Yesterday Linda Bustos published an excerpt from my newest book. It came out of the section on coupons, and reminded me of a question that one of my newer affiliate program management clients has recently asked.

A few days back she wrote to me:

We have always had an issue with offering discounts, especially percentage off discounts, to our affiliates because then we end up paying the affiliate a commission, discounting the costume to the customer, paying the affiliate network and you the commission and nothing is left for us to even cover our costs.

Do you have any other suggestions of promotions that would put us in a better financial position than what I described above?

I do.

Offering a coupon (or discount) shouldn’t translate into losing your shirt. Here are a few types of deals that online merchants may offer through affiliates without stepping on their own toes:

1. Buy one, get one X% off or Buy two, get one free (motivate to purchase more items)
2. X% off $Y or more (stimulate larger order amount)
3. $X off orders of $Y on a select product line/type (highlight different products this way)
4. Free Shipping deals with minimum order value of $X
5. Discount Shipping deals with a min order value

If I have missed a deal type that works especially well for you, please share it in the “Comments” area under this post.

Yesterday as I was adding new coupons for a ShareASale-based affiliate program I have noticed a little (but a very significant) addition to one of the fields you can fill out when adding a coupon/deal to the network. They now have a field for special commission to be applied on coupon/deal transactions. The fine print (and an important rule) may have been up there for some time, but I certainly don’t remember seeing it a couple of years ago. Under the special commission field it says (highlighting mine):

So “this commission amount cannot be less than your advertised global commission rate for public offers” and “for private offers, it must not be lower than your designated commission rate for that specific affiliate.” Very important rule!

I couldn’t help but recall Todd Farmer’s “ShareASale is My Network of Choice” post. For affiliates it is extremely important to have such an understanding mediator between them and the merchants.

It isn’t unusual for merchants (including some of the largest online brands) to offer lower commission rates on coupons (or to coupon affiliates). I like what I see ShareASale doing above. If the merchant doesn’t want to offer coupons through affiliates, that’s fine. Institute such a policy, and have your affiliate manager police it. If, however, you do choose to use the affiliate channel to distribute coupons, factor in the commission affiliates will receive into the discount you’re offering, and still pay the full affiliate commission. Kudos to ShareASale for supporting affiliates there.

This month’s Internet Retailer magazine featured an article on the growing use of coupons, the ways these value-conscious consumers shop online, and what some merchants do to keep the frugal shopper yet by-pass affiliates. At this time the article is also available online here. It opens with these words:

Staffers at Macys.com detected a new pattern in customer behavior last spring: consumers would add items to shopping carts, leave the site and then return with discount codes they had found on the web sites of Macy’s affiliates. Only then would they complete their purchases.

“We said, maybe we should just do this ourselves,” says Kent Anderson, president of Macys.com

And they did — by adding a “Find one now” link next to the customary promo code box that many online merchants have on their shopping cart pages:

As a result, “consumer no longer has to search the web for those savings” and can complete the checkout without leaving the Macy’s website, which “also saves Macy’s the affiliate fee, typically 4-5% of the purchase amount,” says Anderson. Read more about it works in Michael Vorel’s post here.

Here’s an interesting detail though:

1. I go to an affiliate website that is focused around Free Shipping (either directly, or because I was looking for a free shipping deal at JC Peney, or Kohl’s, or some other Macy’s competitor) — FreeShipping.org — and while originally looking for something totally different, I decide to click on Macy’s link:

2. Upon reviewing the free shipping offers for Macys.com, I pick one, and click it (setting the affiliate cookie).

3. I get to Macy’s website, add the items I want to my shopping cart, and proceed to checkout; and I see exactly the same “Find one now” link again.

My testing has not revealed any affiliate cookie overwriting upon clicking the links in the pop-up window (shown after following the “Find one now” link), but I can definitely see some affiliates getting extremely uncomfortable about the way it all works now (it’s really just a step away from turning bad).

Additionally, if a customer originally comes to your website from an affiliate’s website (coupon or not), is offering them a coupon really gonna save your margins? Say, it was a shopping comparison affiliate that didn’t push coupons, but you are now offering the consumer an additional discount.

Macy’s current system obviously has some holes to patch.

Are There Better Solutions?

I’ve had a merchant bring up the question of paying too much (discount to customer + commission to affiliate) to me literally two days ago, and this is certainly an area of concern for many merchants with affiliate programs. I understand their worries, and I have seen some banning coupon affiliates altogether, while others deciding to pay from low to no commission on coupons. My opinion is that neither of these decisions are good. You can still work with coupon affiliates, and not let the system devour your profit margins. Using coupon affiliates to push offers like Free Shipping on orders over a certain amount, or Deal of the Day/Week offers, or discounts only on select products/services are just a few of the techniques a merchant can use.

What are your thoughts on this?

