Yesterday night a chief executive of a company which runs an affiliate program on a popular network, sent out a newsletter. Most of his affiliates have probably found it in their inboxes early this morning. One of them forwarded it to me. She’s been in the business for a while, but even she was surprised by the tactic used — “Not only is he offensive, but he suggests being dishonest” she wrote to me…

Without any further introductory words, here is an excerpt of that merchant’s newsletter (with sensitive information removed for obvious reasons):

Are you ready for a kickass affiliate newsletter? I hope so.

I’m [Name here], the founder and president of [Company Name here] — We are the company that owns and runs [URL here] and 9 other retail websites. I’ve temporarily taken over duties as the affiliate marketing manager. I’ll only be doing this for a couple of months, so I figured I could do it my way.

I’m a straight shooter, I’m not very politically correct, and I sell weird shit for a living, so expect some unusual things in these newsletters…

Today’s newsletter is going to be a good beginning. 4 Things Affiliate Can Do To Get More Traffic

1. Create some … content…

2. Use every opportunity to optimize your site…

3. Let other people know about your site…

4. Cheat — That’s right, I’m telling you to take every shortcut you can. Why, because you are an affiliate, you have very little to lose. I would cheat if I could, but I’ve got a warehouse, 11 employees, three kids, and a building mortgage to pay. I also can’t change my domain name overnight. I have to follow the rules. You do not. So use the strategy du jour to create link farms, buy forum links, pay people to write phony reviews. I don’t care what you do and no one else does either. Make your money now before Google figures it all out. Then, if you get banned, try something else…

I must admit, I love the vigor. When you’re passionate about what you do, it always shows. However, regardless of whether you personally are “politically correct” or not, you want to be sensitive to the fact that your affiliates are mixed crowd, and some will find such writing style “offensive.” I would as well.

Additionally, I have a real problem with the advice he’s giving in that thing #4 that an “affiliate can do to get more traffic”. I mean — REALLY?! You want to entrust your brand to affiliates who “do not” need or “have to follow the rules”? You want “link farms” and “phony reviews” [read this]? Wow… I’m utterly surprised a president of the company that owns 10 “retail websites” would give such an advice.

If I’m missing something apart from the “shock therapy” type component had it been intended in the above newsletter, I’d love to learn what it is.

A month ago, wondering whether the “From” field of affiliate program manager emails matters for affiliates I started a poll asking affiliates to help me figure this one out.

The poll closed on Sunday. We’ve had 46 affiliates cast their votes, and here are the results that I see:

Affiliates, what do you want merchants to use in the email’s “From” field?

My main purpose for this poll was to find out whether affiliates really want to see full names of affiliate managers in the “From” field. The above spread of votes, as well as the comments under this post, basically tell us “it depends” (in some cases the name will improve the open rate; in others, it won’t matter much). The more important thing is that the affiliate quickly and easily understands what affiliate program the email is from and about. Also, when it comes to improving the open rate, the “Subject” field is probably significantly more important. Maybe I’ll put a blog post on it some day too.

I have affiliate accounts with a number of affiliate networks through which I both monitor what my competition is doing, and analyze different things. I seldomly check the email account to which these affiliate-geared emails come, but yesterday when I did, I was stunned by how many affiliate program managers do not use their names in correspondence with their affiliates.

Out of 100 randomly selected emails only two (obvious below) used their full names in the “From” field. The rest had either their company name in that “From” field, or something like “[Merchant Name] Affiliate Team” in there:

Also, out of 100 emails that I have analyzed, only 31 were signed by real names (19 of which were OPMs, and 12 in-house affiliate program managers), while the rest (or nearly 70%) were signed either as “Your Dedicated Affiliate Team”, “Affiliate Manager”, or again followed the format of “[Merchant Name] Affiliate Team”.

While I firmly believe that de-personalization of affiliate program management — which starts with “Dear Valued Partner” type of addresses that open emails to affiliates, and ends with “Your Affiliate Team” type signatures at the end of them — negatively affects manager-affiliate relationship, I don’t know what to say about that “From” field. There is an opinion that in traditional email marketing personalization of “From” fields “with a person’s name” is recommended “only if that person is well known and closely associated with the type of message you’re sending”. But since in the affiliate program management context we’re not only trying to communicate something, but also build a relationship, using your real name in that “From” field may be a sensible extension of this effort.

