For most other online marketing channels, the marketer is speaking directly to the consumer. They send out an e-mail blast and wham! lots of sales come flooding in. They have a good ad out on paid search and their click through rate goes through the roof within a day or two. With affiliates, this just isn't so.
It's hard to retrain these marketers to get them to understand this concept because everything else they live and breath has almost instant cause and effect. What I've found with the affiliate channel is that we tend to see effects one month sometimes up to three months after changing a strategy or ramping up efforts for a program. It can often be a hard sell to convince a client that we just need a little more time. From their perspective, they're paying us to help them make more sales, they're paying the affiliates large sums in commissions and bonus fees and are not yet seeing the desired ROI. This often leads them to pull back on their responsiveness to our requests for the program and then any affiliate marketing efforts become inconsistent - a recipe for disaster.
With affiliate marketing, you're not speaking directly to the consumer, you're speaking to a sales force of online publishers. So a few things have to change. First, any marketing messages, offers or promotions must be prepared in advance so that we have time to get any links, banners and notices out to the publishers and so that publishers have time to get their own marketing efforts in place.
Secondly, communication with publishers must remain regular and consistent. With other channels, even if you haven't made an effort in quite some time, you'll know that as soon as you send out the next blast or launch the next campaign, you're sure to see a spike in sales. However, with affiliates, if you wait too long, by the time you have that next big blast ready, your publishers have already forgotten about you and are less likely to pay attention to this latest offer. Not only that, but if it's been long enough, many of your publishers have already left you for someone else.
Thirdly, expectations must be realistic. Instant results may not be seen. A new or newly active program can take up to three months or more before any real progress is seen and additional time before you can expect to see large numbers in sales. We can't let that dishearten us and pull back our efforts. This is a long-term investment and when the pieces fall into place it is extremely worthwhile.
My company actually did a recent analysis of an account who's sales had been dropping over the past couple of months. We compared month-over-mont their overall site traffic and sales alongside our affiliate numbers and added to the chart our offer and affiliate newsletter schedule. It was almost unbelievable, when these numbers were charted out like this, that it showed without a doubt that results of our efforts and the efforts on the merchant's part were seen within the month after those efforts took place. For example, let's say the merchant had their biggest month in August, affiliate numbers were highest in September. We also saw this same direct correlation with our offers and communication efforts. It was really amazing how we could so clearly prove our point.
When you think about it, it makes total sense that the affilaite channel should work in this way. A good offer goes out, publishers will pick it up and promote it. Traffic will start to pick up. Publishers see that and then ramp up their efforts more for that particular merchant. Then traffic increases that much more. More publishers see this merchant rising in the ranks and start to pick them up as well - etc. etc. It's a delayed effect. The oppisite is true as well and sometimes even more so.
Point is, give it time, you'll see that this is a worthwhile channel.
No comments:
Post a Comment