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How an Affiliate Program Increased Sales By 400 Percent
By Anna Johnson on December 9th, 2009Recently MarketingSherpa profiled PrintRunner, a printing company that increased its annual sales by more than 400 percent to $13.5 million in three years, almost entirely through its 60,000 or so online affiliates.
What are the secrets to PrintRunner’s success in managing its affiliate program? MarketingSherpa gleaned these five affiliate management tips from PrintRunner CEO, Mike Zaya:
Affiliate Management Tip 1: Choose Affiliate Networks Wisely
PrintRunner enlists affiliates and conducts its affiliate program through such affiliate marketing networks as Commission Junction and LinkShare. When considering joining an affiliate network, the company looks for size, quality and ‘platform.’
Size goes to the company’s return on investment of its time, money and resources. PrintRunner doesn’t want to be tweaking offers and analyzing reports for a small number of affiliates. The company wants the kind of leverage from its efforts that is only available from working with a sizable network.
At the same time, PrintRunner looks for networks with affiliates capable of generating high sales numbers. According to PrintRunner CEO, Mike Zaya, around 5 percent of affiliates generate 95 percent of sales, so having both a sizable and high quality network is important.
Finally, when it comes to ‘platform’ PrintRunner needs the affiliate network to offer a simple and streamlined system it can use to easily track affiliates, view and analyze metrics, as well as manage its campaigns.
Affiliate Management Tip 2: Test Small, Then Scale
PrintRunner tests its campaigns – specifically offers and commissions, on a small scale with known affiliates – before reaching out to more affiliates and/or promoting offers via an affiliate network.
Affiliate Management Tip 3: Create Win-Win Campaigns
PrintRunner seeks to establish and maintain mutually beneficial relationships with both its affiliates and the operators of the affiliate networks it works with.
Among other things, the company offers: higher commissions for top-performing affiliates; vanity coupon codes that affiliates can give to customers as sales incentives; and exclusive coupons and high earnings-per-click ratio for the networks.
PrintRunner also pays one of its networks for extra assistance in managing the company’s account, on top of the account service already provided by the network.
Affiliate Management Tip 4: Be Honest and Helpful
Being honest and helpful is about treating affiliates well and includes such things as giving affiliates credit for generated sales (even those originating through offline channels e.g. phone calls) and providing them with data feeds containing product updates including details such as inventory and prices.
Affiliate Management Tip 5: Keep an Eye Out For Fraud
The reality is that there are some bad apples out there and, with some 60,000 affiliates, PrintRunner is bound to come across a few of these now and then!
Consequently, PrintRunner monitors affiliates for unscrupulous behavior that could negatively affect customers and damage the company’s brand. Examples of bad affiliate behavior include affiliates bidding on branded search PPC keywords (or their misspellings), affiliates using fake credit cards to buy products and receive commissions, and click fraud whereby affiliates get paid for clicking on their own ads (less of an issue if a cost-per-acquisition (CPA) pay structure is used).
Source: MarketingSherpa, “Improve Affiliate Performance: 5 Tips,” MarketingSherpa, Dec 1, 2009
