I read with interest the post by Keith Bond on 6 Effective Habits of Super Merchants. I have a lot of time for Keith and think he talks a lot of sense. I just wanted to respond/add to a couple of his points on here, in order to give the perspective from a merchant/agency side in response to Keith’s affiliate sided view.
1) Improve Conversion Rates
Of course an absolute no brainer and appropriate to the wider online mix rather than solely affiliate. Doubling the conversion rate will give you twice as many sales for the same number of clicks.
What I would add to Keith’s post however, is that there are two metrics that make up conversion rate and affiliates are able to affect it also. Firstly we have Click Through Rate (CTR). The CTR is the propensity of a customer to click from the affiliate site through to the merchant site. The responsibility for this is shared, because an affiliate can clearly make changes on their site that will affect CTR, but at the same time the copy, content and creative and also the offer that are supplied to the affiliate by the merchant are vital to this.
Secondly the On Site Conversion (OSC), which is the percentage of customers who buy something once landing on the merchant site. Clearly the sales process on the merchant site is key here, but affiliates can maximise the chances by sending their traffic to the most relevant page and ensuring that messaging is constant throughout the journey.
2) Affiliate Friendly Website Updates
In a perfect world, of course yes. However we must appreciate that for a lot of large merchants, affiliate marketing makes up only a small amount of their sales and therefore affiliates are not always at front of mind when these decisions are made. However, even if changes are made then the person who is responsible for the implementation of the affiliate campaign should ensure that disruption to affiliates is at a minimum.
3) Effective Communication
One of the hardest things to get right as a merchant in my opinion. You are constantly looking to balance the requirement to share information with affiliates with the dangers of deluging them with rubbish and clogging up in boxes. Allied to this you have the constant struggle to break through the noise created by the myriad of other campaigns all competing for affiliate attention.
Obviously in an ideal world you would communicate with each affiliate on an individual basis according to their wishes, but on a practical level, for a large campaign with hundreds of affiliates this is very hard. I’d love to get feedback from a wide range of affiliates on how they like being communicated to. (Maybe a separate blog post).
On a personal level, I find most network communication platforms quite clunky and they don’t really allow us to do what we’d like to do.
4) Provide useful content
Again, something that is clearly best practice but I suspect gets done very infrequently on the majority of campaigns. I would be interested to know how many affiliates actually use content that merchants provide them, would they genuinely be able to drive more sales if this content was provided and in what format should it be provided.
This is something we’re looking into quite carefully but clearly it has a resource requirement. Therefore I’m keen to understand the potential impact that providing bespoke content would have.
5) Keep Product Feeds Up To Date
Couldn’t agree more. I think that product feeds and API feeds will continue to drive more and more sales as 3rd party developers like Easy Content Units, Fusepump and PrismaStar continue to develop propositions that increase uptake of CPA amongst the wider online space, by making it easier to promote merchants.
Keeping your feeds up to date has never been more important.
6) Make Your Affiliate Incentives Winnable
Again, I question how worthwhile affiliate incentives are in the present day and age, unless they are big enough to stand out from the masses. I question whether merchants are seeing them cost in in terms of how much they spend on a promotion versus the return they get in terms of new incremental business.
The volume of large promotions certainly seems to have died down in the last year or so with some merchants who have previously run high profile incentives pulling back on them. Are the days of the super incentive gone?
