would like.

Reporting

Like any other program that you are running, you must be able to evaluate how it is performing.  There will also be an in depth post on reporting on February 22, 2010.  We will get into more details at that time, but some of the things that you want to be evaluating are:

• Click-thru-rate (CTR) – it may look good that a banner is getting 100,000 impressions, but if not a single click, then there is a problem.  Banner location, banner burnout, wrong niche, etc.
• Converstion rate – be sure to have a metric, if your overall conversion rate is 6%, don’t expect your affiliate conversion to be 25%.
• Active affiliates – the amount of affiliates you have typically doesn’t matter if they are not active.
• Number of sales – this is a great tool to figure out where your sales are coming from.  You will want to become more active with those bringing the most amount of sales.
• Sales Amount – just like any other report, you want to know how much each affiliate brought in.
• Cost – this should include all commissions paid and any network fees that may be incurred throughout the month or time period of report.

These are just a few quick tips on managing your affiliates.  If you think of your affiliates as your customer base then it will become easy to manage them.

Come back for next week’s Affiliate Marketing Monday when we will discuss affiliate promotions.
photo credit: William Arthur Fine Stationery via photopin cc