Affiliate management basics
July 7th, 2009 Affiliate Blogger Posted in Affiliate management, All articles | No Comments »
affiliate management is a key part of any affiliate program, affiliate managers are highly skilled analyist and negotiators, we’re people-people and entreprenural by our very nature, infact, affiliate managers have to be in order to do the job we do, we have to negotiate deals and spot opportunities in a heart beat as well as manage the wider picture of the campaign over all.
Affiliate management is made up of several components -
Affiliate recruitment- Affiliate recruitment involves finding relevant affiliates and encouraging them to sign up to the campaign, as affiliates are essentially partnering with merchants they are free to work with any merchant they choose. typically affiliate recruitment involves, find affiliates based on the niche and products a merchant sells, finding their contact information and contacting them, tools such as Twitter, MSN, facebook, Linkedin, LinkCapture and market samurai and syntryx are used to help this process but ultimately its ‘knocking on doors’ and is very time consuming but necissary. Contacting affiliates takes the form of email, snail mail, msn, telephone, any form of communication is used and ideally personalized to get affiliates attention and ultimately encourage them to sign up.
Affiliate retention – affiliate retention occurs once affiliate have been recruited and ultimately this involves optimising affiliates for the program, affiliates need to be kept in the light of any changes and new promotions and need new and fresh content which can be provided by an affiliate manager, affiliates also need new creative and it is the affiliate managers responsibility to ensure this happens. Affiliates can be kept in the loop via emails, twitter, facebook and msn. Strategies need to be developed in order to incentivise affiliates to perform.
Campaign planning – planning any advertising campaign is an important part of marketing, its the same with an affiliate program, due to the nature of affiliate marketing a long term strategy needs to be taken making planning all that more important. Planning should include analysing the merchant site to ensure compliancy and a good checkout process, ensuring that commission levels are high enough to be competative and attract affiliates, ensuring there is a clear shedule of reporting and creative delivery as well as promotions between the affiliate, affiliate manager and the client.
Incentive planning – Planning incentives is important to ensure that there is enough PR for the affiliate program, it also helps to support and spike the interest of consumers and should be viewed as a core part of any affiliate program. Incentives should be geared towards getting a specific result, and should be planned with adquate time to allow implementation. Incentives can take the form of bonuses, tiered commission structures, prize draws and give-aways.
Affiliate policing – Affiliate marketing is all about closing a sale, for the most part this isn’t an issue, in that most affiliates will happily abided by the merchants terms and conditions, however, particularly in PPC, terms and conditions need to be very clear and well policed to prevent such things as brand name bidding and direct linking. AdsSpy.com, AdGooroo.com, iSpionage.com, HitWise.com, PoachMark by BrandVerity, KeywordSpy.com, SpyFU.com, KeyCompete.com, and The Search Monitor can be used to support this, and for monitoring true content affiliates google alerts and a good old google search can help indentify any new articles relating to a merchants affiliate program.
Tracking and program maintainance – whilst typically these would be convered by a tech team a good affiliate manager should understand how to setup tracking and the implications tracking has on a merchant site, they should be able to make recomendations on where best to place tracking to ensure that it the right perameters are being recorded in the tracking, and the right KPI’s are being tracked.
(in some cases) Billings and invoicing – in some cases there will be multiple networks as well as special partnerships with affiliates, these all need to be handled by an affiliate manager to ensure that the right results are being delivered, as a result some affiliate managers get involved in the billings and invoicing process.
Related posts:
Leave a Reply