What I do with the programs I manage is (a) use my full name in the “From” field, (b) use the merchant’s name in the “Subject” field, and (c) always use my full name and all ways to contact me in the signature of the email.

Now, I can talk all I want about what I think; however, the only way to find out what affiliates think is to ask affiliates. So, here’s a poll that I’d really appreciate affiliate participation in. As you can see, there’s also an “Other” option. If none of the suggested options work well for you, please choose “Other”, keying in your brief reasoning in the poll, and elaborating on the details in the “Comments” under this post.

Many thanks in advance for helping us (merchants and affiliate program managers) understand what works best for you.

While there are multiple ways to define cliché in light of our context here I personally prefer the following one: “A trite expression, often a figure of speech whose effectiveness has been worn out through overuse and excessive familiarity.” [source]

I’ve added the emphasis/underlining to the above definition on purpose.

Someone said that you never get a second chance to make the first impression. It is in your affiliate program descriptions and outgoing affiliate recruitment emails that you’re making that first impression; and you certainly don’t want to clog your language with clichés there.

Upon an analysis of some 40 different affiliate recruitment emails, and affiliate program descriptions, I have found out that the majority of them are so full of clichés, it isn’t even funny.

Here is my list of the top 10 ones to avoid:

1. “instantly”

2. “ultimate”

3. “easy”

4. “unparalleled”

5. “perfect match”

6. earn/get/make “$X in X days/months”

7. “highest payouts”

8. “impressive conversion rate(s)”

9. “best affiliate program”

10. “number one” merchant/offer/program

You want to flee from using words and phrases like the above ones. They don’t help you, but actually do quite the opposite — making you sound cheesy and unconvincing.

Also, avoid spelling words in uppercase, excessive underlining, and drop those exclamation marks.

No matter what the communication piece (a 140-character-long tweet or a newsletter), or the context (affiliate-oriented, customer- or client-focused, etc), it will benefit from the following 3 Ps.

In fact, I believe these 3 elements to be integral components of any effective communication.

Let me illustrate each by looking at things in the context of affiliate-oriented newsletters sent out by online merchants.

1) Personalization — Use all available means (many merchants do not use the short codes that affiliate networks offer to them for personalization of emails to affiliates) to make it a personal and personally-relevant communication piece

2) Preciseness — Flee from vagueness, and be concrete (e.g.: not “our affiliates enjoy some of the best conversion rates in the industry” but “during the month August our affiliates’ average conversion rate was 2.3%, while our top 3 performers have enjoyed 0.8%, 2.45% and 5.71% conversion respectively”)

3) Practicality — This one flows right out the previous point. Examples of practicality would include lists of bestsellers, best-performing links, affiliate tools, new coupons, etc. It is also important to mention that including the information on these in your affiliate newsletter is not enough. You want to also give your affiliates an easy way to act based on this info. For instance, just yesterday I received an affiliate newsletter where a merchant is listing their best-performing links, but doing it in an extremely inconvenient manner. Instead of including the code for each link in plain text (or a separate box), they linked text within the newsletter through my affiliate URLs. So, to grab the actual code for each link mentioned I have to view the HTML code of their newsletter as opposed to a simply cutting-and-pasting. So, make sure your practical advice is also convenient to implement.

The above points will also work well in contexts other than affiliate program management.

Earlier this week I have received a newsletter geared at CSN Stores’ affiliates that have generated some traffic for their affiliate program, but no sales. The opening text of the newsletter read:

Congratulations! You have been chosen as a CSN Stores Affiliate Program Rising Star. All the members of this group have been able to bring in a significant amount of traffic to our sites over the last few month. We want to help you make sure those visits lead to sales and commissions! For the next month, April 1st- May 1st, the CSN Stores Affiliate program will be offering an exclusive promotion to the members of this Rising Stars group.

If in the month of April you can convert just 10 sales you will receive an additional $150 bonus on top of your commissions!