Having studied my posts on the affiliate coupons, a merchant has emailed me asking about the sizes of banners I would recommend for coupons. I replied: “give affiliates a 125 x 125 px square, and a 88 x 31 px button for each”, and received the following question back:

We are preparing our coupon banners right now, but how should we handle fine print details (such as expiration date, restrictions, coupon code) since the space for coupon size is tiny?

So, really, how do you fit all of the necessary info on a banner of such small size?

Answer: you don’t have to!

In fact, you don’t even want to do include some of this info, because, for example, listing a coupon code on the banner may be perceived as a “leak” (the end-customer could just pick up the code from the banner, go to the merchant’s website, and key it in by-passing the click on the affiliate link). So don’t do what Symantec does:

I recommend having the following info on coupon banners:

• Coupon title (make sure you emphasize the deal)
• Your logo (preferably without the “.com”)
• Expiration date (if there is one)
• Call to action (some won’t click unless you ask)

Here are a few good examples of coupon banners:

While some of the above examples are not perfect (like the “.com” on the Buy.com’s banner, or the speed of animation in the Checks in the Mail banner), they should still give you a good idea of what affiliates are looking for.

MediaPost has published some information that coupon affiliates should find of extreme interest. Referencing a recent report by Borrell Associates, MediaPost wrote:

…Borrell Associates estimates that the $8.3 billion value of online coupons redemptions in 2009 (including via the Internet, email and mobile) will jump more than 50% to $12.7 billion in 2010 and to $22 billion by 2014.

So the report projects a really steep growth of online coupon use: by over 50% in year 2010, and almost two-fold between 2010 and 2014.

Another interesting observation:

In explaining the growing reliance on digital distribution, Borrell pointed to a study by Nielsen partner NeuroFocus tracking consumer brainwave activity, which found that online coupons outperformed print ones in categories such as attention, emotional engagement, memory retention and effectiveness.

I am not surprised.

Neither am I surprised by the fact that most of the coupon websites quoted in MediaPost’s article are either active affiliates themselves, or are partnering with active affiliates for the distribution of online coupons. Having analyzed some of the top coupon affiliates using Quantcast.com, here are the monthly traffic averages that I see:

1. FatWallet.com – 3.2M
2. RetailMeNot.com – 2.7M
3. DealNews.com – 2.6M
4. CoolSavings.com – 2.0M
5. CouponMountain.com – 1.3M
6. TechBargains.com – 987.8K
7. DealsPl.us – 885.9K
8. CouponCraze.com – 830.5K
9. CouponCabin.com – 694.5K
10. DealTaker.com – 657.0K
11. Savings.com – 632.9K
12. MomsView.com – 490.0K
13. DealCatcher.com – 444.7K
14. CouponAlbum.com – 392.4K
15. Bargainist.com – 388.0K
16. CouponShare.com – 325.1K
17. UltimateCoupons.com – 305.0K
18. Offers.com – 284.8K
19. PromotionalCodes.com – 139.5K
20. CouponWinner.com – 134.4K

With the projected growth in demand for online coupons, there is still room for new affiliate players to enter the market. While the couponing niche is already quite crowded, I do believe that there is still room for new and innovative affiliates to come in an grab their share of the pie.

The pre-Christmas shopping season is gaining speed and volume every day, and it seems appropriate to look into what seems to be the best converting, and most demanded holiday offer.

Many consumers will be looking for coupons, but merchants that cannot offer these can still offer something for their affiliates to market aggressively. I am referring to what seems to be the most beloved Christmas offer from a consumer’s standpoint — the free shipping offer. It will be especially actively sought for over the next few weeks, and it is one proven way to increase conversions.

Hitwise Intelligence has published some statistical data which shows that the “the sharpest increase” in free shipping demand historically occurs “at the end of the year for the holiday shopping season”:

It is also interesting to note that since 2006 the “search breadth” for the “free shipping” key phrase “has been accelerating earlier each year” reaching its pinnacle “is the first week of the New Year, as online buyers look for post-holiday sale items” [more here].

A few days back the Internet Retailer has also published an article with stats and patterns that the top 100 e-tailers follow in regards to deals, discounts, and free shipping. Here are some of the key points that have been made about the subject of this post:

• The number of e-tailers who offer free shipping this year has grown from 61 to 63
• 44% of them attach the free shipping deal to a minimum order value
• Minimum order value ranges from $30 to $699, but in most cases the bracket is $30-$75

If you are not yet offering free shipping through your affiliate program (and/or any other online marketing channels), now is the time to do it!

Got a message from a client this morning:

I’d like to disapprove this affiliate for illegal use of coupons. I don’t know how they get proprietary coupons but Next Jump is a private program. Another is for cart abandonment. The other two are expired…

Went to the affiliate’s site, took a screen shot:

Dear affiliates who are stealing coupons from fellow-affiliates, this is the surest way to either get your account suspended on the network level, or, at the very least, to be kicked out of the merchant’s affiliate program.

