It’s easy to let happen–you do the initial work of uploading creatives, testing tracking and writing a description–and vavoom, you’re active! The problem is, though, that very few campaigns (if any) thrive on auto-pilot. You’ve already done the hard work of establishing your presence in the network. You might as well reap the rewards of your effort with further investment. For Self-Managed Accounts, here are a few ways you can give your campaign a quick check-up, and places can you tweak to increase your returns.
Current Affiliates
Better enable your proven and established partners. Arm them with demographics data, peak season information, coupons and product feeds. Optimization is key to further build these partnerships.
New Affiliates
Regularly search for affiliates through LC’s Add Affiliates functionality — there are many great new affiliates joining our network every day. Often times, affiliates don’t regularly search for merchants, so be diligent about extending your campaign to them.
All Affiliates
How does your campaign stack up against your competitors? Do you have favorable items such as allowing coupon sites, and search affiliates with no (or few) restrictions? If not, how does your competition measure in these areas?
How does your payout stack up against your competitors’? Consider offering higher commissions, maybe for specific partners at a minimum.
Or, consider having higher discounted coupon codes to help increase conversions.
Do you offer “vanity” codes? These can impact individual affiliate algorithms in favorably placing your specific site.
Do you have a product feed?
Newsletters. If you make your campaign more attractive by, for example, uploading a product feed, providing vanity codes, allowing coupon sites, or increasing commissions, be sure to, again, extend your campaign to affiliates, and send out a follow up email to them and other approved affiliates letting them know about the “recent campaign updates.” This is especially important with the upcoming holiday season.
Paid Placements — gain additional exposure on some merchant sites.
Are you Exclusive? If so, let us know. LC gives additional exposure to merchants that are either exclusive with LC, or have an exclusive offer in LC. Also, if you are a top performer with coupons, or if you are a top performer that has excellent SEM terms, LC may also give you additional exposure through scheduled monthly pushes we do for these categories.
Are you promoting your LinkConnector Affiliate Program on your website? This is a no-brainer way to acquire new affiliate partners. Affiliates interested in your products and services often start their search there.
Explore other possible affiliate partnerships, such as traffic abandonment. Do you currently have a traffic abandonment partner or know your stats on site abandonment? If not, LC does have a few partners that specialize in capturing this traffic, so let us know.
Also, do not undervalue the importance of coupon affiliates. An upcoming post will expound on the value of coupon affiliates and ways to ensure you are getting a piece of this high-dollar pie.