Best Ways to Contact Publishers

This is always a tough one as every individual will have their preferences, but there are certain best practices one can adopt to ensure a higher rate of return on contacting publishers and trying to get feedback and responses. Here are my 10 rules for getting in touch and reaching your publishers:

Rule #1: Do not over-communicate.

So many people fall into this pitfall. They think if they bombard all of their publishers every day with lots of deals and offers in a big newsletter they'll make more sales. That is simply not true. All it proceeds in doing is annoying your publishers, making them feel like their being spammed and the more e-mails they get from you, the more they will start to ignore you completely and lose interest in your program.

Rule #2: Always have something new to say.

If you keep sending the same offers again and again and again, your publishers will just lose interest because they've seen it already and have either already put it up or determined that it is not a worthwhile offer. Eventually this will run you into the same problem that we found when violating rule #1. The publishers will simply start ignoring you completely so that if you do have something worthwhile, you'll have a much lower response.

Rule #3: Don't make empty promises.

Sadly, this had to go in here also. When you send out offers and promotions and especially bonus incentives, you absolutely have to follow through on your offer. Don't be the "boy who cried wolf" to your publishers. If you have a plan to send out daily offers for a two week span, then make absolutely sure you have something up and ready for them every single day. If not, your publishers will be trained to not trust you and will eventually leave your program for a competitor they can trust.

Rule #4: If you're sending a personal e-mail, be personal!

When you're trying to reach out to specific publisher contacts personally, even if it's someone you've never contacted before, be personal. Keep it short, to the point, and make it sound like you're really interested in hearing from them personally. Lengthy and informal e-mails are almost always a sure-fire way to guarantee your e-mail to be filed away for later and probably lost or forgotten. You'll find that the more simple and personal messages are more likely to be read and responded to.

Rule #5: Be careful with your subject line.

For this one, I'll just refer you to a great Mashable article showcasing an infographic and study done by Boomerang: http://mashable.com/2012/02/09/boomerang-email-infographic/

Rule #6: "Rule of Three" for those personal e-mails.

Credit for this one goes to a couple of Account Directors at Commission Junction. I heard them speak at CJU last September and they brought up this "rule of three":

• 3 words in the subject line
• 3 paragraphs, maximum
• 3 sentences per paragraph

Always keeping messages short, sweet and to the point is always the best way to ensure you'll be heard. I'm among those that hate reading long-winded and over descriptive e-mails. When those hit my inbox, I usually save them for later and it's happened that I've taken days before I get back to them to actually read them through.

Rule #7: What's in it for me?

That's what a publisher wants to see. If you want to grab their interest, make sure there's something in there that shows them how much they can gain by promoting your offer or responding to your requests.

Rule #8: Get feedback.

As I said before, every individual will have their preferences. Once you've got them, be sure to ask them the best way to get in touch regularly that will ensure the best responsiveness. Keep notes on your top publishers and who your contacts are as well as best way to reach them and what processes are best to send them your offers.

Rule #9: Using the phone should not be your first method of communication.

Especially in this industry where everything is online, most people find random phone calls to be disruptive and extremely annoying, especially if there's been no frame of reference or past contact history. You'll find that most are super responsive to the right e-mails and prefer e-mail only communication. Of course getting on the phone should be involved at some point, and can be the only way, but it shouldn't be your first attempt. Send an e-mail first and wait for a response. I'd even suggest sending 1-2 follow-up e-mails before picking up the phone. Speaking from personal experience, I've gone out of my way to ignore those that abuse the phone like aggressive salespeople. I'm much more agreeable and responsive to any form of online communication.

Rule #10: Be Friendly

Publishers are people and they're people that you want to work hard for you. Always treat them nicely, be courteous and professional. Even if they've made mistakes, 95% of the time, it is not on purpose. Keeping them happy will guarantee that they will make you happy too.

The Top Shopping Sites you Must Familiarize Yourself with if You're going into the E-Commerce and Affiliate Marketing Business

In my capacity as an affiliate manager with a sizable agency, I come across many different clients and representatives of these clients. The people I deal with come with varying different degrees of online experience and often one wonders what they are doing working in this industry if they are not familiar with shopping online or some of the top shopping sites on the market.

I grew up with a mother who loved watching the Home Shopping Network and favorite activities included browsing through the latest mail order catalogs. Growing up like that I made the natural progression to online shopping. Being an avid online shopper from the early days when Amazon was just a book store and Google was just a small new search engine, I often find it hard to comprehend that there are still people out there that have never heard of some of these sites below or even considered purchasing something online.

