Archive for the 'Email Marketing' Category

As the Merchant, you want your affiliate program to be successful.
So how do you get affiliates to promote your product?

Your job is to make it easy for the affiliates to make money. When they make money, they’ll promote your product more. They’ll give your banner better placement on their webpage, and they’ll send out your emails promoting your product.

First get all your creatives ready. Banners, emails, and landing pages.

Create some banners that are animated, and some that are stills. Start by having all the creative ready for them to copy and paste in all the standard sizes. Sizes should include:
728×90 Leaderboard, 300×250, 160×600 Skyscraper, 125×125, 250×250, 120×240, 120×60, and the standard 468×60 banner.

Also, have ready at least 2 HTML emails and 1 Text email creatives.
For the email, give them multiple choices for the Subject line, and From line. All they should have to do is copy and paste the code. Keep it sweet and simple (KISS). Allow them to run their own campaigns via Email, Search, Banners, Contextual and Pops.

After your chosen Affiliate Management company has all your creatives, it’s time to reach out to the affiliates. Most of these networks will do this for you with a standard announcement email. However, I highly recommend that you send an additional personalized email to them, introducing yourself, and how much you will bend over backwards to help make them successful.

In your introduction email, show them some of your banners. Intice them. Tell them how much they can earn with each sale. Share conversion rates (if you have them, and they are good). Give them incentives. Maybe increase the payouts after they reach a certain amount of sales in a given month, or other time period. Connect their incentive with a holiday. Make it a contest. But, whatever you do keep reaching out to the affiliates on a regular basis. Make them aware of you. Maybe an affiliate decided not to use you on your first announcement, but, maybe on your second or third time reaching out to him, he’ll promote your product. Maybe the affiliate just wants to try something new. Whatever the reason, keep emailing them creative ways to make money from you. Refresh your creative once per month. Let them know with an email update. Why not send them a weekly newsletter?

It’s a lot of work, but an active affiliate manager can make your affiliate program successful.

PS: If you want to do-it-yourself instead of using an Affiliate Network, then look into using MYAP, or a related affiliate management software.

A colleague of mine is starting an ecommerce site. He has formulated & contracted out the manufacturing for his new product. He has a limited amount of start-up money. He asked me how he should divide his marketing budget. What percent should go into online marketing channels such as: Search, email marketing, behavioral marketing, affiliate networks, banner advertising, etc.

Where will he get the biggest return on investment (ROI)? So, first question is, what is your monthly marketing budget? Answer: $20,000 for the first month. His cost per acquisition (CPA) is $20. If it doesn’t go well, then that could be the end of his new company.

Hmmm. Not bad. His challenges are: He is working with a shoestring budget with little room for testing. And, he has demanding investors, and if his first month doesn’t go well, then his whole project/company will potentially fail. Hmmm. Just a little stressful. What would I do? His cost per acquisition (CPA) is $20. Search Engine Marketing, and Behavioral Marketing might be too risky for the first month. And, forget about banner advertising. I would concentrate on email marketing, and affiliate marketing. I like affiliate marketing because he won’t pay-per-click. He only pays the affiliate for a sale. His payout (CPA) could be $20 or less. And $20 bucks is an attractive commission to an affiliate. Where to get the email list? From a CPA ( cost per acquisition ) network of course. They have an established network of affiliates that have their own permission-based email lists. And/Or, buy a highly targeted list from a list broker.

Now, for the big decision. Which Affiliate networks to use? I would recommend either AdDrive or optinbig for the mass email campaign. Another good affiliate network that has both email, and banner advertising, is Azoogle. If there is any marketing budget left over, I’d set-up a Search campaign, and track, test, and manage it very tightly. In the meantime, try to raise more funding for the 2nd and 3rd months until you become self-funding.