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THE AFFILIATE
MARKETING PRIMER
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7 - SETTING UP AN AFFILIATE PROGRAM (Part 2 of
3):
You did read PART
ONE, I hope?...
CUSTOMER SERVICE NEEDS:
One thing I should mention before
going on: Yes, it will cost you something to set up a program, whichever
way you go about it - you knew that. A business expense you might not be
expecting is the quantity of email (/phone?) support you'll likely have
to deal with (perhaps proportional to the number of affiliates you recruit).
You'll get questions and appeals for help from some
intelligent people, from whom you can learn how to fine-tune your program,
and from some people who will perhaps make you shake your head in amazement at
their apparent lack of sense. (Or could it be that your instructions
weren't clear, or the person fielding the
query at your end didn't understand??)
The idea is that as your revenue grows
through the success of your affiliate program, you'll be able to pay
people to handle the incoming queries.
If you haven't read in the
primer section "How to Get the Most Out of
Your Affiliate Programs" the paragraph beginning with
"Some affiliate companies seem to be contemplating how to jettison 'poor producers'", I hope you will do so now. Don't be shocked
by the influx - be prepared for it. Spend some time thinking like an
unknowledgeable affiliate (even like a not-terribly-bright affiliate) so
that you dispose of as many points of trouble as possible before they crop
up as queries. (This is one of the best reasons to work on a really useful
FAQ file.)
But realize that this point of
contact is also where you can get a lot of creative ideas about improving
your website or services, for free! Everyone who contacts you is
interested, and possibly they are even more imaginative than you
are.
Please, don't make the mistake of having a narrow-minded
loyalist as your customer service representative... Someone who defensively
turns questions or mild suggestions for improvement into challenges to the
greatness of their company (and perhaps, when asked nicely to pass an idea
on to the website design people, instead cites the years their team has
been on the web and even trots out the "Marketing Degrees"
everyone has, to prove that the website is already perfect and the
"customer" simply too inexperienced to grasp it - I had it
happen to me while writing this!)... That's how to get behind and stay
behind (and quite possibly lose customers and/or affiliates, of
course).
Also realize that in any situation, of the many people who have
questions, only a small portion of them ask. You will do yourself
a favor by taking it as read that any question you get is representative
of an issue that is wrinkling the brows of a number of people who you
aren't hearing from. You want the most intelligent, thoughtful,
(patient,) and
analytical people you can find in your customer service positions! (Perhaps
you might even test your customer support people periodically with
"customer" messages sent by you via email addresses unknown to
them. If they know you'll be doing it, so much the better - they'll be on
their toes all the time!)
I think you'll enjoy this article from Ken Evoy of
SiteSell, Turn
Lemons into Lemonade, Sure... - about the difference between customer
satisfaction and customer delight. (Mere customer satisfaction
[i.e., they aren't actually complaining!] isn't enough to drive businesses
to greatness.)
And here is a short article on "the
80/20 rule" (80% of a business' success tends to come from 20% of
its, in this case, affiliates)... And how affiliate companies can empower all
affiliates to achieve better marketing results: "Affiliate
Empowerment".
And of course, a facility for handling international
customers (and affiliates!) can boost your business greatly.
BEING CHOOSY ABOUT AFFILIATES:
A more appropriate time to worry
about which are the best affiliates for you, if this seems critical to
you, is before you sign them up (see the "Affiliate
Empowerment" article linked in the previous
paragraph for some excellent clues on what to look for). If a prospective affiliate does
have a website, by all means take a look at it - if it is very amateurish
or you just don't feel good about it, you certainly have the right to
turn down the application.
But remember - it isn't only webmarketing
affiliates who can make you money... Do you really want to limit
affiliates to only those with websites?
Also, I wonder about those
companies that make it clear on their affiliate information page that they'll
only consider sites with a direct connection to their field... They might
be blindly ruling out some more creative connections that would work well.
For instance, what if I had a site all about the Orkney Islands?
- a
travel company would be a great addition, because you have to get there
somehow. Or that site about Harley motorcycles - people travel on them...
But I've seen travel-related affiliate programs that state that they'll
only consider "travel websites". It would seem more prudent to
simply invite people to present their sites and/or other marketing ideas
for consideration, with the understanding that their applications will be
reviewed with the company's objectives in mind.
If you aren't willing to accept an
affiliate without a demonstration of his or her website's drawing
"X" amount of traffic, please don't turn down the application
with one of those "you may have been denied for any one of the 8
reasons listed below; but feel free to reapply" notices - that's
simply rude. (Why would anyone want to come back for more of that?)
If you
require a minimum volume of hits (i.e., you are going to
deny everyone with a brand new website), let people know clearly when
to apply before they do so and are denied. There's no sense in being
negative when you can avoid it.
(And in case this wasn't obvious, if
you're leaning toward having a lot of control over your affiliates, you probably
won't want to set up a multi-tier program.)
