Is the Grim Reaper at the door of your affiliate relationships?  I’m being a bit dramatic here, but is it?  One of the biggest killers of your relationships is lack of communication, and more specifically, lack of follow up or simply bad or untimely follow up.

The good news is that one of the best ways to build trust with affiliates, and in turn strengthen relationships with your affiliate partners is to deliver impeccable follow up that is timely, comprehensive and relevant.  It isn’t a complex process or procedure that takes years to perfect.  It’s simple, effective and dangit, will make affiliates like you (channeling my best Sally Fields.).

A few months back we had several affiliates, affiliate managers and industry luminaries tell us what the biggest frustration and problem they find with affiliate managers, almost the entire group we spoke to identified follow up and overall communication as the biggest frustration.  For this reason, we include not only an entire module on Building Strong Relationships in the My Affiliate Coach affiliate manager training program, but also include an entire session of this in our internal employee training here at JEBCommerce.  It is THAT important.

Check out this tweet from an affiliate I saw last month:

You can imagine the tweets when an affiliate is frustrated with an uncommunicative affiliate manager.  Some are simply not fit to print if you get my drift.  Communication and follow up build trust, trust builds relationships and relationships build every affiliate program.

So, what can you do if you find the Reaper on your relationship doorway?

1. Get yourself a great CRM tool.  HighRise, from 37Signals offers a great way for you to not only keep track of your communications, but allows you to set follow up tasks so you are sure not to miss anything.  It also is very cost effective.
2. Call your top producing affiliates to connect.  Ask them what you could be doing better and if there is anything they need that you have not provided.
3. Get in the process of creating a daily task list and review each of your producing partners to determine if there are any items you need to address or provide them with.
4. Make a point to be a great communicator with your partners.  This has to do more with you and your personal work flow than and commitment to the communication and follow up process than anything else.  You have to make this important to you.  Your program depends on it.

Overall, the good news is if you are having trouble, it’s easy to turn around today.  If you don’t think you are having trouble, the items above can help you be better.

What say you?

One of the things I learned from working at and with several large, national, multi channel retailers, was the concept of same store sales.  Now, don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a complex metric that I came up with, it’s only something I have found useful when managing affiliate programs.  Whether retail programs, lead gen programs, business-to-business programs or others, it comes in quite handy.

Same-store performance is a concept used by retailers and investors to evaluate a retail company’s performance.  It compares sales of stores that have been open for at least a year in that organization.  From investopedia:

This statistic allows investors to determine what portion of new sales has come from sales growth and what portion from the opening of new stores. This analysis is important because, although new stores are good, a saturation point–where future sales growth is determined by same store sales growth - eventually occurs.

So why should you care?  As an affiliate manager it is important for you to know where your sales are coming from, how your current partners are performing and what percentage of your sales growth comes from new partnerships.  And like the description above, at some point, your program’s sales growth will be coming from your current affiliates as your program becomes saturated with all the appropriate affiliates.

You need to be able to measure if your program is growing by new partners, or existing partners.  Your plans, promotions, offers and strategy will be dependent on this measurement and will change as you move from new partner growth to current partner performance growth.

I put this little video together this morning after driving my favorite vehicle to work.  Yes that is a two-tone, 1973 Scout II.  Unfortunately it runs about as good as it looks at the moment.  Watch the video and then please share with me your story.  Do you feel like you have a good idea of where your program stands?  Are you ready to tackle all your obstacles and opportunities through the end of the year?

I honestly can’t believe we are almost in September.  My evenings are starting to fill up with my kids extra curricular school activities, back to school shopping and picking tomatoes and corn out of the garden and hoping my butternut squash turns out ok.

All those things trip a trigger in my mind and make me realize the 4th quarter is here.  It’s now time to get ready for the marathon that is the holiday season and ensure that all our programs are ready to rock and roll.

We use a process we call the Affiliate Assessment and Success Roadmap, you can learn more about this service here, and we teach this in our My Affiliate Coach affiliate manager coaching and training program.  It is such an important aspect of managing an affiliate program.

How can you get to where you want to go, without first knowing where you are now?

Assessing your affiliate program is vital as we head into the last part of the year.  Why?

