Dumping Inactive Affiliates
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The primary way to eliminate any of these “tire kickers” is to manually approve affiliates as they apply to your affiliate program.
You should apply some sort of criteria to prospective affiliates to be sure they are affiliates you’d like to have in your program.
Take a look to see if they seem to have a relatively fresh site that they are updating often. Check whether their sites are ranking well for key terms in the search engines, and if their content is relevant to your business.
Another approach, which is going to piss off a lot of affiliates, is to conduct a periodic audit. If affiliates don’t respond to your various efforts by phone, e-mail and direct mail to make them active, you could always just remove them from the affiliate program.
However, that’s not the best approach. You’re going to sour some potential producers by effectively rejecting their sites after you already accepted them.
While you point out that it doesn’t cost anything for affiliates to join your program, it also doesn’t cost anything to keep them in your affiliate program.
Ideally, scrutinize who you let in on the front end, and it should alleviate your “tire kicker” issues.
Personally, I think a good measure of whether an affiliate program has too many affiliates is whether you can adequate support the number of affiliates you have.
if you are not getting back to their questions in one business day, and providing support on other issues on a timely basis, you need to staff up or audit down.
- Posted in Ask Shawn Collins
Shawn –
You are missing one point about the approve/deny process — communication. I reach out to potential affilaites asking what they are up to before approval/deny. If they ignore my overtures, they are obviously people I don’t want. Simply relying upon the information that CJ and LinkShare or the other information that a network gives you would have led me to miss many, many top affiliates.
reply to this comment>> Since it costs nothing for affiliates to join
but affiliates are being spam by merchants for all the emails after signed up
There is a cost for being inactive and remain in the program
reply to this commentYou have an interesting definition of Spam.
Anyhow, if you don’t wish to hear from a merchant after joining their affiliate program (personally, I wouldn’t want to work with a partner that refused to communicate with me), just opt-out from their e-mails.
reply to this commentI think dumping inactive affiliates is begging the question. Unless they have email lists in the thousands or are copy writing whiz kids – it’s going to take time for some affiliates to get their numbers up, maybe even months.
Does it mean they are inactive? No, it means they are finding what marketing venues work or doesn’t work for them. Remember, not all affiliates use English as their first language and penalizing them seems a bit harsh.
What is it costing you to have inactive affiliates anyway? You’re using an auto-responder to send out the same message to all of them, so how much is ‘not paying’ an inactive affiliate costing?
reply to this commentHi Shawn,
I posted a long response on here right after you posted this. Did you ever get it?
Thanks,
Jonathan
reply to this commentHi Jonathan -
I’m afraid it must have been caught up in my spam filter and gotten deleted (that’s where I just found this one).
Sorry.
reply to this comment