By knocking down barriers between these relevant parties, you allow communication to thrive. Ad copy is consistent across all channels, and customers are not confused by different messages. When communication thrives, you can bet on success.

Obviously, aligning your automated digital marketing channels is better than executing campaigns in a vacuum. But before you go live on your next campaign, I want you to take a step back and think carefully about how you go about planning and executing one of your most valuable channels: affiliate marketing.

If your brand has an affiliate presence, chances are it’s one of many marketing channels but probably not your largest. So the temptation is there to draft a message to your affiliates — in some cases — just hours before a new offer is published and hit the send button just like you would change your paid search keywords, execute bidding on display positions, or schedule an email send.

But affiliates don’t work like AdWords or an RTB portal. There are real humans on the other end of that email, and they’re not going to make your changes at 4:30 p.m. on a Friday. If you want to increase your revenue through affiliate marketing, you have to first think like an affiliate.

Affiliates Aren’t Software

This is a key differentiator between affiliate marketing and your other digital marketing channels. You’re not interacting with a user interface when you change your campaigns — you’re communicating with people.

Consider how you handle a situation where you receive many emails within a short time period. You go into triage mode and react to each one according to its need. Just like you, affiliates are responding to multiple messages from many different people. The link changes and promotional copy you’ve asked to be swapped aren’t going to be happen immediately.

That’s why you need to communicate your plans for campaigns (and changes to those campaigns) with enough lead time for affiliates to be successful.

So if you plan on changing your product lineup on April 1, affiliates should be made aware no later than March 1 or March 15 at the latest. If you want your end-users seeing the same copy on an affiliate’s site that they’re seeing in retargeted banners, you’d better start early and send reminders along the way. There’s nothing worse than hurriedly auditing affiliate sites after a key launch date. It’s costly and ineffective.

You’re Not the Only Gig in Town

Affiliates come in all shapes and sizes. Some are full time bloggers, some have set-it-and-forget-it offer feeds, and others have full-time jobs outside of promoting your products. It’s a completely different relationship from even that of an independent contractor.

While you’re used to sending instant messages to vendors, clients, and coworkers and receiving almost instant responses, your affiliates are juggling multiple merchants, multiple verticals and multiple careers. You’re a fraction of their income, so expect only a fraction of their attention.

Remove Barriers

This brings me to the great misnomer within “affiliate management” as a practice. An affiliate is not like your normal colleague or a subordinate that you manage on a day-to-day basis. If affiliates liked being managed, they’d be working a nine-to-five job like you and me. With that in mind, your focus should be on removing the barriers between your marketing strategy and the strategy of your affiliates.

For starters, make sure your methods of delivering marketing assets remove as many steps to completion as possible. If you’re emailing tracking links to a new landing page, consider sending it as a mail merge or using an email personalization platform in order to autofill their affiliate ID. As an added bonus, your emails will feel more personal and you can address each affiliate by their first name.

If you have individual relationships with your top affiliates, send separate emails that appeal to their personal promotional methods. In other words, don’t send the same content to your blogging affiliates as you would to your top coupon site.

Removing barriers means not always relying on assets sitting behind a password wall. Sure affiliates can research your website and get everything they need on their own, but why not save them some time and help them get your message out to their audience much more quickly.

“Life finds a way” – Dr. Ian Malcolm

It is common to start an affiliate relationship where you go, “These are the three products I want you to sell, so these are the only three products I am going to commission you on.” The problem with this type of deal is a situation where your affiliate links to a landing page on your site instead of sending traffic straight to your cart, and the customer purchases a different item than the one the affiliate was advertising. Even though this sale was outside of your agreement, you should still incentivize those affiliates for bringing you additional sales outside the scope of your agreement.

Just like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park found a way to multiply, the consumer will always “find a way” to buy things from you that you didn’t intend. If this happens, don’t penalize your affiliates for referring sales that you didn’t anticipate. Affiliates will generally link to the products that you prioritize, but the consumer will dictate what they actually click through to buy.

Therefore, offer a commission on all products that add value to your program. If you’re using the cleverbridge Affiliate Center, you can set up Campaigns to reflect your prioritized products while keeping your broader product lineup listed within your Commission Configurations. If you want to deprioritize something sold on your site, make it harder to find. Or create an alternate landing page that changes the click path to your preferred product offerings for affiliates to use.

Keystone

Marketing with affiliates poses unique challenges to your digital strategy. Unlike your other channels, your success is only as strong as your relationships with individual affiliates. But once you treat your affiliates as partners and as real people, you can harness their efforts to do what they do best.

Nick Oswald is an Affiliate Marketing Manager at cleverbridge.

Wondering how you can generate more revenue through affiliate marketing? Reach out to us today!

The post Think Like a Performance Marketer: Three Keys to Making More Money appeared first on cleverbridge.

That’s right, the holiday season ecommerce bonanza is coming.

For our October Ecommerce Digest we take a closer look at the expected growth for online holiday sales, landing page optimization for the holiday rush, as well as recent news that touches all online retailers: the proliferation of ad blocking software.