So here it is, my hit list of the top shopping sites you must know if you intend to run an online store or work in e-commerce and affiliate marketing. This is broken up into two separate lists. First, the list of sites you must check out before entering into the business, and then a list of top sites you should check out after you have a decent business and are looking into affiliate marketing.

Take some time to check out each one. Shop around, see what's there, maybe buy a thing or two. If you're going to sell something online, you have to understand what it's like from your customers perspective and perhaps what your competing against.


The Before List:

#1 - Amazon.com

As the #1 site on according to Internet Retailer, of course the first one should be Amazon.com. If you're going to see what e-commerce is like, you'd better start with the best of the best and see how it's done right. With their top of line technology, merchandising and marketing, they're hard to beat. They are a huge success story and it's no wonder that the recent nexus laws for Internet sales tax has been so commonly referred to as the "amazon law".


#2 - SlickDeals.net

Any savvy online shopper will be familiar with SlickDeals.net. Their user-based forums are the ultimate source to finding the best deals, discounts and prices across the net. Founded in 1999, they have become one of the largest and most well known destinations for their user forums where other savvy consumers are sharing and posting the best deals they find. But posters beware, SlickDeals' users can be very brutal if they don't like your deal.

#3 - Woot.com

Every Internet/technology enthusiast is obsessed with Woot! along with all of their other sites and brands. Woot's brands bring together the best of both worlds in online shopping and deal hunting. Check out their multiple daily deal sites where one item is sold every day at an unbeatable price - woot.com, kids.woot.com, home.woot.com, shirt.woot.com and more. Don't forget to keep an eye out for the monthly woot off and the ever elusive bag of crap. They also have a deal forum (in a similar vein to slickdeals), deals.woot.com.


The After List:

#1 - ShopatHome.com

With a great domain name and one of the largest consumer following in the affiliate space, ShopatHome.com is a great destination. They not only provide a great place for customers to find the best discounts and deals on the net, but they also offer cashback rebates on purchases when shopping through their site. Rebate sites, like ShopatHome.com will often be the bread and butter of most e-commerce affiliate programs.

#2 - FatWallet.com

FatWallet.com is a top destination for shoppers looking for the best deals online. With their cashback offers combined with their stellar user forum and hot deals section, customers don't need to go elsewhere. They know they're getting the best deals when shopping on FatWallet.com. As their name suggests, they help us all keep our wallets nice and fat.




#3 - Retailmenot.com

As the top coupon site on the market, you can't miss Retailmenot.com. They have some of the best natural search rankings on the market for almost any coupon or discount related search terms. If a customer is looking for a discount, RetalMeNot.com will be the first site they see. Retailmenot combines both user-submitted offers and coupons as well as vetted deals they've gained through their affiliate partners. You'll also find a guaranteed voting system so incoming customers will know if a coupon listed is successful and current.

Why Allowing Publishers to Bid on Your Trademarked Terms is Good for Business

We're not talking about pure trademark bidding here, but what's referred to as Trademark+ (or TM+) where affiliates will bid on the trademarked name plus another term like "merchant coupon" or "merchant discount".

This has been a very long-standing debate in the industry. It comes up with every single program we manage without fail and is a very difficult argument to win.

Most merchants view this as "cannibalism" to their business. They feel (usually very emphatically) that these sites are doing nothing but claiming sales for customers that they would have gotten elsewhere. They firmly believe that any publisher doing so does not bring them any incremental value so don't see why they should pay the commissions or partner with these sites at all.

Well, do I have a surprise for you! We've actually proven with a couple of solid case studies that the complete opposite is true.

For years we've been arguing the following points when it comes to trademark bidding for affiliates, but it was always theoretical and our words against theirs. We could never really prove it and often lost the argument:

1. It increases traffic and conversion rate by targeting consumers looking for something of more value than what they'd find by simply searching for the merchant's name. They're likely searching for things like coupons or discounts.
2. We're allowing affiliates to leverage the merchant's name to bring additional traffic to their own site where they are providing an added value to help close the sale for the customer.
3. It helps clear out the space and cut down on competitors bidding on trademarked terms.
4. While yes, it may give the affiliates some "easy money", they are all more than happy to give the merchant added exposure and value because they are allowed to do so.

However, this is no longer theoretical, we now have proof thanks to a couple of clients that were kind enough to share their analytics of their entire site with us.