Dear affiliate networks, please borrow buy.at’s idea to help fighting the use of other affiliate’s exclusive coupons by unauthorized parties. The only party that will lose from an implementation of such a technology will be the unethical affiliate.

…at least within one particular affiliate network, within one particular country.

Stolen coupons have been a long-standing problem for affiliates that are receiving exclusive deals from merchants. The essence of the problem is as simple as this:

• You run an XYZ affiliate website
• A merchant gives you an exclusive coupon code (e.g. XYZ-TWENTY) for a 20% store-wide discount
• You upload it, start ranking well, and landing sales for this merchant
• A competing affiliate steals the coupon code, and posts it on his/her site
• You now have to chase the merchant’s affiliate program manager (and/or your affiliate network rep) to get the thief to remove the coupon code from their site

On 4 August 2009 buy.at has added an awesome functionality to their UK system (I’m hearing that they are still working with the U.S. merchants on launching the same product in the U.S.). They called the product OfferCentral, and what it essentially does is lets merchants assign exclusive coupon codes to specific affiliates, so that even when the exclusive coupon code is used on another affiliate’s site, it is the original affiliate that the gets the credit for the sale.

Here’s an official wording from buy.at:

For Advertisers:

• Assign permission to specific affiliates to use a unique voucher code on their site
• Set start and end dates for each code, and manage transaction approval for affiliates that are not authorized to use the voucher code

For Publishers:

• Receive permission from an advertiser to use a unique code on your site
• Sign up for RSS feed updates on new voucher codes and coupon creatives

What an amazing development! Leonardo da Vinci words come to mind: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” The idea is both simple and ingenious. Why chase the thief when if he/she is marketing the coupons of another affiliate when the system can simply credit the commission to the appropriate affiliate account (that of the affiliate for whom the coupon was created in the first place)?

WTG, buy.at, and hoping many other affiliate networks (especially in the USA) will follow this example as well.

Yesterday Yahoo! has launched a renewed website, Yahoo! Deals (where they feature “deals and online coupons from around the web”), and resurrected their Twitter account @yahoo_deals to push the coupon offers published on Yahoo! Deals [source].

I went to the Walmart coupons page (titles and meta tags of all pages are well-optimized [no wonder why, right?], and destined to get excellent SE-rankings):

…and clicked all of the the “coupon” links to find out that the URL’s the end-users are going to be going through in this particular case are all LinkShare’s (i.e. affiliate) URL’s:

Then I browsed around a bit more to see that many other URL’s go via CouponMountain.com, DealCoupon.com, CouponAlbum.com, BradsDeals.com, DealNews.com, and probably other affiliate websites I haven’t registered.

Looks like Yahoo! has just launched a new (or should I say, the first?) affiliate coupons aggregator.

I wonder what the rules for inclusion are. Obviously, the revamped Yahoo! Deals website is now directly competing with individual affiliate websites.

A few months ago I wrote how an affiliate campaign can be killed with a landing page, an unthoughtfully created one, or an altogether nonexistent one (scenario when the homepage of the website is used instead). Yesterday I’ve had two people ask me exactly the same question:

1. Do you have any samples of good landing pages for coupon campaigns?

2. Wanted to get some feedback on landing pages from you. I know how important it is for successful landing pages. The success of an affiliate campaign depends a lot on how well that landing page converts otherwise all the affiliate traffic can go to waste. There are a lot of useful articles on your blog… Is there any other info that you can share on the landing pages?

Some 4,000 years ago an early Emperor of the Xia Dynasty in China said that “a picture speaks a thousand words”. I have therefore decided to make this post concise in the wording/recommendations (eloquent and straight to the point), but abundant in examples/screenshots of well-created landing pages.

When running a coupon campaign through your affiliate program, you must have a landing page different from the homepage of your website. The coupon-specific landing page should:

1. Reinforce the details of the promo/campaign
2. Provide instructions on how to redeem the coupon
3. Spell out any restrictions the customer should be aware of
4. Have a clear call to action

Over 95% of the merchants whose coupon landing pages I have reviewed — and I’ve studied more than 100 coupon campaigns over the past 2.5 hours — either have only one, or none of the above-mentioned points covered. Very few merchants do it the right way, but those that do, register higher conversion rates. This makes both the merchant, and the affiliate happy, and builds up an affiliate program.

The following exemplary landing pages — created by merchants for affiliate coupon campaigns — either cover all of the above-mentioned points, or apply the coupon/discount automatically:

Buy.com Dollar Off Coupon

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

UnseenOnTV.com % Off Coupon
(applied automatically)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Hocks.com’s Deal of the Day

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Avenue.com Dollar Off Coupon
(note: graphics, no text, no organic SE competition with affiliates)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Sierra Trading Post % Off Coupon

I’ll be honest with you: this post took me longer than any other post in my blog to date. When I first starting writing, I didn’t expect it to get this difficult to find merchants with good landing pages for affiliate coupon campaigns.

If you are not yet providing these, you are hurting your own affiliate program.