Letter to affiliates

[bfree74]

I am about to send out a letter to our less active affiliates in an effort to motivate and help them increase their productivity. What should the theme of this letter be? I have looked over some examples and have yet to find a good communication from a merchant to its affiliates. Any suggestions?

[Linda Buquet]

This is a good one, but I may have shown it to you before.

Ultimate Affiliate Activation Email from zZounds Affiliate Manager
http://affiliate-blogs.5staraffiliat...ivation-email/

[AffiliateGuild]

Wow, that is nice Linda. Thanks for bringing it back up. You have so much info here ... how you keep track of it all is beyond me?! But, I'm glad that you do.

[Linda Buquet]

"how you keep track of it all is beyond me?"

Bobbie, lucky for me, my blog search button works like a charm.

[WyndhamVacation-EricEwe]

nice letter..but if you have like 10k affiliates, you will get a flood of affiliate calls like, help me with HTML..

incentive does work..$$

[JamieConverseon]

I love that letter, thanks for posting it again.

I've done several things like that in the past and even offered a designer and web developer to help them. I was worried that what Eric stated above would happen and we would spend weeks educating on html and basic stuff. Fortunately, that didn't happen. We did have quite a few affiliates call for simple tips and tricks and it helped us develop a resource site for them. That program didn't have 10,000 affiliates, only 1,500, so it is totally possible to get inundated with calls.

Eric, did this happen to you personally?

[Teli]

This is an awesome topic as I'm moving into a similar phase myself. Everyone is correct, that is one amazing affiliate letter and :blush: I wouldn't have thought of that myself.

Of course, when you have a ton of affiliates, it becomes a very real problem if you're inundated with questions about basic HTML. But, what I'm wondering is whether there were stipulations to the consultation. For instance, time limits? Topic limits? Then, the next question comes up is what to do with the affiliates who've neither improved their account nor contacted you for the free consultation? How much time would you give them?

It would be nice to hear from people who've had experience using this method. Maybe I'll just go ahead and get my feet wet.

~ Teli

[Click-Here]

One thing I've found to be effective both as merchant and as an affiliate is to set up a autoresponder series of tips and latest techniques. Striclty information an incentives with out sales pitches

It can be set up so that when the affiliate signs up for a program they click on the button that best describes their experince level. By doing this you can teach the newbies basic techinques and more experiece with get the medium to advanced tips.

[Linda Buquet]

I really doubt you would be overrun with calls.
I may be wrong but...

Affiliate marketing is not the 80/20 rule it's the 95/5 rule. I bet only about 40% of a company's affiliates fully read every single merchant email. Then out of the 40% only 5% would think about
taking advantage and then out of that 5% - only 5% of those would bother to call and actually take you the affiliate manager up on the offer. So that's 1 out of 1,000 affiliates that would call. Truthfully I think the very max would be 5 out of 1000.

I still think the letter is brilliant and I think affiliates would think "wow here's a company that really cares and stands out from the rest." I just don't think many would ever set up a consult. Again maybe I'm wrong but I don't think so!

Click-Here I really like the idea of segmenting affiliates by asking them their skill level and then messaging with the right type of training info. Nice personalized approach.

[bfree74]

I was hardly overrun by calls, I got some calls and some emails, people asking for help or advice, the letter above definitely helped