Purge Inactivity To Get The Best From Your Affiliates!
10 Comments March 19, 2008 / Posted in Affiliate MarketingMarch it seems is purging month, with a number of merchants deciding that in order to move their affiliate programs on, they have to take some drastic steps. Inactive affiliates are causing an ever increasing strain on their workloads, damaging their brand by not sending any traffic, and are costing the merchant an absolute fortune by not sending any sales.
In order to combat this tiresome burden and free up some time so the merchant can work with the best of the best of the best (sir) the only necessary step is a bit of an affiliate audit. Something along the lines of “To ensure that we can offer active affiliates the best possible level of service we will be removing all inactive affiliates from the programme”.
Tripe is defined as the “rubbery lining of the stomach of cattle or other ruminants, used as food” as well as “something of no value; rubbish”.
And guess what I think of these inactivity purges…. yes it’s total cattle stomach lining!
On one hand I understand the need to go through the ‘purging’ process – it shows whoever employs you you’re doing something – but why is it always the first email we ever receive is of the purging nature? Why have we never heard from you before? Why have you never made any effort before? Where was the time spent that we cost you?
It’s about time this purging process was better formalised, because it does nothing but alienate affiliates to both the merchant AND network.
Before agreeing to send out an “inactive purge” email perhaps it might be wise to consider the following:
1. When was the last time you actually contacted the affiliate to encourage them to promote you?
2. Have you provided all the required tools for affiliates to be able to promote you?
3. Are all you tools available and up to date so that affiliates can promote you?
4. Is your offering significantly good enough so that affiliates want to promote you?
If you’ve done the above, and that hasn’t worked, then ok collate those time consuming, money wasting, taking up all my time away from the active guysing affiliates and give them the boot.
But personally I’m a bit fed up of recieving these emails from merchants claiming my inactivity is making their job harder when the evidence clearly demonstrates they haven’t even tried to do their job in the first place.
Perhaps the solution is to kick out the inactive manager before the inactive affiliates?
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Sounds like you got the John Lewis email too?
Compare and contrast to the praise I gave one of their competitors – M&S not long ago, it just shows that there are better alternatives:
http://www.stephenpratley.com/the-alternative-to-throwing-out-your-affiliates/
I was particularly thrilled at the prospect of this requirement:
“please contact me providing the URL of the site where you intend to promote johnlewis.com and a screenshot illustrating the inventory you are able to commit to the brand.”
So which part of a performance-based partnership involves me promising traffic to a merchant at no cost?
Perhaps we’re inactive because we don’t get any encouragement from the merchant? We’re not offered a reason to promote them. We’re not made to feel valued.
If a merchant is complaining of affiliate inactivity, they should look at themselves first!
I haven’t been missed out this time – I got the same email.
When I was involved in affiliate marketing from the merchant side one of the metrics the agency used to show the effectiveness of the programme was “click active affiliates”. In other words, the percentage of the affiliates signed up who were actively sending traffic to the merchant. So, remove all your inactive affiliates and by definition your “click active” percentage shoots up and it looks like you’re doing a worthwhile job. Just a thought.
It genuinely amazes me!
Why don’t these big players get the same point across in a much more positive way.
So, for example, instead of saying “we are kicking you off our programme because you haven’t generated any sales” why not say “lets work with you to start generating some sales”.
Instead of saying “you’re not linking to us that’s not good enough” why not say “have you seen this great new product which sits with your user demographic. How about promoting it on your site?”
ETC.
As I’ve said before (and I’ll say again…) It’s not rocket science.
Also – look at the quality of affiliates who have responded (including Jason) who have been kicked off the progamme!!! All REAL QUALITY AFFILIATES who any merchant SHOULD love to work.
This is another of those issues that just won’t go away – Someone somewhere has made the conscious decision that removing affiliates from the program en masse is a good idea, ignoring the fact that those affiliates may just be in need of a gentle nudge, some decent creative, or just forgotten about your program after you took 12 weeks to approve them in the first place.
And for every one who thinks like that, there’s another smaller, yet switched-on merchant ready to reap the rewards of actually using a bit of common sense.
Flipping this on its head for a moment, from the circa 2500 affiliate programs in the UK, if affiliates removed inactive merchants ie those they had never received communication from (even a direct promotional email) or not attended any important events like a4uexpo, how many merchants do you think would be left. Some networks seem to happily allow the purging of affiliates, but how often do they purge inactive merchants or agencies. Just a thought.
i dont see the point in culling, there is no point in removing seemingliy inactive affiliates as they will produce a sale at some point and one sale is always worth waiting for!
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