Welcome to the Avangate Blog, the place to hang out if you have a software business.
Here’s one for you: subscribe to our RSS feed and get served immediately.

Enjoy your reading!

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.

Thoughts about getting your voice heard in the crowd

See how Avangate communicates with its affiliates

Once you have a number of affiliates in your portfolio, keeping in touch with them and helping them make sales become paramount. Some software companies invest in creating a special position for this – the affiliate manager -, some deal with the affiliates through the already existing employees, but let’s say you have an affiliate manager.

Talking about communication with the affiliates, beside the personal contacts the affiliate manager should have with his Super Affiliates, email marketing is the best way to reach your affiliates.

Recently I was doing a market research on eCommerce trends in 2009. One of the things we should expect is that customers are more cost-aware and every minor thing they get for free or with a discount is often worth more than a brand they’ve used for a certain time or even a popular and reliable brand worldwide (we’re talking, of course, about similar features of the products being compared).

Of course, discount coupons are not a new technique for affiliate marketers, but in the near future we could easily foresee an abundance of promotions, discounts – let’s call them “deals”.

I remember from my early days as an affiliate that waiting for the commission check to arrive, then cash it in were amongst the most annoying things of the affiliate marketing business.

It was annoying because you had to wait for the money to re-invest instead on focusing on growing the business. Wire transfers sometimes are subject to high banking fees.

Even with PayPal (PayPal made things slightly better for the affiliates), you still had to withdraw the money to a card (and that added some more fees) or to a bank account. My time working for software vendors showed it was quite the same for software vendors – waiting for the check to arrive or paying wire transfer fees.

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?