Question

Topic: E-Marketing

How Should We Market An Esp Affiliate Program?

Posted by Neil on 9/6/2008 at 3:47 PM ET 800 Points
I work for the StreamSend Email Marketing service. We are an Email Service Provider (ESP) and have fairly recently implemented an email marketing affiliate program.

Without any effort on our part we have had a decent number of people sign up. We have not yet studied it closely but I am making an educated guess that most of our affiliates are current customers or referrals. We do need to look into that, though.

The question is how do you take an affiliate program to the next level and market our affiliate program beyond your base of clients, referrals, and the like?

Now, most of our marketing dollars go toward marketing the service itself and our private label reseller program but not our affiliate program. It would seem strange to devote too much marketing budget to an this program so are there creative ways to market an affiliate program?

I know there are services, web sites, and so on that help you market your affiliate program but I am not sure what they are or how exactly they work. I'd like to get a lay of the land.

I posted this as urgent as we really think this is an outstanding program and we want to start marketing it to a broader audience as soon as possible. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
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RESPONSES

  • Posted by Jay Hamilton-Roth on 9/7/2008 at 10:53 AM Accepted
    Some resources for you:

    Background:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affiliate_marketing
    https://www.howstuffworks.com/affiliate-program.htm
    https://superaffiliatehandbook.com/
    https://marketing.about.com/lr/affiliate_marketing/169062/1/
    https://www.e-consultancy.com/publications/affiliate-marketing-networks-buy...

    Program listings:
    https://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/Web_Design_and_Development/Authorin...
    https://dir.yahoo.com/Business_and_Economy/Business_to_Business/Business_Op...
    https://botw.org/top/Computers/Internet/Web_Design_and_Development/Authorin...
    https://affiliatetracking.com/atn_directory
    https://www.affiliatescout.com/
    https://www.affiliateprograms.com/directories.php
    https://www.affiliatetips.com/
  • Posted by Neil on 9/7/2008 at 1:09 PM Author
    Thanks Jay! That is quite a list.

    StreamSend has an email marketing affiliate program and people have to go to this Web page to sign up.

    Through the Web sites you listed, would we still drive people to *our* affiliate page to sign them up through the sites you listed above or would we have them sign up through these sites? I am trying to get a lay of the land on the mechanics of how these sites typically work, though I am sure there is variation.

    Obviously, we will keep our sign up page too but, in addition, would we have secondary ways to sign up through those services you listed? Or do those services just have another way to promote our own affiliate program and drive the actual sign up traffic to it?

    Thanks again. Your links will prove incredibly helpful and I look forward to reviewing them.
  • Posted by Jay Hamilton-Roth on 9/7/2008 at 9:41 PM Member
    Affiliate program directories are lists of companies (like yours) that offer affiliate programs. The point is that there are many people online who make a living creating landing pages, PPC campaigns, email blasts, etc. for other people's offerings. The better the cut the affiliate gets, the more enticing it is. Basically, it's a self-motivated sales opportunity. On many of these directories, you'll put a brief synopsis of your offering, with a link to your site to sign up the affiliate, etc. Once they get an affiliate link, they can "go to town" for your mutual benefit. Some of these directories are for free, some you need to pay for the listing (that's how the directory list manager makes their money).
  • Posted by Neil on 9/8/2008 at 12:12 AM Author
    Jay, I guess what I do not yet understand is what do these sites you listed above get out of the deal? We are promoting *our* affiliate program. Do they get a cut or do they benefit in some other way (e.g., advertising of various sorts)?

    Thanks for the education on this. I appreciate it greatly.
  • Posted by Jay Hamilton-Roth on 9/8/2008 at 8:52 AM Member
    As I mentioned, some of these directories you pay to list your affiliate offer for a fixed fee (like the classifieds), or they can benefit from the traffic itself.

    The compiled directory is a list of categories of affiliate programs that are similar to yours (for example, https://www.affiliatefirst.com/txt/Internet/Email/index.shtml). Look at the example to see how an offer looks and works.

  • Posted by steven.alker on 9/8/2008 at 9:20 AM Accepted
    Dear Neil

    Rather than go for the public sites which would either list your product for free or list and promote you for a fee. I would be inclined to look for partners who already have a large in-house, owned email list.

    For example, through collaborative work with a number of our clients, we can get a good quality of introduction to nearly 250,000 prospective customers, out of which probably about 30% are also potential re-sellers or affiliates for web based and email based services.

    I will use two examples; one Marketing guru of our acquaintance sends a weekly newsletter to about 35,000 subscribers. Another offers distance learning packages and has over 40,000 contacts on his CRM system which we supplied.

    Apart from being natural re-sellers of your services, they could also receive enquiries from companies which are themselves looking to offer email services,

    I’m not suggesting that you get into some pyramidal structure of recruiting people to recruit people (And so on). If these types of organisation were to be given a workable business plan to sell StreamSend’s services to their own end user accounts they also recognise that some their own clients would also have large client databases and could avail themselves of a reselling agreement without impacting on the relationship with the distance learning company or the marketing operation (They are in different sectors of the customer base)

    The distance learning company already do this and have offered us the opportunity to get 20% of the value of any courses we sell by mentioning them in our own company emails. When we come across someone who themselves want to re-sell these distant learning courses, we pass them on the principal. It is no skin of our noses as we get rewarded for bringing a new distributor, whilst the distributor’s own database is likely to consist mostly of records and email addresses we do not possess.

    All they need is the courage of their convictions to promote someone else’s product or service in their marketingl and selling material.

    Hope this is of use


    Sincerely


    Steve Alker
    Xspirt
  • Posted by Levon on 9/8/2008 at 11:04 AM Accepted
    I have never been a fan of the affiliate directories. If you have a good affiliate program -- affiliates will find you. I would start by growing your affiliate program slowly and offer big incentives that pay well. The big incentives will help you leverage good affiliates. I would then start to leverag off of JV partners and cross-sell the affiliate program that way while steadily focusing on slow but meaningful growth.
  • Posted by Neil on 9/8/2008 at 11:18 AM Author
    Thanks Jay. I was not entirely clear on that but that makes perfect sense now.

    Would you recommend say the top few of these to try out? I'd want to run a test or two (to see how well it works) before going headlong into this approach.

    Steve, I do also like your idea of directly approaching potential affiliates and we definitely will be doing that. We had talked about marketing and selling it like our core service because we do think it is a great program.
  • Posted by Neil on 9/9/2008 at 10:59 PM Author
    Thank you very much for the answers. I appreciate it.
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