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Affiliates Sales Channel Tips

I finally got some time to study in detail the new AffStat Report 2009. It offers a comprehensive overview of the affiliate business and, from my point of view, it’s something every affiliate manager should read.

Starting from the affiliate responses, I put together a list of tips for the vendors that want to use the affiliate sales channel at its upper capacity. Having also put my experience so far in this list, it’s especially aimed at software affiliate managers; however, the principles can be used for other verticals too.

What do affiliates mainly need? I think you’ll agree with me that this is a question with many possible responses. But, as you will see, there’s one thing it really matters to affiliates and that is the involvement of the software vendors.

In April 2009 we did our annual Avangate Affiliate Survey and we got interesting feedback from our affiliates. Here are the main conclusions that stand out from the survey from the publishers’ point of view:

• The affiliates think that more discount coupons from the software vendors would help them sell more;
• They find it rather difficult to cope with the fact that some of the software vendors aren’t more helpful – offering unattractive affiliate commissions, lack of marketing materials, no commissioning schemes to stimulate competition.

As I mentioned in my last post on how to recruit software affiliates, an important part of the recruiting process is the reason you give them to join your program. It may very well be a successful program with high commission rates, but sometimes this isn’t enough.

When trying to convince an affiliate to join your program (especially if it’s an important affiliate), nothing works better than something to welcome him with.

It’s not mandatory in any way, but like Geno Prussakov noted in his “Practical Guide to Affiliate Marketing” and from what I’ve experienced so far, an affiliate is easier to convince in joining a certain affiliate program if you offer her an incentive.

OK, so you have the software products to sell and you want to extend your sales force with minimal costs. Using affiliates is a perfect solution, but where do you find them? This is the first challenge that has to be faced by software vendors who are just discovering the affiliate marketing advantages and by newbie affiliate managers.

As I see it, the recruitment process involves 2 elements – finding / contacting the affiliates and the incentives you give them in order to join your affiliate program. Here are a couple of ideas in order to get you started.

I recently did a research on what software vendors are doing in order to sell through affiliates. I looked on over 400 websites that sell software. After putting all the data together, the first thing that stands out is that most of the vendors haven’t implemented the minimum requirements in order to affiliate efficiently.

Most surely they would like to sell more through affiliates, but this isn’t going to “just” happen. Either they don’t have as many affiliates as they would like or they don’t help their current ones sell more.

Here are the key findings of my personal research:

• most of the vendors (55%) have an affiliate sign up page;
• just a couple of them (5%) are using a special email for affiliate matters;
• very few software vendors (5.5%) help their affiliates with marketing materials (e.g. banners, other web graphics);
• more than half of all software vendors don’t have any PAD files or they don’t update them with the affiliate section.

Vendors must understand they have to help their affiliates sell more through simple, yet effective ways. After all, it’s the vendors’ interest to get more revenue from affiliates, isn’t it?