Affiliates That Are Dormant
3 Comments August 15, 2006 / Posted in Affiliate MarketingAnother day, another “you’re not doing anything with us therefore we’re removing you from our affiliate program” email. Unfortunately for the merchant involved the email went to Jude and not me, so the merchant got a slightly dumbed down version of the various expletives eminating from her office by return email.
Anyway - merchants, why do you have dormant affiliates?
1. Some affiliates will join your program and not do anything immediately. They like to see if tracking works and that sales appear. They may give things a few weeks to see if any issues arise. E.g we recently added content and links for a new gaming merchant who within 24 hours was suspended!
2. Some affiliates will join your program and think “that’ll be useful for a site I have in mind” - it may be that that site is coming soon, in development, or something that’s on the backburner.
3. Some affiliates will join your program to just see what’s on offer. For example to look at banners, content units. They may also want to grab your content feed and implement it in price comparison systems.
4. Some affiliates will join your program with intent to promote you… except it turns out your creative is poor, the wrong size, has your url plastered over them. It may also be your site has the appearence of the back end of a bus and/or the landing page isn’t affiliate friendly.
5. Some affiliates will join your program with intent to promote you either through PPC or content, but after looking at your site have found alternatives. Perhaps your competitors pay more or offer better creative?
6. Some affiliates will join your program with intent to promote you via PPC, but you have restricted keywords, a closed group, or something in place which alienates other affiliates.
7. Some affiliates will join your program, but you leave them on pending for so long that they lose the desire to promote your program or forget about it altogether.
There’s probably more to add to the above, but hopefully the above covers why some affiliates are dormant. Now, if an affiliate is dormant - just why are they causing some affiliate managers a major problem?
In the email today, the affiliate manager suggested that dormant affiliates would be removed so that they could save time concentrate their efforts on their active affiliates! That’s nonsense.
If you have 100 affiliates, of whom 90 affiliates are doing nothing (either dormant or little sales), and 10 pro-active… then if you remove the 90 you still have 10 pro-active affiliates! You’re still producing new creative (well, some of you are), you’re still sending out generic emails to inform affiliate’s of offers (well, some of you are) and you’re still working closely with your 10 pro-actives. So, please explain how kicking out dormant or low sales affiliates saves you time? You’re not doing any more or less work - and more importantly you’re also not burning bridges with potential future affiliates.
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This is something I don’t get also, how can people who join your program and not do anything take up lots of your time? A normal Merchant has 1 site to look after where as a Normal Affiliate is looking after many sites and has to keep up with a dozen Networks and hundreds of Merchants.
So having sat down and wondered about this for hours I came to the conclusion that it’s not that people who join and do nothing are taking up loads of time, it’s that they don’t make the stats look cool as who wants to see 80% of there Affiliates doing nothing and if you have to wade through all them to get to the “good guys†then of course you will be thinking lets get shot of them… but alias I don’t think just like that, I think “what the heck did they join up for†and “can I convert them from no sales to some sales†with as little effort as possible. So this is why for the new Merchant Interface at Paid On Results (going live this week) we came up with Auto Grouping.
Basically in a nut shell it allows the Merchant to set criteria for who should be in what group. So let’s say you want you’re active and you un-active Affiliates in different groups so you can communicate to them a different message, view your reports and stats for each groups differently but do it in a way where you don’t have to lift a finger. And that’s what this new feature will do! A switched on Affiliate Manager can work on the guys doing nothing and try and get them motivated, while still being able to service the ones who are making the effort and of course the flip side is that if you’re a lazy Affiliate Manager (and we know your out their) you can ignore the guys not making a bean until the day they do something as per what Jason has listed above, making a win, win situation for all and not leaving you open to doing ridiculous things like removing someone just because they have yet got round to promoting you.
[...] The other issue I keep seeing is described perfectly by Jason over at One Little Duck so there is no point in me saying exactly the same thing but I will say I am as confused as Jason about the logic here. [...]
[...] I started writing a comment to a great post by Jason on One Little Duck and realised it was going become a biggy so I’ve put it on here instead. Clarke’s comment, was spot on too: it’s that they don’t make the stats look cool as who wants to see 80% of there Affiliates doing nothing and if you have to wade through all them to get to the “good guys†then of course you will be thinking lets get shot of them [...]