Here's a summary of the two case studies we put together:

Merchant 1: This merchant had been with us for a number of years and allowed TM+ bidding for all publishers. Around May of this year, they decided to make a policy change and disallow all publishers from doing this (much to our protest). After three months of running the new policy terms, we did an analysis to see how this affected sales and traffic. Here's the results we found:

•  Affiliate sales had been trending about 8% up from last year, but after the change, we were down 20%. A net loss of approximately 4,000 transactions.
• The merchant's PPC traffic was supposed to have picked up the difference since that's the marketplace we shut down for the affiliates. PPC traffic only picked up an extra 2,000 transactions. Only half of what we lost from the affiliates. That's a 1:1 ration. For every customer we "saved" we lost another.
• Furthermore, we looked at Google Analytics' new Assisted Conversion reporting (check here for an explanation of these reports) and found that the assisted vs. last touch ration for affiliates dropped by 12%. Meaning, that for every 100 customers that were closed by affiliate sites, we may have lost an additional 12 that would have hit an affiliate site somewhere during their online shopping.

Merchant 2: This was a relatively new merchant we had started working with. Their policy had been extremely tight and did not allow for any TM bidding. So we made our case and started opening up the marketplace for select affiliates around last May. Here's the results we found for this one:

• Affiliate traffic increased by 42% and sales increased by 85%. Affiliate conversion rate increased by 30%.
• Overall site traffic increased by 47% and sales increased by 92%. Overall conversion rate increased by 30%.

We were able to clearly show here with these two studies that :

1. Disallowing affiliates to practice TM+ bidding can result in a loss of sales for the overall business.
2. Introducing the policy for affiliates will significantly boost overall traffic and sales.

What we see here is that by limiting an affiliate's methods of gaining traffic, they have little incentive to promote a merchant's offers. At the end of the day, they'll go where the money is.

By allowing them to do this, yes, we may be paying more for some sales we would otherwise get, but we gain a much higher return in the long run. When dealing with affiliates, one must always remember, this is about building relationships. When doing anything at all to an affiliate program, the first thing that should go through your mind is "Will this hurt my relationship with this publisher and could I lose additional and future sales?"

Like we already mentioned, most affiliates are more than happy to provide added exposure and placements on their site in exchange for these rights. In fact, we had a featured spot on one of the sites for Merchant #1 for about two years running. A few weeks after the policy change, that affiliate had to pull the spot in favor of a higher bidder and we lost that incremental traffic.

So have I convinced you yet? I always find it so mind boggling the lengths I have to go to in order to make people more money....

Why Should I Pay a Coupon Site Full Commission?

That you're asking this question in and of itself is a problem. Have you not been paying attention to the world around you? The economy is bad. Consumers simply can't afford to pay full price anymore and are searching for coupons and discounts more than ever.

I can't even begin to count how many articles, reports, webinars and panels I've seen discussing this over the past few years.

So why would you not want to optimize and work closely with this very active and one of the largest segments of publishers on the market?

Yes, there are some coupon sites that are of less quality than others and yes you'll want to weed those out of your program, but there are plenty of them that are well worth your efforts and money.

Many of them will provide a lot of added value for your customers and can bring in new customers and traffic. They'll often offer lots of extra placements and prime exposure at little-no extra cost to the merchant.

There's another point to consider here. There's a very strong chance your competitors are being heavily promoted on these sites because they've realized the positive value here. Even if I can't convince you that these sites are worthwhile in general, at least I can make the argument that you have to work with them or risk losing sales to your competitors.

"Ah," you say, "but I know through my analytics that this customer came to my site from another source and THEN went looking for a coupon after seeing the coupon box on the shopping cart page. So why should I pay them for that sale at all?"

You're forgetting the one most basic and fundamental aspect of affiliate marketing. This is all about building relationships. Unlike other marketing channels where it's all very data-centric, affiliates are people. If a search campaign is costing you too much, you shut it down. If a blast of e-mails didn't send you sales, you don't send the same one again. Dealing with your affiliates is not so simple.

Yes there is a chance that the customer would have made their purchase without going through the coupon site, but do we know for sure? How do we know that the customer, after checking the coupon site and not finding a coupon for your site would have abandoned their purchase for a merchant who did have a coupon? There's no way to no for sure, but better we spend a little more on those sales than risk destroying the relationship with this publisher and losing sales.

Let's say you've ignored everything I've said here and decide to start cutting down on coupon sites. You feel that they are not really bringing you quality sales and you are paying too much for them. Well, here's what will happen:

1. The coupon site, seeing that they're not making as much money, pull back on their marketing efforts for your company.
2. Competitors start showing up instead and are likely gaining traffic that was once yours.
3. Without any listings for your site on these coupons sites, some customers searching for a coupon will abandon their shopping carts.
4. Due to the lower payout and fewer active publishers your network ranking will start to drop.
5. This makes it difficult to recruit new partners who feel they may not make money with you.

You see where I'm going with this? It can just continue to snowball after that. Granted this is an extreme, but you get my point.

Bottom line is, you absolutely want to work with these sites and maximize everything you can out of them. Consumers are shopping for coupons and discounts more than every before. Brand loyalty is slowly becoming a thing of the past as consumers will simply just look for the cheapest deal and the biggest bang for their buck.

A successful affiliate program simply can't work without these sites.

It's all About Balance

Is it good to have lots of different offers all the time or should we just have a few ongoing offers? Should we spend time on banners for everything or just create text links? Do commission increases work well or are bonuses or gifts better? Do % off or $ off offers work best? Do incentives work, or should we just increase our payout?

The answer is: YES

Very often there's no right or wrong when it comes to the affiliate marketing channel. We're dealing with hundreds if not thousands of different types of sites and each one will have a different person behind it making decisions. There's not going to be that one strategy or one idea that will work for everyone. It's going to come down to balancing these things out and often a lot of trial and error before you can find exactly what works for you. Even then, what works now may not work a month or two months from now. This channel is ever-changing as more publishers join the market and new innovative sites are created.

So what do you do?

Plot out a solid plan that's as best balanced as you can and test it out. See what works. Give a good 2-3 months and then regroup to see where your traffic was best and which offers converted well. Make some tweaks and try again. Make sure to stay in contact with your publishers and get their feedback. Most of them will know what does or does not work for them and their visitors. You'll want to work with some of your top players one-on-one to make sure they have exactly what they need from you. Try plotting out 2-3 different strategies based on the type of publisher and/or how well they perform for you. Talk to publishers about your plan and work out some kinks with them first. Make sure you're plan includes strategies that target as many of your publishers as possible.

And don't forget, it's all about balance!

Affiliate Marketing Can have a Delayed Effect

Too often I am faced with marketers that have it so ingrained in their understanding that there is always an immediate cause and effect when doing online marketing. With affiliate marketing that is not always the case.

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.

Consistency is the Key

The singlemost biggest question I get asked by clients is "How can we get this program growing/moving faster?"

My answer is always and forever "Consistency". It's so surprising that this can be a new concept to so many and how often I have to stress this so much. Yes, it's true that different marketing channels will often benefit from different messaging and offers, but when you're small and just getting started or don't have the branding and visibility of other well known sites, it's best to start small and keep your message and offers consistent via all channels.

There's no reason a strong offer that's working well via your e-mail marketing shouldn't do well via paid search or social network channels. It can often be those multiple touchpoints that will lead to closing a sale.
But that's only part of it. When it comes to affiliate marketing, you need to have consistency with your affiliate communications as well.

Imagine if you had a door-to-door sales person working for you. This salesperson would go door-to-door showing potential customers a catalog of the latest products, offers and discounts available for purchase. He/she does a fair job of getting new customers and getting existing customers to continue shopping with you. Now imagine what would happen if this catalog is only valid for a few weeks and after a couple of good copies, the salesperson doesn't hear from you. So he sits and he waits, and finally gets an updated copy two weeks late. Maybe the salesperson thinks it was just this one time so he/she continues to go out again promoting your catalog.

This latest one expires and again there's no update. The next one arrives three weeks late. Now the salesperson is starting to get a little annoyed. They rely on this income and need the information to coninue to come through on time. But again, they still go out and hope it'll get better.

This time they're waiting for over a month for something new. At this point your once eager and happy salesperson is probably now looking for a new job. Now take this one step further. Imagine that this same salesperson is being constantly barraged with updated catalogs and new offers from your competitors on a regular basis, trying to entice him to promote their products or services instead of yours.

Why would you expect any different from an online affiliate? Why would an online affiliate keep your ads and your offers in the forefront when they don't hear from you and are constantly indundated with hundreds of new offers, specials and products from other advertisers on a daily basis?

It's just too important to consistently communicate with your affiliates and provide them with the latest products, sales, offers and everything they need to sell for you properly and consitently. Even if you don't happen to have anything particularly new, it's still so vital to keep that constant flow going and make sure all your existing and newly joined affilaites are getting something from you to remind them of the great offers you have and keep your site and your products in the forefront of their minds along with all the other advertisers out there.