Killer Incentives & Red Letter Days
September 22nd, 2009One question you can guarantee you’ll be asked if you’re an account manager at an affiliate network or agency is ‘What makes for a good affiliate incentive?’
Overall we try and advise merchants to run promotions that are as inclusive as possible, not just rewarding the same top performers (in fact this can actually serve as a disincentive as most affiliates know they don’t stand a chance of winning anything).
Cracking promotions and incentives are now becoming a much more regular part of a well run affiliate campaign and as affiliate marketing grows in size so engaged merchants allocate more and more budget to running them.
And gift experience or gadget merchants seem to be particularly good at it in the run up to Christmas.
One of the first off the mark this year is Red Letter Days boasting the dynamic duo of Angela Greenwood and Joshna Patel to fight for every last affiliate sale. Here Angela explains a bit about the Red Letter Days 2009 Christmas promotion:
“Here at Red Letter Days we put a lot of thought into our incentives and this Christmas we wanted to offer a wide range of opportunities for all of our affiliates to secure a desirable prize.
Last Christmas we launched a very well received incentive scheme structure offering a variety of guaranteed prizes in return for affiliates hitting various sales tiers. Again this year we’ve made the entry level very achievable, with prizes starting at just £1,500 worth of sales over 3 months (1 October to 31 December) to ensure our smaller affiliates have a good chance of getting a reward. We’ve selected what we think is a very enticing range of options at each sales tier, including Bose sound systems, Gucci watches and Mulberry bags for the fashionistas!
This year we’ve also taken things a step further by adding in some major holiday prizes, including a 7-night trip to Bali for two and two runner-up prizes of the winner’s choice of city break for two (Venice, Cannes or Barcelona).
Again we’ve tried to ensure that any affiliate, big or small, has the chance to win one of these, so we’ve adopted what we believe is an innovative approach to determining the winners. For example, one of the runner-up prizes will go to the affiliate judged as having the best Red Letter Days landing page, which means any affiliate who puts in the effort and creativity has a good chance to be in the running for this.
We’ve also come up with a variety of ways for affiliates to earn extra entries into the draw to win the top Bali holiday prize – not just for making big sales – and we’ll be continually releasing new ways to earn entries from 19 October onwards. We particularly like the way that this approach rewards loyalty and interest in our communications, and gives affiliates of all sizes the opportunity to get a good amount of entries into the draw.
Finally, seeing as the rewards mentioned above will be distributed in January, we also wanted to make sure that our affiliates have the chance to receive a gift in time for Christmas! So we’ll be sending out gourmet Christmas hampers to all affiliates who’ve made more than £750 worth of sales by 30 November so that some goodies will land at their doorsteps during the festive season.”
So there you go Affiliate Window merchants, the gauntlet has been well and truly thrown down. And if you’re still not convinced Angela has these final words of wisdom:
“The feedback so far has been fantastic. We’d encourage all merchants to put the effort into coming up with a really cracking incentive scheme as the benefits to the programme are well worth it. Not only do we see a significant effect on the bottom line, but it’s also very valuable for building loyalty amongst existing affiliates and enticing new affiliates to come on board.”
If you’d like to find out more about the Red Letter Days programme click here
September 22nd, 2009 at 10:11 am
[...] got those creative juices flowing with our talk of the cracking Christmas incentive launched by Red Letter Days we thought it was only fair to highlight for you another fantastic opportunity from our friends at [...]
September 22nd, 2009 at 10:28 pm
Will RLD be offering any kind of generic discount/offer so that affiliates can have something to offer their users who perhaps might head off to code directories with exclusive 10% discounts?
It’s a great promotion, but it’s hard to want to push RLD when you know any content you fire up may well result in possible customers heading off for a discount online elsewhere.
Jason
September 23rd, 2009 at 9:45 am
Thanks for your feedback Jason. We are always happy to issue discount codes for any affiliate, not just voucher code sites, so we encourage anyone who is interested in offering a code to get in touch and we can create one very quickly. We don’t offer generic discount codes as we prefer to issue these bespoke – we believe it adds value for our affiliates and gives a more personalised feel.
We also run regular special product offers on our site and we email these out to all affiliates every month. At the moment we have some enticing offers including 33% off sushi making lessons which is proving extremely popular. In the run-up to Christmas, as you might imagine, we will be updating these offers on more like a weekly basis and we will continue to communicate these regularly to all of our affiliates.
I hope this has addressed your concerns and I encourage you to get in touch with us if you would like to discuss any of this in more detail.
February 1st, 2010 at 12:54 pm
Hi Angela
I’m a bit late joining this particular thread and to be honest I don’t want to knock you as I think RLD has one of the best organised affiliate programmes that we work with, but picking up on what Jason said, the though of losing customers to discount/voucher code sites is also a problem for me.
While you do provide some excellent special offers, even with these special offers us non-voucher code site publishers will lose commissions to anyone who has installed a browser-based commission hijacking toolbar or who is savvy enough to do a last minute search for “red letter days voucher codes”. Either of these allows the voucher code site to grab the commission for the customers that we have introduced your product to (or even the customer who has come to you direct through your own marketing efforts, and where you deserve the commission!).
As you suggest above, I could, or course, apply directly to yourselves for my own unique voucher codes but this comes off my margin. My business is built around making many pages of content that promote products to uncommitted searchers, not splitting gazumped commissions with customers who are in the final throws of making an RLD purchase anyway. This kind of multiple-page, broader brand exposure and product-based promotion is much more labour intensive than a single brand-name related page/popup offering “10% of all purchases” and is simply not economically viable under the narrower margins that I would get if I instituted voucher codes as well. I really don’t think the product-based site + voucher code model that you intive us to follow is a viable business model, particularly for the smaller and medium-sized publishers that provide you with such a diverse array of opportunities for product exposure and brand reinforcement.
I wonder if you might consider making special product offers available only to non-voucher code/cashback sites – in fact bringing in an internet version of ‘no other offers can be used with this promotion’. I appreciate this is not a simple as it sounds as you have no clear way (at the moment) of telling whether the sales commission you pay is going to product-promoting affiliate or is being passed back to a customer as cashback via a site that only markets your brand name to people who already know it. But there must be some way of doing this – requiring affilaites to declare themselves as one or the other maybe. At least then us traditional affiliates would be able to promote the idea that the price we are offering is the best that is going to be available anywhere on the web and that cashback/vouchers/any other offers are not applicable in these cases.
In summary, voucher code sites have something unique that us traditional affiliates cannot afford to offer – cheaper deals that they can offer because they aim at fully pre-qualified end-stage customers. If you are genuninely interested in being promoted to a wider audience than the ‘already committed’ you could balance this by giving those of us who do this for you something unique to offer, and that something could be these occasional special deals.