Session Description: Affiliate marketing best practices are not “one size fits all.” Optimization tactics that work for online retailers could prove disastrous for subscription marketers (and vice versa). This session examines popular affiliate strategies from both the retail and subscription marketing perspectives to identify how both types of marketers can grow sales/subs, manage quality, protect their brand and ultimately get the most from this channel. Learn from Peter Figueredo’s, Co-Founder and Brainstorm Chaser of Netx, 11 years of experience running successful affiliate and search campaigns for large retail and subscription advertisers.
This session took place Wednesday, April 13, 2011. The speakers:
- Peter Figueredo, Founding Partner and Brainstorm Chaser, Netx (Moderator)
- Vinny Lingham, CEO, Yola.com
And you thought I was done posing about ad:tech? Pshaw! I really enjoyed this session because it gave me great actionable items to help improve and better understand the For Me To Coupon leads program I manage!
Bullet Point Review!
- Retail Programs
- Product focused
- Paradox of choice
- New customers
- Short term ROI
- Minimize returns
- Subscription/Service Programs
- Service focused
- Fear of commitment
- Wants qualified customers
- Long term ROI
- Minimize churn
- Advanced Techniques for Retail
- Product driven: Shopping comparison, coupon, loyalty (Peter suggested brands create orphan coupon page to rank higher than affiliates on brand + coupon).
- Paradox of choice: feed optimization, advanced creative.
- New customers: new customer bounty, recruit new & growing affiliates.
- Short term ROI: offers to increase AOV, only pay more to get more (don’t just give higher commissions, negotiate what kind of placement you’re getting).
- Minimize returns: commissions on shipped, reverse returns.
- Advanced Techniques for Subscription
- Service focused: review sites, vertical content sites, blogs.
- Fear of commitment: affiliate education (one sheets, webinars, networking, etc), consumer education.
- Qualified customers: manage consumer incentives, clear consumer messaging (you know the lifetime value, so you can offer a higher bounty).
- Long term ROI: sites with a loyal user base, track retention by affiliate.
- Minimize churn: retention based commissions, retention rate bonus.
- Key takeaways
- Retail: optimize your feed.
- Subscription: optimize on retention.
- Subscription: educate your affiliates.
- Yola Case Study
- Focus on purchasing actions, not sign ups.
- Run promos for multiple year subscriptions.
- Test different discounts on promos.
- Keep promos fresh by varying messaging & theme, keep discounts constant.
- Align creatives with affiliate pay our structure.
Points brought up during the Q&A
Drive engagement with top tier affiliates. Look at the research. Look at how they prefer to be engaged & engage them that way.- Do you provide materials an influencing person can take to a meeting to convince the decision maker? One sheet, stats, other educational materials.