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AFFILIATE PROGRAM SOFTWARE:
In "doing it yourself", you have three
options: Program it yourself, purchase affiliate software to run on your own server,
or pay a company to run their in-house software for you on their server...
1) Program it yourself:
If
you're a great programmer, of course, you could create your own program!
(No doubt some of the programs for sale started out this way.) Maybe you want something quite simple, or maybe you are up for any
challenge...
So I should point out one small thing, in case you take up the
gauntlet: As mentioned in the discussion on the previous page, some search engines use "link
popularity" as one factor in ranking your site. What you need to be
aware of is that link codes shouldn't contain question marks, because
search engines can't "spider" (follow) through such URLs. It
might not make a huge difference, but there's no sense in penalizing
yourself unnecessarily.
Other than that, I can't give you any help!
2) Purchase affiliate program software to run on
your own server:
Some
affiliate program software sells in the range of up to $10,000 (!).
A number of
programs sell for under $1000, but some are very basic and/or inflexible.
Particularly for those who want total control over their own program, it's
a challenge to find in-house software that will do the job.
Pretty inexpensive and pretty darned powerful affiliate program software called Ultimate
Affiliate is available from Groundbreak.com. At a
cost of $200, this software (only available for Unix-based systems) allows you to set up a one- to twelve-level per-lead or per-sale (percentage or
flat fee) affiliate program. (A pay-per-click program can be maintained
with software titled "Ultimate Advertiser".) It tracks by cookies, IP address logging, and
MySQL database (if applicable), and the administrator can set the
timeframe (up to indefinitely).
The Ultimate Affiliate program can be integrated with any
Perl-based shopping cart (and some others). It gives you a mechanism to
email your affiliates easily. The fee includes lifetime software
updates; but installation, if you choose not to do it yourself (you need a
decent understanding of Perl, and HTML for forms customization), is $100
extra. There are question marks in the codes (they work with various
shopping cart programs), but that arrangement can be changed by the
administrator. ...The site is chock-full of information!
On the other hand, here's on-site software
that has its own (real-time credit card processing
service-integrated) shopping cart - and is designed with
downloadable products in mind... Synergyx,
by Paul Galloway. (You might say that it's comparable to ClickBank's
own system, if you're familiar with that - more on that in the next
section.) Single- or two-tier, and the commission structure can be
very flexible.
Synergyx may be getting into the
a-little-bit-pricey range, but wow, does it have features! - I think
you'll be very impressed (and the site offers a great demo). You
don't have to use the shopping cart (now - room to grow?), nor do
you have to have (only) intangible products. ...But that combination has
become very common. Installation support is complete - Paul is
utterly devoted to customer service (and many very successful webmarketers
stand by his software products).
Then we have iDevAffiliate,
quite sophisticated on-your-server software at only $99. Many
testimonials laud the super-easy setup and range of features. This
choice might be especially good for merchants in three categories:
For those wishing to use PayPal, this interfaces with other shopping carts
but it is easy to integrate the PayPal mass payments option. For
those focusing on speakers of Spanish, German, French, Italian,
Netherlands, or Portuguese, the control panel for both affiliates and
merchants can be set to any of these languages (or English); plus one can
calculate payments in any of 52 currencies. And for programs which
especially lend themselves to offline marketing, there is an option
for creating a special page on your site for customers to type in the
affiliate's ID (which could be called a "promotional code" or
some such thing). The company also offers a monthly-fee,
on-their-server option (which, coupled with the "promo code"
page, would be a way for a merchant who works largely offline to
run an affiliate program nevertheless).
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| 3) Pay a company to run their
software for you on their server:
KowaBunga! Technologies offers truly excellent
company-hosted affiliate program software - it's called My
Affiliate Program Software. I think of this as the Cadillac
of the genre... It has an abundance of truly useful and elegant
features; the site is an exceptionally well-honed information-giver; and
their merchant services (and affiliate support, by the way) are superb. There
are 3 levels of service to choose from. I highly recommend that you
check out their site, no matter what route you may want to go.
There is also a powerful email/ezine list
service, "Opt-in Pro", available for $25/month - allowing you
to easily glean and manage opt-in addresses, send autoresponder messages, and
archive your ezine back issues on their website... Whew! And rest assured, you can import a database
of names/addresses from any email-handling utility you're currently
using. (Opt-in Pro is also available as a free-standing
service/software, apart from the affiliate program element. Click here
if you're interested in that.)
One
of the main virtues of the KowaBunga! program, aside from server cost/space saving, is that
it
allows for easy portability in case you change servers or ordering
systems. (Busy now? - Have
information sent to your email address by clicking here
and sending a blank message.)