• knowing where your program stands will provide you with an objective picture of the items you need to work on to reach your goals for 2010
• it’s incredibly hard to create a plan for the 4th qtr if you haven’t looked at all aspects of your affiliate program
• self evaluation is vital in continuing to improve your own performance, advance your career and is important in a process of life long learning

Here are a few things you should assess this month to get ready for the big push, as we call it:

• your creative - do you have current banners and text links, do you have old ones sitting out there, are you scheduling updates for the season?
• affiliate performance - retail organizations call this “same store sales”, but it is a concept you need to look at here.  How are the affiliates you have performing compared to last year?  I’ll be writing more about this next week.
• consumer promotions
• affiliate promotions
• distribution of top sellers and categories

That’s a real short list.  We cover over 20 distinct areas of each affiliate program we manage to determine what needs to be worked, where the opportunities for increase are and exactly what we need to do to reach our goals.

What say you?

Sunny with a slight chance of failure?  Does that sound like a forecast you have been putting together for your affiliate program?  With the fourth quarter running rapidly at us, our team is working on their forecasts for each of our clients.  It’s an extremely important aspect of affiliate management, and one that drives the strategy for the month, quarter and year to come.

We create a forecast each year for our clients, then update it on a quarterly basis.  In our affiliate manager training program, MyAffiliateCoach, we spend an entire module on forecasting and goal setting.  During that module we talk about some of the mistakes made in developing a forecast, and that’s what I’d like to talk about today.

But let’s start off with a small confession.  Each and every one of these mistakes I have personally done…… many, many times.  Hi, my name is Jamie, I have, in the past, been a horrible forecaster for my programs.  Ok, I feel better now.

All kidding aside, forecasting is difficult and important.  If you have yet to put together a forecast for your programs, maybe we can help.

There are many ways you can mess up a forecast, let’s go over three of those most common errors:

• Isolation - Creating a forecast within a vacuum.  I’ve personally created, and seen many affiliate managers create forecasts without any input from other marketing channels or taking into consideration the activities of the entire company.  The foundation of a forecast tends to be historical data, but if you aren’t looking at things such as Catalog drop schedule, consumer promotion schedule, retail store openings, overall online sales forecast, seasonality, nationwide events (elections for example) and other things outside of the affiliate silo, you’ll really be missing out a lot.
• Identifying your key drivers - There are actions, events, and other items that directly effect the sales of your affiliate program.  Things like how many producing affiliates, average order size, number o contacts and outreach you make, catalog drops and orders per affiliate, are drivers of your affiliate program sales.  Now, yours may be different, but you need to identify those things that directly drive sales and effect the amount of sales of your program.  You need to be a bit scientific about your forecast.  How many affiliates product 5 sales a month, how many $5000 in sales, how many active affiliates producing our average sale amount do we need to hit X amount of sales?  Not identifying these things will make your forecast less accurate, and will increase the difficulty of creating a plan to reach the forecast you create.
• No trust in the gut - I have put together countless forecasts where I included all my drivers, all the seasonality and even a daily sales schedule based on catalog drops and store openings, only to be told “you need to be 20% higher.  When asked why, the response was - “it just needs to be, my gut tells me we can do more”.  The first time I heard this, after spending about 40 hours developing a scientific forecast, I was like “ok, what the heck, why did I got through this process in the beginning if the sales goal was going to be pulled out of a…. hat?”  Sometimes you either need to work back from a sales number you just have to hit, or you just have to trust your gut and work back from there.  Don’t be too discouraged, use that number, identify your drivers, and work your way back to identify how many and how much of each of those drivers you need to hit those numbers.  Then you can create your plan.

We spend a lot of time developing solid, accurate and achievable forecasts.  When we begin our quarterly planning process, this is where we begin.  It doesn’t necessarily have to be a daunting task, but avoiding the mistakes above is important to be successful.

We’d love to help you develop a forecast and reach it.  If you are interested in our outsourced affiliate management services, contact us at jamie@jebcommerce.com.  Want to learn more about our MyAffiliateCoach program, contact coach@myaffiliatecoach.net.

I remember a time, farther back than I care to mention, when I managed programs, well, from the hip.  Runnin’-n-Gunnin’ is what we call it now.  As a new affiliate manager, I just didn’t know any better.  When I was asked what my program goals were, or where I wanted to be, I would just say “more”;  more sales, more affiliates, more performance, more revenue.  Does that sound like you?

