Tired of the same old tips and tricks about web affiliate marketing programs? “Communicate with them, treat them with respect” yada-yada. What about what really works? I pulled together a group of my most experienced, thought-leading colleagues to find out what’s moving the needle in affiliate marketing today. The below innovations are what I discovered. I’m happy to share these best practices. Yes, they can be quickly and easily applied—helping you manage your affiliates and extract maximum sales efficiency. Stay tuned to Electronic Retailer’s blog for candid interviews with these experts where they’ll “go deep” to reveal their secrets to success.

1. Allow affiliates to access a knowledge-driven feedback loop to improve their ROI and, as a result, increase yours.
a. Let affiliates “connect the ROI dots” between their investments (media spending) and your ultimate success (sales or new customers).
b. Provide select, trusted affiliates with limited, yet unfettered, access to your internal metrics and customer behavior data.

2. Strengthen relationships with superstar affiliates and open doors for potential superstars by actively, yet cautiously, investing hard and soft dollars in them.
a. Invest in affiliates: Underwrite affordable, educational opportunities and conferences for them. Sponsoring affiliates is very popular in the European realm.
b. Sponsor low-cost, virtual innovation forums and webinars that offer training opportunities for top affiliates.
c. Provide limited access to web metrics (i.e., Google Analytics, Omniture) and optimization tools that are already at your disposal, yet possess a high perceived (and applied!) value among affiliates.
d. Invest in affiliates: Subsidize the media buying of select, high-value affiliates by providing matching contributions to their expenditures or allowing access to your media buying prowess.

3. Develop and communicate a clear, well-reasoned search marketing policy to affiliates.
a. Audit your affiliate program for confluence with paid (PPC) search advertising efforts.
b. Understand value driven by affiliates across various categories based on audit results that demonstrate “triggers” of sales transactions.
c. Create business rules that negate and approve affiliate commissions based on logical rules that are shared openly and pro-actively with affiliates.
d. Understand where your search engine optimization “sweet spot” is by identifying where you want to spend time, energy (money). Assign “long tail” search terms/keywords (those able to generate less referral volume) to affiliates for their monetization efforts.

4. Experiment with social media affiliates.
a. Scale your most precious resource, time: Use new tools, such as Syntryx, to rapidly prospect for qualified affiliates.
b. Provide affiliates with access to helpful, innovative Web 2.0 linking technologies like Linkshare’s FlexLinks or Amazon’s various tools ranging from “SiteStripe” to widgets.
c. Give affiliates access to product data, coupons and other content via flexible, RSS-enabled technologies.

5. Consider creative, new approaches to paying and bonusing affiliates based on performance.
a. Throttle up payouts among performers who drive volume at a reasonable cost, considering channel confluence issues, etc.
b. Throttle down payouts among under-performers who’ve been given a fair chance, but are not performing on a quarterly basis.

Stay tuned for more actionable tips and interviews with experts in a variety of performance-focused web marketing strategies.

Jeff Molander is a leading Web marketing expert, author and speaker. He is CEO of Molander & Associates Inc.

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What happens in Vegas ends up on this blog. Below are a few pictures from ERA’s Annual Convention in Las Vegas. Check back often - more pictures will be posted soon.

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Let’s be honest. It’s been a while since anything interesting has turned up within the realm of online affiliate marketing. Yet that could change and soon. We need to know how and when to exploit the next performance-based marketing opportunity. Rest assured, there are exciting new opportunities for DRTV’ers big and small in affiliate marketing—but serious challenges lie ahead. From managing the intersection of search and affiliate programs to diversifying the mix of distribution points, the key question multichannel merchants should ask is, “How can affiliates be encouraged to send more incremental sales or new customers?”

Affiliates: Friends or Foes?
It’s a harsh reality: Web affiliates are taking a beating in search marketing. If you’ve been involved in affiliate marketing for more than a year, you’ve likely seen declining sales or leads from search-focused affiliates. Newbies and veterans of the performance-based strategies are noticing affiliates competing for searchers and wondering how to handle it. Do you ban them from using some tactics or all tactics? Do you partner selectively with them? The issue is a familiar one to the DRTV industry and was more thoroughly discussed by SendTec CEO Paul Soltoff in Electronic Retailer magazine. Bottom line is, affiliates are challenged and sometimes embattled. After wrangling with the issues, many DRTV marketers are asking “are affiliates even worth it?!”

Pockets of Innovation
Most DRTV marketers find such investment to be a difficult pill to swallow, and therefore, rely on affiliate networks to scale their efforts. This begs the question, what are affiliate networks doing to support affiliate innovation? What tools and educational support are available to open new doors? (more…)

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The ERA Minute is a new feature where ERA members can film marketing tips that will be distributed throughout all of ERA’s channels and social networking outlets. If you’re interested in making the next ERA Minute, contact Tom Quash at tquash@retailing.org.

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Inventions—they are a full-time job for a guy like me. I have been licensing inventions for the past eight and a half years. I’m a matchmaker, the e-Harmony of inventions. I try to make “love connections” between inventors and companies.

I will never say that I’ve seen it all. Every day I see something new and innovative. For instance, I have been presenting new product ideas to Allstar Marketing Group for several years. They are the team that brought you Aqua Globes and Cold Heat. And who can forget the direct-response monster, Smart Spin? Last year, I found an air freshener invention in our vast catalog of products. It was a small cartridge that affixes to the top of your ceiling fan. When the fan spins, the fresh smell of lavender fills the room. I had never seen anything on the market like it before. I checked the patent status, and it had been issued a utility patent.

