Question

Topic: E-Marketing

Possible To Sell Recurring Service Through Elance?

Posted by Neil on 8/9/2008 at 8:10 AM ET 50 Points
I work for the StreamSend Email Marketing service and I just signed up for elance.

We are a month-to-month service and I see lots of people who need email marketing services. The problem is elance does not appear to be setup to take a cut of recurring revenue so I do not think we can bid on anything.

The ironic thing is our own StreamSend Affiliate Program pays 20% recurring monthly commission, which is a considerably higher cut than elance takes on project work. We would be more than happy to pay elance's rate or even our normal 20% commission per month for any customers we got through them but there seems to be no mechanism at all for month-to-month services.

Any advice on how to use elance to sell a month-to-month service? Or if this is even possible at all?
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RESPONSES

  • Posted on 8/9/2008 at 9:51 AM Accepted
    Try contacting Elance directly (+1-877-4-ELANCE) Monday - Friday, 7am - 7pm Pacific Time.

    Also, have you considered a package, for a year's worth service for a discount, perhaps 11 month's of monthly fees paid all at once? That might be a way to increase value as well.

    Good luck!
  • Posted on 8/9/2008 at 11:04 AM Accepted
    Hi Neil,

    I started off using Elance as a service provider. The way to do this is to set it up as a year-long (or however many months you agree upon) project with monthly milestones. Each milestone is a payment point. Then you can have them fund it with milestones and they will get a reminder around the time of the milestone to fund the project.

    If you need any more help on navigating Elance, I'd be happy to help. My contact info is in my profile here.

    Best of Luck!

    Alexa
  • Posted by Neil on 8/9/2008 at 1:07 PM Author
    Thanks for the feedback. Yes we are a service with a monthly fee:
    StreamSend prices

    People generally sign up for an account directly with StreamSend and have a credit card on file that is charged the same amount each month. Well, they can upgrade, downgrade, or cancel any time they want.

    As I mentioned we do have an affiliate program but it is still not clear to me how setting it up with a project with milestones would get them into our system through elance if the customer decides to go with us as their Email Service Provider.

    It is unclear how elance gets their cut if someone is signed up for our service? We have our own database of customers whom we bill by CC.
  • Posted by Neil on 8/12/2008 at 6:01 PM Author
    Thanks for the feedback. Most appreciated.
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