I’ve had the good fortune and blessing of having great mentors and advisers over my life and professional career.  One has always been my father.  Ed Birch has a long track record of managing some of the largest manufacturers in the country.  That experience has enabled him to do some pretty amazing things, and has allowed me to learn some tried and true business principles that, once I really took to them, enabled my business and the affiliate programs we manage to really grow quickly, methodically and hit some serious goals.  He shared those concepts around the dinner table, in our pickup truck (looked just like Uncle Jessie’s on the Dukes of Hazard), on mountain biking trips and more.  And I’ll be honest, as most sons, I fought some of those learning moments for some time (25 years) before I started to realize that, yeah, the old man is right.

Over time I’m sure you’ll hear more about that, and stories from my family, but today I was thinking about SMART goals and how things changed after starting to use them.

So what’s a SMART goal?  a SMART Goal is a goal that is:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Realistic
• Timely

Pretty simple right?  Goals in general have a better chance of being accomplished when they are specific and not general in nature.  For example - “Grow affiliate sales by 20%” is much more specific than “Grow sales through affiliate channel”.

How can you know if you reach a goal if you don’t have a measurement for it?  “Be a better affiliate manager”, that is a goal that is almost impossible to quantifiably measure.  “Answer affiliate emails within 24 hours”, Send monthly newsletter on the 1st of each month”, “increase active affiliates by 5 affiliates each week” - those are all measurable goals that you can track over time.  Goals need to be able to be measured and tracked so you can see how you are doing in terms of attaining them.  “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it“.

Goals need to be attainable.  From TopAcheivement.com - “When you identify goals that are most important to you, you begin to figure out ways you can make them come true. You develop the attitudes, abilities, skills, and financial capacity to reach them. You begin seeing previously overlooked opportunities to bring yourself closer to the achievement of your goals.

You can attain most any goal you set when you plan your steps wisely and establish a time frame that allows you to carry out those steps. Goals that may have seemed far away and out of reach eventually move closer and become attainable, not because your goals shrink, but because you grow and expand to match them. When you list your goals you build your self-image. You see yourself as worthy of these goals, and develop the traits and personality that allow you to possess them.”

Goals should also be realistic and timely.  Your goals must be representative of objectives that you are willing and able to work towards.  If you aren’t willing to put in the work, you won’t reach your goals.  If you don’t put a time frame to them, you end up procrastinating until the goal becomes some abstract hope, not an actual item that you are working towards.

Once I set some specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely goals with my programs I noticed a few things:

• I began to work with a higher degree of confidence and purpose
• My day to day tasks became less mundane and more specific to a given hoped for outcome
• In general I worked with more passion
• Tasks were completed ahead of time and in general my affiliate program began to see a lift in sales and my affiliates noticed a distinct change in my behavior

All this lead to higher performance for my program, more recognition inside my organization, more career advancement opportunities and I really started to enjoy my job on a level I hadn’t before.

Are you using SMART Goals?   Are you finding yourself doing more busy work than actually reaching higher and higher?  I’d love to hear from you.

SMART Goals, and a corresponding item called KPI’s, are things we go over in module 2 of the MyAffiliateCoach Affiliate Manager Coaching and Mentoring program.  If you are interested in learning more about these items and more, please contact us at coach@myaffiliatecoach.net.

Last week we launched our affiliate management coaching and mentoring program, MyAffiliateCoach. A few days later we received our first printed workbook, over 140 pages of worksheets, tips and best practices.

Here is a brief walk through.

You can actually get to see the first 15 pages at blurb (the price is for our on-demand only version that comes with the book).

If you’d like to see more, just let us know!

Guest Post - Joe Sousa

“From time to time, we have the good fortune of having a well respected, successful and knowledgeable individual provide a guest post for this blog.  Today is one of those special days. Joe is a close friend of ours and his opinion as an affiliate is one we rely on significantly to ensure that we are doing our job and being great affiliate managers.  I was watching Joe’s Twitter stream last week, http://twitter.com/drcool73, and read his struggle with a certain advertisers datafeed.  We do quite a bit with datafeeds, so I reached out to Joe to ask him if he would be interested in sharing this story and his view on datafeeds for our readers, especially our My Affiliate Coach members.  So here it is, a first hand account of working with a difficult datafeed.  Thanks Joe!”