I’ve generated 14 clicks for them (some by myself, some my friends), and not one sale. So while the “significant amount of traffic” part constitutes quite a bit of an exaggeration, I can’t help but love the “Rising Star” hyperbole. This beautiful technique, and the whole text of this affiliate newsletter, reminded me of Bronwyn Fryer’s “Moving Mountains” article in a 2003 issue of Harvard Business Review where the author wrote that to motivate others effectively managers must have “a clear, unbiased understanding of the situation at hand, deep insights into the vagaries of human nature.., the establishment of appropriate and reasonable expectations and goals, and the constructions of a balance set of… incentives.” Fryer also proposed several practical techniques to make one a better motivator. Out of the ones that she listed I thought that immediately relevant ones for affiliate program managers are:

• Start with the truth
• Appeal to greatness
• Make them proud
• Stick to your values
• Provide constant and consistent communication channel
• Build trust
• Care for the little guy
• Set different incentive levels

It seems that the CSN Stores’ affililiate program manager has hit at least half of the above nails right on the head.

A solid online retailer, voted one of Internet Retailer’s Hot 100 Companies of 2009, visited by over a million of unique visitors every month, has sent out their affiliate newsletter. It was written well, but some of the things could certainly use some improvement. Here’s a screenshot of a part of that newsletter:

Good style, but the formatting of your affiliate newsletters deserves a much closer attention! (1) The short code for the affiliate’s first name has never translated into the first name, but stayed in the short code form (the affiliate program manager must have made a mistake in the code). (2) The paragraph line spacing has suddenly jumped from single to double (starting from the second paragraph), to never return to the single form again. (3) The font type and size choice hasn’t been great at all. The whole newsletter is typed up in bold font, and I could count as many as three different types of fonts, and three different sizes (often within the same type of font).

I know I’ve mentioned it before, but it’s worth repeating. Prior to sending out your affiliate newsletter, by all means preview it and, whenever possible, send yourself a test email with it (to ensure it will look nice and clean on the affiliate end). Otherwise, regardless of how well you write, it’ll quickly show that you haven’t put enough time/effort into it.

In my previous posts I have spoken about the structure of the affiliate newsletters, the three Ps to remember at all times, the necessity for clear distinction between customer-oriented vs affiliate-geared promos, the art of getting attention, and other things. Today I would like to address a basic, yet very important question — that of the frequency with which you want to send your affiliate newsletters out.

It is important to emphasize that the main problem with the choice of frequency lays precisely in the fact that the decision is most frequently based on the desire of the merchant. A better approach is to listen to your affiliates, and base your decision on how often they want to hear from you.

Let’s turn to AffStat 2009, where affiliates were asked to respond to the how often question. Here’s the pie chart that illustrates their distribution of their choices:

Aha! So, the majority of affiliates (83%) want to hear from their affiliate program managers not more than once a month (44%), or once a week (39%). To be honest, the number of those that voted for the once-a-week option does surprise me, but this is certainly great data to have.

Based on the above stats, and my personal experience, I would recommend starting with monthly newsletters, and then also experimenting with a semi-monthly (once every two weeks) option. At the end of the message you want to always include a line soliciting your affiliates feedback on the newsletter, and what you can improve.

Best of luck, and, as always, if you have any opinions to share, be my guest by posting them in the comments area below.

Not many affiliate networks provide you with such data as an open rate for your outgoing affiliate correspondence (such as approval emails or newsletters), and this is really unfortunate. Commission Junction does provide merchants/advertisers with such important information as a part of the Email Campaigns reporting:

Looking at the data for the last five pieces of email correspondence we sent out for one of our clients I see the following picture:

Ok, let’s presuppose that the number will double if plain text messages were taken into the calculation as well. Our total would then be 2,500. This still looks like a staggering number to me. Apparently only between 17.65% (1,250) and 35.3% (2,500) of this particular program’s affiliates are opening the email messages (mostly newsletters) that I am sending to them. The rest must either be deleting them without opening, or receiving them at email account that they never check.

This brings my thoughts back to the question of affiliate activation. Is it even possible to get 100% (or 80%, or even 50%) of the affiliates aboard any given affiliate program to become active? If so, how when they are not interested in hearing from you? Both of these are, of course, rhetoric questions.

Some of you may remember my “Back to the Question of Affiliate Newsletters” post made earlier this month where I expressed my gratitude to an affiliate that called my newsletter “personal, intriguing, well written,” and one which she has never received from any other CJ-based merchant.

Yesterday this same affiliate has encouraged me again. She sent some clicks and a couple of sales since that newsletter, but yesterday she has put together a blog post about DaySpring Cards, and here’s what we see in her reporting for this program today:

Nice work!!

I hope she is encouraged by the above statistics as much as I am.