I thought: This can’t be real. It’s so simple. It’s so inexpensive. Has this really never been done before? Let’s see what Allstar thinks. So, I presented it to Gary Sullivan, who is an “all star” himself and works as their new product scout. When he presented it to the gang, it was a hit and “Fan Fragrances” was born.

Allstar developed the product in China, and has just begun to market the product nationally and internationally. They do a great marketing job on their own; we assisted by using our own publicity department to get the word out there and help promote their new product.

Is your company looking for new inventions or products to sell on TV or into retail? Our service is free to qualified manufacturing companies, distributors and catalogers. Also, by checking out our online retail store, marketers can search through all of our products available for wholesale distribution. We have thousands of patented inventions with prototypes in most categories waiting to find your love.

Ronny Smith is responsible for innovation licensing at Intromark Incorporated.

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The term “multichannel” is tossed around in direct response as a casual new buzzword that everyone claims to provide. However, there’s a difference between using multiple channels and truly having an integrated multichannel approach. The strength of a true multichannel approach is in the results that add up to more than just a sum of the various elements.

While you work with partners on different aspects of a campaign—creative, media, response/order take and fulfillment—you need to focus on the complete picture (and work with partners who allow you to do that!). Many marketers stick with what they know works and use traditional metrics to evaluate success. As media is expensive, it is understandable why that’s the case.

But, what happens when your customer sees that spot on TV and decides to purchase via mobile phone or web days after the airing? What about the customer who saw the ad, visited the site and did not buy? Or, what about the client who did not see the spot, but is a potential buyer because of his or her past history? Unless you have a plan to catch all of these opportunities you may not be using a big enough net—and you may not have the data you need to make decisions about how effective the media truly was. Take the multichannel integration test!

Consistency and Coordination
· Do you coordinate advertising events so all channels launch with the same message at the same time?

· Are changes to your DRTV offer or creative simultaneously reflected in online and mobile activities?

Analysis and Media ROI
· Do you view key metrics for all channels together to assess the full impact of your media, as well as the contribution from each channel?

· Do you know how buying patterns differ for customer purchasing via phone, online and mobile (upsell take rates, cross-sell success, etc.)?

· Can you identify how customers who purchase via the phone differ from those who purchase online or through mobile channels?

Revenue Opportunities
· Do you include a call-in option with online and mobile activities? (For example: We see lift of 10-30 percent in online conversion when we allow visitors the option to place orders by phone.)

· Do you tailor upsells to channel?

If you’re not answering YES to the above, you’re leaving sales on the table for someone else to pick up. So get a bigger net to capture ALL the sales generated by your advertising activities!

Mike Ferzacca is CEO of Advanced Interactive Sciences

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Some say that ERA appears to have abandoned its original DRTV members in favor of online technologies and advancements. I want to say without any qualms that ERA has not abandoned the DRTV segment of the membership at all. Indeed, DRTV is alive and well at ERA and the association’s commitment to it is demonstrated in many of its offerings, from education and research to the self-regulatory program, and to government affairs advocacy.

At the Annual Convention last September, the Opening Session was dedicated to three celebrities who use television to sell their products primarily through infomercials, as well as interviews with the CEOs of HSN and ShopNBC, both live television shopping channels. In the third quarter of the year, ERA commissioned a research study on The Evolving Role of Direct Response Television in Multichannel Marketing Execution. The research demonstrated that DRTV continues to grow as a marketing medium, but concludes that it has evolved into a driver of multichannel marketing. More significant, in order to make DRTV profitable on the front end, while also driving a multichannel marketing strategy, it shows that DRTV marketers are accelerating their adoption and customization of emerging technologies, especially in the interactive sphere. (more…)

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A key to successful infomercial production involves having the right balance of entertainment and selling. An entertaining infomercial production can be instrumental in gaining the consumer’s attention and getting them to stop and watch your show. However, infomercial marketers need to make sure their infomercial production isn’t too entertaining and doesn’t do a good job of selling your product. A call-to-action (CTA) is the key-selling segment of an infomercial, during which the product benefits, offer and price are revealed to the consumer. Some infomercials do not reveal the price during the CTA, and this type of offer relies on the telemarketing firm to reveal the price and sell the product. This is referred to as a soft offer. Recent research has shown that by including more CTAs in an infomercial production an infomercial marketer can generate a better level of consumer response. Since consumers have so many media options to choose from, they are likely watching infomercials for shorter periods of time, so that’s why it’s important to provide them with the ordering information contained in the CTA more often throughout the infomercial production.

Before-and-After Photos, Product Demonstrations and Continuity Programs

Make sure before-and-after photos and infomercial product demonstrations are believable and represent what the product can actually help you achieve. Today’s consumer is more sophisticated than ever and can detect deceptive product representations. In addition, make sure you work with an experienced FTC lawyer to ensure that your infomercial production complies with all FTC rules and regulations. Many successful infomercials include a continuity program, where the consumer authorizes the infomercial marketer to ship a product to them on a regular basis. This can provide the infomercial marketer with an ongoing stream of income. Work with your telemarketer in establishing a continuity program that complies with all FTC rules.

Peter Koeppel is founder and president of Koeppel Direct

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