Tutorials for Advertisers

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Advertiser Strategy

Advanced Program Development

Introduction

Welcome to the "Advanced program development" tutorial.

This tutorial will help you take a strong program and make it a fantastic one! We'll look at ways to get publishers even more excited about promoting you by offering compelling offers, effective compensation and strong communication. In the Advertiser 101 tutorial, we discussed the basics of getting your affiliate program started. We also discussed the key metrics a publisher will use to judge if you are worth promoting. Now we can build on those concepts and take your program to the next level.

Let's get started.

Chapter 1

To help provide a more compelling offer, let's examine the benefits of offering special consumer promotions - promotions that will target your publishers' traffic.

By offering promotions in your banners and links to attract potential consumers, you will increase the likelihood that the consumer will take action on your ads. Whether you are speaking to a seasonal audience or just offering a discount on your products or services, offering a promotion to incentivize the end user means increased commissions for your publishers.

Here are some promotion types that have proven effective in the CJ Marketplace: Try offering a promotion with a monetary discount. Or you can consider offering free shipping. Perhaps a buy-one-get-one free offer. Or try offering a percentage off of the sale promotion. Whatever you offer, maintain publisher and consumer interest by keeping your promotions and offers up-to-date with fresh creative. Just like a furniture store with the same "Sale" sign up for five years straight is unlikely to get attention, promotions that run too long, don't change or don't feel "exclusive" won't be effective either. Make sure that you keep your promotions up-to-date with fresh creative.

Put yourself in the place of your publishers, they are using your ads to generate income from their Web site traffic, and without a competitive offer, publishers will choose to work with another advertiser. So be creative and test different promotional strategies to entice publishers to continue working with your program.

You get the idea.

Chapter 2

Now that you have a compelling offer to draw publishers to your program, you need to create strong incentives to advance your program's development.

The key to the most successful advertiser programs is the time spent nurturing effective publisher relationships. There are simple, proven ways to gain your publishers' attention and to grow your relationships. To begin you will need to identify and then reward your top-performing publishers. Let's take a look at how.

Begin by identifying your top performing publishers.

Under the Performance Reports tab in the CJ Account Manager, you can run a number of basic reports that clearly identify your top-performing publishers. You can also look in the CJ Performer™ to identify the top performing publishers in the CJ Marketplace.

Now that you have identified your top performers along with the CJ Marketplace's top-performing publishers, here are some proven methods of rewarding them:

Commission Tiering - Commission tiering gives top-performing publishers additional commissions based on hitting certain sale or action benchmarks. They push a publisher to put extra effort toward your program, versus a competitor, because of the increased rewards of high volume. Learn how to set up payment tiers by publisher group by using the Help feature in the CJ Account Manager.

Let's take a closer look at hybrid payout programs - which combine pay-per-lead and pay-per-sale. Hybrid programs can help you attract a greater variety of publishers, which means you can ultimately generate more revenue. If you are currently paying out 10% per sale, you might want to consider enhancing your program by creating an opportunity to payout a flat rate of $5.00 for leads as well. For instance, you may find value in collecting sign-ups for your company newsletter, or perhaps offering potential clients a product information download.

You can create another hybrid payout opportunity by offering item-based commissions. In this type of program different commission percentages are awarded for different item categories. This incentivizes publishers to push your higher priced items, clearanced items or any items that you may choose to pay higher commission rates on.

Some advertisers decide they can offer a tiered commission plan in addition to hybrid programs to add in another layer of reward.

Bonuses or Incentives- Providing an additional incentive or bonus to publishers that achieve volume milestones is also a very effective tactic for getting attention. Think of a way you can create a special reward for top performing publishers once they have reached a threshold in sales or leads.

One example of an effective bonus program is to run a contest with a bonus for publishers that surpass a pre-set goal, based on percent increase over their average volumes.

For example, 1-800-Contacts hosted a successful contest in which the five publishers, with the greatest increase over their set goals received prizes of $3,000, $1,500 or $750. Though we're emphasizing special trea™ent for top performers, remember all of your publishers. Like the 1-800-Contacts example, contests with individual goals for publisher segments (based their on average performance levels) motivate everyone to improve! If each publisher in your program increased sales by even 1% it could do wonders for your bottom line. Also consider offering one-time bonuses for the first few sales or leads a new publisher generates. This can help publishers over the startup hump.

Pay for Long Term Value - Paying for Long Term Value means that you reward publishers that are bringing you quality customers that repeat buy or that do not return goods purchased. These publishers help drive down your cost to acquire customers and by rewarding these publishers' efforts, you can create generate sustainable value for your program.

Measuring the average "long term value" of the results each publisher sends your way is easy. In the CJ Account Manager there are a number of performance reports you can use to measure the number of sales or actions a publisher generates against the rate of returns on those sales or actions.

Custom Campaigns- Top publishers care about their customers' user experience and this makes the opportunity for custom campaigns important. Create specialized landing pages, custom creative or special offers tailored for your top publishers' Web sites. As an advertiser you gain increased visibility and additional sales. The publisher gains increased positive user experience and increased revenue. Think outside the norms and work with your publishers to create successful opportunities.

Chapter 3

We have established both how to identify and reward top performing publishers and now let's look at ways to effectively communicate with them.

Communication builds relationships and unless you make communication a priority, your publishers will not know how to promote your products and services. Here are a few ways to successfully build your relationships:

Create regular communication expectations through a monthly newsletter or email. Use that opportunity to grow your business by providing advanced notice for upcoming promotions, highlighting product benefits and sharing competitive knowledge on, at the very least, a quarterly basis.

Provide sales training if it makes sense for your business. Don't expect publishers to know how to sell your product, help them.

Make one-on-one individual communications a priority and check in with your publishers as you would in any relationships that you care about. Most importantly, just make sure to keep the lines of communication open. Phone, email, instant messenger, whatever works for you and your publishers.

What's Next?

We have covered a lot in this tutorial. We have created compelling offers, developed enticing compensation plans and learned how to communicate with publishers. Keep in mind, there isn't one way to run a successful program, but we've shown the key components that successful programs share. Make sure to examine your program's appeal regularly and make changes as needed–you will be happier and so will your publishers. If you feel you missed anything or need to review a concept simply hit the back arrow button below and review the chapter.

To learn more about how you can further grow your program check into CJU often for additional tutorials and resources. Thank you for your time.