The “to coupon or not coupon” debate is an age old one in affiliate marketing that has no universally correct answer. Coupons can be a great way to generate business with new or repeat customers and can also be a great tool to help you accomplish specific business goals. The key though is to be strategic in your implementation of coupons and coupon codes.
Before you set up a promotion, ask yourself a few questions:
- What goals am I looking to accomplish with this coupon?
- What is my targeted cost of acquiring a customer?
- Am I more concerned with improving conversion alone? Or am I more focused on achieving a specific value per sale from the promotion?
- What is my competition offering?
- What has the higher perceived value to my customer – free shipping or a percentage or flat rate off of the purchase?
- What can my margins support?
- What is the likelihood that new customers acquired will purchase from you a second time?
All of the questions above will give you some guidance as to how to structure your coupon promotion.
We’ve seen several instances where the questions above weren’t asked when coupon deals were formulated and it ended up costing the merchant in either a failed promotion or in terms of lost revenue because the offer was too generous.
Here’s an example – you want to have a quick sale to generate some extra revenue during a slow period – you have some healthy margin on your products so you decide to run a sale at 30% off or better. So you set up a coupon for a flat 30% off with no “qualifier” and when the offer goes out, you see sales increase, but the average order falls through the floor. Maybe that coupon should have been for 30% off all orders of $50 or more? Also – if your cost of shipping was effectively 15-20% of cost, maybe you could have run an offer like “Free Shipping on orders of $60 or more” and actually been a bit more profitable.
Definitely also pay attention to your net margin – especially if you are selling physical products and make sure that when you add up the affiliate commission, the network commission and the coupon that the offer still made sense from a profitability perspective. You’re in business to make money right ? The only exception to this would be if you know that you sell really effectively to existing clients and you were thinking “customer acquisition” with future sales or cross sell/upsells in mind. There are few things worse than running a promotion that you think generated dynamite results until you ran the numbers to find out that you actually lost money.
I’d also encourage you to work closely with some selected coupon affiliates to help in developing your offer. They know their audience and they know what makes them tick and can give you the benefit of the experiences they’ve had with similar offers.
Using the FanDuel “API Feed” Reporting Tool to view inactive players
One of the most popular questions we are asked is “How can I see the players that I have referred who haven’t become an active player yet?” The video above shows affiliate partners how they can use the “API Feed” reporting tool included in their affiliate dashboard. If you have any issues or any questions, please get in touch.
Shareasale “License Plate Links” support social media marketing and gives affiliates a viral marketing tool
I just got done watching the tutorial video on the new “License Plate Links” on the Shareasale blog and I came away really impressed with what Brian and his team have rolled out. More and more affiliates are marketing via social media link Twitter and Facebook and it’s not possible or practical to use the standard long-form network affiliate link – enter the License Plate Link. License Plate Links work as an add on to Shareasale “Create a Custom Link to a Page” feature. Affiliates now have the choice via drop down to “Create License Plate Link.”
If they choose yes, they are also given the option to “Activate Social Sharing Function.”
As an example – here’s the License Plate Link that will take you to the SAS blog post I reference above with Social Sharing enabled.
The “Social Sharing Function” is the real value of the the new feature pack. When enabled, it will place a social sharing bar at the top of the destination page that will allow the visitor to share the link with their friends via Twitter, Facebook or email, and track how many times it’s been shared.
Here’s the best part – the original affiliate gets credit for any and all referrals that result from the sharing. Viral marketing on the social media made easy. It’s awesome – and if you are an affiliate promoting Shareasale merchants you are absolutely crazy if you are not using this feature if you market via the social media in any way.
Great work SAS!
Affiliate 101 : Labeling your affiliate link section
I was doing approvals today and was inspired to post really quickly on something that I saw come up a couple of times.
In both cases, I was looking at sites or blogs that represented an organization – the content was good stuff and the layout was well done. Then I saw a navigation link on the bottom of the page that caught my eye – it simply said “affiliates.” I decided to click it and see if maybe the sites in question had affiliate programs of their own. Nope. The “affiliates” page was a “banner farm” or a collection of affiliate program banners with no copy, descriptions or anything. There are two mistakes here that can be easily corrected and help you make more money with your site.
1. Calling the page “affiliates” will actually cost you traffic. Your readers don’t know what “affiliate” means or what affiliate marketing is. If you wan them to click a link to a page where they can shop to support your organization – tell them so. Call it “Shop and Support” or something like that.
2. BANNER FARMS DON’T WORK!!!! To get impact from yoru “shop and support” page, invest a little time in writing an intro that tells people that “We’ve teamed up with some awesome companies who have agreed to share a portion of the proceeds of any sales you make after clicking their link, etc.” Then, use a combination of a small banner (125×125 pixels is great) and text to describe what the level of revenue share will be.
For instance: ” FTD.com – 10% of sales – shop now“
Once you have set this up, you will have a greater likelihood of getting clicks to your page with affiliate links, and your visitors will be more likely to shop your affiliate links and support your site because they like what you do and want to support it.
Happy selling!
Wade
Advice for Affiliates – Solve Problems for Shoppers
There was a great post with a video from Shawn Collins today at the Affiliate Tip Blog. Shawn talked about how affiliates can turn themselves from being a simple link page that takes visitors to stores one time (and potentially never get the visitor back) into a real resource that visitors will bookmark and come back to again and again (generating more revenue for the affiliate and their selected merchants alike.)
The key – solve a problem for your audience. Share your wisdom and expertise. Worked all your professional life as a plumber? Awesome! Write a blog on how to accomplish tasks you did all the time – join programs that link sell to the products you mention and link to them. Are you a hardcore scrapbooker? Do the same thing. Are you an expert in home theatre set up? Awesome – share your expertise.
There are great programs out there in pretty much any niche you can think of. If you establish your expertise and regularly solve problems for visitors, they will not only keep coming back to you… they’ll tell their friends about your site and sing your praises on social networks as well.
Here’s the video:
