Today I would like to show merchants that run affiliate programs how a landing page could kill an affiliate program’s campaign.
Unfortunately, most merchants do not do a thorough enough job when putting together landing pages for promos and coupons they offer through their affiliate programs, and I feel like blogging about it today.
Do any of the following, and you will succeed in decreasing your affiliates’ conversion rates, confusing the end user, and burring the whole initiative on its final, and possibly, the most important phase:
- Simply use your homepage
- Fail to reinforce promo’s details
- Leave out the call-to-action
- Have too many (over two) calls to action on same page
- Overcomplicate the page with Flash, talking assistants, etc
Additionally, you may also use such techniques as disconnecting the landing page from the rest of your website (no clear navigation, etc), and/or thoroughly optimizing the landing page that is meant to convert affiliate traffic. While the disadvantages of the former “technique” are obvious, the latter one may sound like a mistyped statement. It is not! What I am saying is: do not compete with your own affiliates on the campaign that you’re pushing as one that’s exclusive to them. If you offer a coupon that is to be promoted exclusively by affiliates, do not compete with them. Make that landing page search-engine-unfriendly (e.g.: use graphics instead of text, intentionally leave out the title and the meta-tags, and so on), so that its very existence does not create a competition for affiliates.
Of course, much more can be written on how not to do it, but the above list sums up the main issues that I personally have been registering over the past few years. Unfortunately, many merchants do exactly as I have described above, and at the end of the day, it hurts everyone: (i) their affiliate program’s conversion ratio, (ii) affiliates, and (iii) their own expectations of the channel.