Bright Outlook for the Holiday Season

Happy Holiday Season Expected for Retailers | eMarketer

In this analysis by eMarketer, we see that the overall forecast for the holiday shopping season is strong. Ecommerce continues to make up a significant component of holiday shopping. They expect online sales “will hit 9.0% of total retail sales this season, or $79.40 billion, up from 8.3% share last year.”

eMarketer also asserts that mobile ecommerce continues to grow. “We estimate that by the end of 2016, 25.0% of all retail ecommerce sales in the US will take place via mobile devices.”

Their analysis of a recent study by Signal found, “an impressive 60% of respondents intended to increase mobile holiday buying activity.”

Optimizing Your Site for Seasonal Sales

SEO & Black Friday: How Are Brands Preparing Their Landing Pages? | Econsultancy

How carefully do you curate your seasonal webpages? This article from Econsultancy examines different landing page strategies in terms of the strength of their SEO.

One approach, employed by UK retailer Currys, favors leaving your Black Friday landing page up year-round. Author Ben Davis says, “Currys has had one page ranking consistently all year. [Their Black Friday landing page] peaked recently at number one and has been live continuously since Black Friday 2014…Currys page is the only British retailer ranking for a host of Black Friday search terms.”

Keeping their site active, while regularly updating content and linking to other seasonal pages has positioned them well to take excellent advantage of the seasonal rush.

Davis emphasizes that overall web presence may be less important than a well targeted landing page. Amazon’s inconsistent ranking for key seasonal search terms illustrates his point. “Amazon is ranking well, so [they] might not be worried by its blip in the SERPs for the phrase ‘Black Friday 2015’, but it still shows how search performance can be affected if you don’t keep an eye open.”

Speaking of Mobile: Let’s Talk Ad Blocking

Ad Blockers — Friend or Foe? | cleverbridge Ecommerce Blog

We have known for months now that the fall release of Apple’s iOS 9 would support ad blocking on Safari. Its launch brought on a flurry of articles about the implications for online retailers, advertisers and consumers.

Randall Rothenberg at AdvertisingAge points out that “Ad blocking is the latest crisis du jour” for digital marketing, presenting significant challenges to the industry.

Meanwhile, Mark Jones at PerformanceIN highlights the reaction of City A.M., one UK site which has banned traffic from readers using ad blocking technology. City A.M. is currently “informing users that the site ‘relies on advertising to fund its journalism,’ and asking users ‘having trouble seeing adverts on the page’ to deactivate ad blockers if they wish to view the content.”

Even APM’s Marketplace is getting in on the deluge of commentary about ad blocking. In this recent piece, they explore new trends in digital advertising, meant to resonate personally with consumers. Brian Wong, CEO of the digital marketing firm Kiip, makes the point that while traditional advertising strategies attempted to overwhelm viewers with ads, “those laws of physics are different on mobile. In fact, you see a brand many times and you get more annoyed.” Listen to the whole piece to learn about what Kiip and others are doing to market to customers in today’s increasingly ad-hostile atmosphere.

All the tumult ad blocking technology has wrought inspires some self-reflection, as noted in this article from Econsultancy. The trade industry group Interactive Advertising Bureau admitted, “We messed up.” The current backlash has inspired IAB’s senior VP Scott Cunningham to confide, “We were so clever and so good at [digital advertising] that we over-engineered the capabilities of the plumbing laid down by, well, ourselves. This steamrolled the users, depleted their devices, and tried their patience.”

As we saw in this week’s Ecommerce Eye Candy, not every analyst agrees with the woeful tune sung by most articles on ad blockers. For a more comprehensive look at how ad blocking is affecting the entire industry, be sure to see Signal’s handy infographic below about the rise of ad blockers.

To learn more about strategies for holiday season ecommerce, download our Six Guides on Ecommerce Essentials today.

The post October Ecommerce Digest appeared first on cleverbridge.

According to Google, the page, ” … includes transactional data collected from 42 thousand Google Analytics properties with Ecommerce tracking enabled, across 8 countries, over an 11 month time period (purchase paths that concluded on 45 randomly selected dates from October 2013 – September 2014). ”

The tool begins by letting users select a company size (small, medium or large), an industry (e.g., auto, books, or computers) and region (e.g., U.S. or Germany). Based on this selection, the tool visually displays different marketing channels a customer typically goes through along their purchase path and at what stage of the path they go through them.

For example, customers of a large travel company in the U.S. typically start off with a click on a display ad, followed over time by social interaction, and then a click on a generic paid search ad. From there, the customer might return to the travel company’s website through a referral site, organic search, email, or a branded paid search ad. Finally, the customer will pay a direct visit to the company’s site before completing a purchase.

On the other hand, for a large Internet company, the path to purchase most often begins on social media. This visit is followed by one through display and generic paid search ads. Then comes referrals, organic search and paid branded search. An email is the penultimate step in this journey, which is completed, once again, by a direct visit.

Of course, not every customer journey ends with a direct visit to a company’s site — a significant number of customers might pay a direct visit in the beginning or middle of their journey. The next portion of the web page lets users investigate where each marketing channel tends to occur in the customer journey using the three qualifiers of industry, region and company size. In fact, a significant amount of direct visits for large U.S. computer companies occur in the middle of the customer journey (43 percent).

Go ahead, and visit this page yourself. Play around with it, and compare its findings with your internal data to see how your business measures up.

The post The Customer Journey to Online Purchase [Interactive Web Page] appeared first on cleverbridge.