A very good alternative
is AffiliateShop, by Pendulab. For
a good-value monthly plus setup fee, you can have access to
the means for click, lead, or sales-based affiliate tracking. (No residual
- but you can pay different amounts, either by percentage or
flat fee, to different affiliates.) Only the per-%-of-sale option has a
question mark in the tracking code. The software tracks by both cookies
and "session variables", for a period of 30 days. I should also mention ClickBank
again in this context... For those wishing to base an affiliate program
around services or ditigal products (i.e., not tangible products),
ClickBank is very popular (and easy/quick/cheap to get going with).
It provides an internationally accessible infrastructure that both takes
care of all the order processing (via credit/debit card - so that you don't need an expensive merchant services account) and
a single-tier affiliate program. The affiliate program is fairly
basic - but for what it is, it's an
effective solution for many businesses.
ClickBank represents, to me, the "lazy
merchant's answer to affiliate programming" - minimally, all you have
to do is set it up and let it go. (Let me clarify that I don't mean
to put down anyone who chooses the easy way! - I so chose myself. I
feel that it's very important to limit your responsibilities to what you
really want to be doing - otherwise burnout is likely to
ensue.) While you can develop your own relationship with
those acting as your affiliates (which is likely to add to your overall
success as you work to add to your affiliates' success), you don't have
to when you use ClickBank. You also don't have to pay the
affiliates yourself (which is true for most of the affiliate program
clearinghouses).
If you like the ClickBank model overall but
are a little frustrated at some of its restrictions (intangible products
only, no monthly billing, cap on the amount you can charge customers and
pay affiliates, no payment differential possible for JV partners) - and
are willing to at least commit yourself to a single session of
affiliate-paying (through their easy-to-use mechanism) each month - I
suggest taking a look at PayDotCom.
In fact, PayDotCom is the cheapest way to go if you have only one
product, because it's totally free! - and their activation fee (pay once
for all the other products you ever want to add) is still cheaper than
ClickBank's fee (for 50 products). A major benefit of using
PayDotCom is that purchasers can use their PayPal or StormPay
electronic funds as well as credit cards and online checks to buy your
products. (Also, your payments are instant instead of a)
monthly b) and only if over a certain amount c) and minus a check charge -
they go into your PayPal or StormPay account. No money held in
reserve, either.) Take a look... there are a number of other feature
differences that might make a big difference to you (notably the ability
to track, communicate with, and provide tools for your own
affiliates). (Still single-tier, though.)
And for another option entirely, there's
the 2-tier affiliate program option for those who wish to simply add an
affiliate program "on top of" their webhosting, via WebsiteWizard
- an excellent webhosting service with 3 levels of service (and this
feature is part of #3). Even the least expensive version of
WebsiteWizard (quite cheap) let's you add a PayPal-linked shopping
cart to your site; #3 also enables you to take credit cards without PayPal
(and has some other nifty features, naturally). There
are many ways to go! - it just depends on your desires and your budget.
The issue of how and how long links are tracked for
your program could be of great concern...
Savvy affiliates are looking for
the most complete link tracking possible, for as long as possible.
If you're seeking quality affiliates who will feel loyalty towards your
company, this factor might help you in deciding which affiliate program
management software option to go with. Here is an informative
article called "How
Does Affiliate Tracking Work: A 'Not-too-technical' Overview!",
by Todd Farmer of KowaBunga! Technologies.
While we're on the subject of
affiliate program software, there are two adjuncts I should mention:
HANDLING ALL THOSE SMALL PAYOUTS
EFFECTIVELY:
If you're going to be handling the
payments yourself, a complementary service that many merchants are finding
valuable is PayPal.
Their
Partner Program gives businesses all over the world a cost-effective means of handling the
many smaller payments that tend to go along with affiliate reimbursement,
via electronic transfer.
You would submit to PayPal a list of email
addresses and payment amounts; they will then automate a batch payment to
all of your affiliates. Money is transmitted securely from your
credit card or bank account to each affiliate's "holding tank" -
the
recipient can then retrieve it by direct deposit or ask for a check to be
mailed to him/her. You can still set a minimum amount to prompt a payment
- but
now you don't have the expense of cutting checks, stuffing envelopes,
and paying postage... And the service, incredibly, is free to both sender
and receiver.
Some international affiliate programs avoid the big
expense of cutting checks in foreign currency this way... They might send
checks in their own currency or distribute payments via PayPal.
However, only recipients in about 10 countries are able to take money out
of their accounts (by transferring to their bank accounts) - which limits
them to utilizing their affiliate income in purchases from vendors who
accept PayPal payments.
(Anyone can use this service, by the way, not just affiliate
programs. Individuals use it like a debit card. It's popularly used on
auction sites. And it can be used to especial advantage by any other type
of business that makes many small payments regularly, such as rebates.
Money can even be transferred from one PayPal account to others via email
as well.)
There's
one more section to go - See
PART THREE of 7 -
SETTING UP AN AFFILIATE PROGRAM...
Wondering
what to try next in your marketing arsenal?... ThinkJointVenture.com |
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