Why are you making it hard for your affiliates???

As an affiliate I build many different types of sites. Sometimes I will take one product and build a site around it, sometimes I will pick a handful of related products and create a site, and sometimes I want to put up thousands of similar products on a website. When I do a site for just a few products I will usually just do everything by hand but when I want thousands of products it would take forever by hand so I use a datafeed.
A datafeed is basically a database of products supplied by the merchant for the affiliates to use. Generally speaking the feed will contain the name of the product, a URL to use for your affiliate link that goes directly to the product, a link to an image, price, categories, and product numbers. Some feeds contain much more information like product descriptions, colors, keywords, and so on but for the most part I just like my feeds simple and will usually delete all the extra fields I don’t need.

I wanted to update a site I have had for years with a new datafeed since it contains a bunch of new products since I last updated the site a couple months ago. Before we go any further let me give you a bit of background on this merchant. I won’t say who they are but this seems to be a fairly common problem among merchants:

This particular merchant has an in-house affiliate program as well as being on three different affiliate networks. I generally prefer to use their in-house program because when you use their program on the networks the links take you to a page before you get to the actual page where you can buy and the conversion is quite a bit lower than the in-house program. So I usually use the feed from their in-house program.

But first let me tell you about the feed I can get from one of the networks. For the most part it is a good feed. There aren’t really any incomplete records and all the information is there. The problem is the categorization on that particular feed is terrible. The products I want are all of a certain category and in this feed they are spread out through 3 or 4 different categories and mixed in with a bunch of products I don’t want. Combine that with the lower conversion rate and it really makes me like the in-house feed.

I downloaded the feed from the in-house program and instantly saw many, many problems:

• 1) The feed should have around 130,000 items and this feed for some reason has over 290,000. Not a huge problem. I delete duplicates and I am down to right around 130,000. No idea why there is so many duplicates.
• 2) Out of those 130,000 items 84,265 of them are in great shape. All the info is there, they are categorized properly, and good to go. But that leaves 45,000 that are missing categories, missing prices, missing links, missing images, etc. They do all have an item number and a product name so that is a start.
• 3) There was really only one category of products I needed so just to see what happened I deleted all the records with missing info and everything that wasn’t the category I needed and was left with about 900 items. I checked the merchant site and saw there was 1270 products on their site in the category I needed so that meant that in the stuff I deleted there was probably around 370 items I needed to create information for. I could have just gone with those 900 items and called it good but that is over 25% of the products that would be missing and potentially 25% fewer commissions for me. GRRRRRRR!
• 4) I was able to do some cutting and pasting and cell merging and was able to create the image links and buy URLs for the products fairly easily. That maybe took 10-15 minutes or so once I figured out what was going on.
• 5) Then I needed sub-categories for all these products. They are all in one main category but there are over 30 sub-categories I needed for these products so it was pretty much a manual process. Luckily I am very familiar with these products so I was able to just look at the product name and know what sub-cat they went in. Just a lot of manual typing and stuff.
• 6) Now I just needed the price. For these products there are about 4 or 5 “standard” prices so once again I was able to do some filtering, cutting and pasting, and was able to get quite a few of the prices in fairly easily. But there were still about 150 or so products that had odd prices. So I needed to manually look up these products and get the prices so I could enter them into the database.
• 7) OK, it seems like the feed is ready to go. Many hours spent tweaking the feed but it seems good to go. So I plug the feed into the program I use for my datafeed sites and it spits everything out. But there is a problem. One sub-group of products isn’t showing any images. GRRRRR! Turns out those products have images in a different format than the rest of the products. And with the way they are formatted there is no easy way to do it. So it is manually cutting and pasting image URLs for about 80 products.

