Are you an Affiliate Manager, Merchant, or OPM that wants to know what it would take to get your affiliates to love…or even LIKE you more? Last month I was fortunate enough to speak on the Inside the Minds of Affiliates panel at Affiliate Summit West with Eric Nagel and Kim Rowley (moderated by Greg Hoffman). If you missed that presentation (or didn’t take notes), here are some of the basics that we covered.

Program Management

• Weight the pros and cons of using outsourced program management (OPM), including how much you already know (or do not know) about affiliate marketing, whether the OPM will have the authority to do their job, and if you need them to connect you immediately with new affiliates
• Understand the difference between hiring an in-house person to run your affiliate program as opposed to outsourcing. In  addition, will your in-house person be a dedicated affiliate manager or just a part of your marketing team?

Communicating with Affiliates

• Your initial recruitment email should specifically state which of our sites you think your program would be a good fit for. Make sure that you know our site and that your product actually fits out niche.
• Sign that email with actual contact information and not just “the affiliate team.”
• When you mention numbers to us, make sure that correspond with numbers we will find within the network (such as EPC, reversal rates, etc). Understand that those numbers do not mean much to most affiliates.
• Tell us how you are different from your competitor. There are likely a number of competitors in your niche and we need to know why we should promote you over them.
• Once you approve us to your program, provide us with full contact information such as phone number, Twitter, direct email, and IM.
• In that approval email, provide us with any non-standard terms (like coupon and PPC restrictions), your top-selling products, and any seasonal trends.
• Do we want an email when we have our first sale with you? Our panel was split.
• Be available via email, phone, Twitter, Facebook, and Instant Messenger. Respond timely if you want us to make sales for you. If you have to go search for an answer, at least let us know that you are looking for it. Be available to your affiliates. Be available for questions. Be available…are you getting this one?

Newsletters

• Newsletter frequency preferences vary but we all agreed that we do not want to see the same thing every week. We like newsletters at least monthly but only weekly if you have different coupons or specials each week.
• When should you send your newsletters? The panel was pretty split on this but overwhelmingly agreed that we need at least a couple of days’ notice for special offers and coupons. Anything sent for “today only” is probably going to be overlooked or ignored.
• Be sure to include the program name in your subject line. It’s also helpful to include the network somewhere in the email because sometimes you have programs on multiple networks.
• Include either our links in the newsletters or direct links to access the links. If you just say “find the links in the interface,” we are not as likely to take the time to go get them.
• Tell us what is working for other affiliates but be generic and don’t give out the actual domains of other affiliates.
• Tell us about seasonal trends because we do not know your business like you do.
• Let us know about any kind of media exposure that you will be getting.
• Send us any specialty categories that might be applicable to you like top sellers, best sellers, holiday specials, hot deals, and new arrivals.

Banners and Creatives

• Give us at least one text link to your homepage.
• Provide banners in popular sizes (see the iab.net “Ad Unit Guidelines“). Consider that different types of sites use them in different ways (coupon sites, content sites, cash back sites).
• Provide at least a couple of banners that are logo only.
• Let us know about any video that we can embed, including Youtube videos.
• Consider creating widgets.

Datafeeds

• Make sure that they are updated and check the links before you upload the datafeed.
• Provide both thumbnail and full-size images.
• Understand how your affiliates are using your datafeeds (e.g. niche sites or product search/price comparison).
• Let affiliates know in advance or ASAP about any major datafeed changes because these could impact their entire site.

Coupons

• When possible, provide exclusive coupons that track back to the affiliate. Don’t know how to do that? Ask your network and they will help you.
• Give out the coupons at least a day in advance, not the day that they go active.
• Understand the coupon feed system of the network you are on so that your coupons are included and have the proper start and end dates.
• Make sure that exclusives are really exclusive.

Search Restrictions

• Know what you are telling your affiliates. Saying that “affiliates cannot use brand name in source code” is stupid because we can’t promote you if we can’t say your name.
• Really think about PPC restrictions. Would you rather have your affiliates bidding on your brand name or your competition? Even if you restrict your affiliates, your competitors may still be bidding and sending your potential customers to their sites instead of yours.
• Understand TM and TM+. One restricts the Trademark only and the other includes Trademark plus additional terms.
• If you have restrictions, enforce them fairly across all affiliates. Consider using Brand Verity.

Rewards and Incentives

• Incentive programs that reward only the affiliates with the “most sales” do not motive niche-site affiliates.
• Allow us to compete against our own stats–year-over-year or month-over-month.
• Personalize the rewards to your affiliates and make sure that they are achievable.
• Ask your affiliates what they want–cash, prizes, increased commissions?
• Don’t make us ask you for our prizes. Send them immediately or make them easy to claim.

Leaks

• Know what “leaks” on your site are. Essentially, anything that takes the traffic that we are sending you away from your site in some way that will benefit you and not us.
• Fix 800 number leaks with a PayPerCall program.
• Ensure that Live Chat does not overwrite our commissions.
• Do not link to other sites, including your “sister sites” if we will not be compensated for purchases made there.
• Take off AdSense because we receive nothing if people click on those links.

Network Account

• Have your own affiliate account within the network. Join your program and set yourself at 0% commission. This way, you will be able to see what we are seeing.

Thanks to the AffStat Report for providing us with some data that we were able to use during the presentation. I left out the quotes and pretty charts but you can read the whole report yourself. The rest of the presentation was based on the experience that the 4 of us have had in our 20+ combined years of affiliate marketing.

Questions for us? Anything we missed? Here are our Twitter accounts if you want to track us down:

Tricia Meyer @sunshinetricia

Eric Nagel @esnagel

Kim Rowley @kimarketing

Greg Hoffman @akagorilla