A day in the life of an affiliate programme

This piece illustrates the daily and weekly workload of an affiliate programme manager. Understanding this workload will help you to manage your programme and make the greatest returns from your affiliate scheme. SoYou! is a fictional women’s fashion retailer. The activities detailed are taken from a real retailer.

SoYou! launched an affiliate marketing campaign through an affiliate network in mid 2006. Up until then, their transactional website had functioned mainly as a method for repeat purchase from their extremely loyal customer base, or for completion of catalogue orders.

The objective of launching an affiliate programme was to help turn their site into an incremental sales driver.

SoYou! has an Online Marketing Manager (OMM) with overall responsibility for running their affiliate programme. Their network has also appointed them with an Account Manager (AM) who supports SoYou! with week-to-week programme management and optimisation.

Daily checks

The SoYou! AM logs in to their online interface to review the performance of their programme. The OMM checks that sales are tracking correctly and that the top performing key affiliates are on track to achieve their targets.

Both the OMM and the AM check for emails, network enquiries and online affiliate discussion forums for posts that specifically relate to the SoYou! programme.

Data-feed

SoYou!’s data-feed is a digital inventory of all products they sell online. It includes other information such as, a deep link to their location on site, a link to an image of the product, a description, the price, reference ID and category (hat, trousers, etc). This information is used by SoYou!’s affiliates to highlight SoYou!’s
products individually.

By refreshing their data-feed on a daily basis stock levels, product additions and prices are kept accurate on affiliate sites. The AM checks that the latest version has uploaded correctly.

Affiliate recruitment / applications

There have been two applications from affiliates to join the programme overnight. SoYou! like to review each application and send a personal response accepting or rejecting the affiliate.

Affiliate enquiry

The network receives a phone call from an affiliate with a fashion content site. The AM for SoYou! discusses their offering including the commission structure and cookie length. The AM identifies that the affiliate can make use of a ‘bestseller list’ to highlight SoYou!’s products in an editorial piece on their site. The affiliate likes the initiative and receives the content later that day to be published at the end of the week.

PPC Arrangements

All of SoYou!’s search engine marketing is handled by one selected affiliate, ClickFinder. SoYou! do not use a PPC agency and as such ClickFinder have become an integral part of their online strategy.

It’s important that as few ‘repeat customers’ as possible arrive through the affiliate channel. To ensure this is the case, ClickFinder worked with their clients to avoid running the PPC adverts where customers would otherwise easily find direct links to the client website.

ClickFinder contacted SoYou! to discuss the effectiveness of a recently implemented tiered commission structure. The structure rewards ClickFinder an increased commission while a specified level of sales is achieved.

Newsletter feature

Each week SoYou!’s network send out an electronic newsletter to the affiliates across their database. The newsletter highlights important merchant developments and promotions to affiliates.

Reporting

SoYou!’s OMM logged accesses reports on affiliate performance for the month. With this information the network advise SoYou! on the progress of specific affiliates who were previously invited to join a bespoke incentive scheme for the SoYou! programme.

Voucher code

SoYou! want to explore offering their affiliates discount codes, but are fearful it will have a negative impact on their existing traffic levels. Together with their network they select one affiliate partner with which to work. The partnership will award the affiliate site with exclusive distribution rights of the voucher code promotion. The chosen affiliate is a reward site with a large member base, which will promote the offer to their end users. SoYou!’s OMM sets up the code and informs the affiliate that they can launch the promotion. The results will be observed over the next four weeks before a commitment to roll out a boarder discount code scheme is made.