But now it is finally done! The site is up and running. There are a few images that aren’t working properly but not too many. I can just clean that up slowly over the next few days. I did, however, spend a bunch of time cleaning up the feed when I would have liked to use that time to improve my site in other ways, create some videos, do some redesigning of the pages, etc. to make more sales.
For the most part I have no problem tweaking a feed if that tweaking is done to distinguish it from other feeds. If I need to write custom descriptions, add in keyword fields, or something like that I am happy to do it because I know that will reap benefits. What I don’t like is to spend 8 hours getting a feed to the point where I can use it. The feeds should come ready to use. This should be the job of the affiliate manager. Most AMs are pretty good about getting decent banners and text links that work to their affiliates so why do so many skimp when it comes to datafeeds?
Affiliate managers should be able to help their affiliates and assist them in making sales. That is pretty much why they are there. That will take a different form for different merchants but the affiliate manager should be able to provide their affiliates the tools they need to succeed whether that is text links, banners, custom banners, videos, or datafeeds.

I have worked with dozens and dozens of affiliate managers over the years and there are only a handful I would really say do a good or great job. I don’t think most of them have had enough training or have enough knowledge of the industry to be of service to their affiliates. Affiliate manager isn’t just a job you can throw anyone into. They need to be taught how to do their job and know what they need to do to help their affiliate. Something “simple” like providing the affiliates the proper tools (like complete datafeeds that contain all the information) is one of the main ways they can help.

You can find more of Joe’s thoughts and opinion at http://www.whatdoesjoethink.com.

If you are looking for help with your datafeed, overall coaching and mentoring or complete outsourced affiliate management, please contact jamie@jebcommerce.com.

Just a few moments ago, I wrapped up a meeting with our Director of Affiliate Management and all our affiliate managers.  We went over our affiliate scorecard during this meeting.  We use scorecards pretty extensively in managing our clients’ programs to ensure that we continue a methodical march forward to make sure we hit our clients’ goals.

The video below talks about our scorecard process and outlines why these are so valuable and some basic ideas on how you can create yours.  With the launch of our new service, MyAffiliateCoach - Affiliate Manager Coaching and Mentoring, going over our scorecards was pretty timely.  We go over two to three different types of scorecards we use to manage our programs every day.

If you find yourself interested in our Coaching/Mentoring just click on the image below.

(side note - not real sure why my hair always looks on camera like Lyle Lovitt stuck his finger in an electrical socket, but oh well.  We all have burdens to bare.)

What do you think?  Do you use a scorecard?  Am I off the grid on this one?  Would love your responses.

Are you an ideal affiliate manager?  We have been working with affiliate programs since 1999 and at times, we made some mistakes.  I know, for those of you who know me personally, that is probably hard to believe (said with my most sarcastic voice), but it’s true.

Many of these mistakes come from simply not knowing what an ideal affiliate manager is, what characteristics she/he has and what she/he does for affiliates.  This past year as we developed the MyAffiliateCoach Program, we asked many affiliates and veteran affiliate managers what characteristics the ideal affiliate manager exhibits.  It helped us create our very first training module - the Ideal Affiliate Manager.  Here are a few of the characteristics that many brought up:

1. Communicative:  I remember when my boss at Coldwater Creek received my personalysis test back the second week I started there.  She had it in her hands laughing at the top of her lungs.  I had thought I’d done something so bad that it was funny to fire me.  I wasn’t expecting her to show the entire team my results.  I was heavy in communication and heavy in strategy.  These were the two things she felt most important in an affiliate manager and they were my highest scores.  Being communicative is vital to a good affiliate manager.  You have to be able to reach them, converse with them and communicate, not only your companies goals, objectives and value proposition, but also with them on a personal level.
2. Strategic:  As I said above, my boss at Coldwater Creek felt this was the second most important characteristic and those we interviewed this year echoed that sentiment.  A good affiliate manager needs to have a handle on the landscape and be able to create and execute projects at a strategic level, planning how things are going to work, working with affiliates to identify new ways they can be successful and helping them do more today.
3. Impeccable Follow Through:  I’ve heard this time and time again and it is probably the most often recited issue with affiliates “that affiliate manager has no follow through”.  “Do what you say you are going to do” - I’ve heard that one many times too.  When you don’t follow through on what you promise and what you say you are going to do, each time that whittles away any trust you have built with affiliates.  Following through as promised, or more than promised, strengthens your reputation and your relationships every single time.

In our first module we cover more than 11 characteristics of an ideal manager, those above are only a start.  What do you think?  What are the most important characteristics of an affiliate manager for you?

If you are interested in learning more about our affiliate manager coaching and mentoring program, please visit MyAffiliateCoach.net.