Tactics > reinventing customer recruitment Powering


For a better relationship between merchant and affiliates


T 20


he affiliate, or performance- marketing channel, has


undergone immense change since its inception in the mid-1990s. It has branched into new areas including comparison and group-buying sites, as well as making footsteps into social media and mobile. It has become more professional with affiliate networks and super-affiliates investing in technology platforms and it has diversified with the emergence of micro affiliates, catering for the longer-tail specialised search terms of the web.


This proliferation of streams within the affiliate channel makes it much harder for merchants to work successfully across them all, which is why development of rich product- level data feeds and innovative tools for their creation, distribution and management are so important. High-quality data feeds allow merchants to create a single platform of distribution under which brand consistency and product visibility is maximised, while affiliates can more easily tailor rich product information and promotional text into higher-converting consumer-facing content.


Consumer engagement drives channel diversity The internet has been the catalyst for a dramatic shift in consumer shopping habits. For marketers, it is the change in the way consumers are searching for and engaging with brands and products online that is driving diversity throughout the affiliate channel—the birth of group-buying and comparison- shopping engines being two examples of this change. Recommendation sites are also important for merchants, with a recent survey by Havas Media Social and Lightspeed Research finding that 53 percent of consumers were


more likely to look up a brand if a friend had recommended it. The boom in user-generated content and the power of recommendations has led to the emergence of micro-affiliates. This term describes the sites that form the web’s “long- tail” of niche search product categories. Historically, the micro-affiliate stream was perceived as uneconomical in terms of the administrative burden in managing a huge number of tiny commissions. The tide is turning though as merchants begin to appreciate their “collective” influence in driving click-through activity.


The product feed challenge In the past, merchants have struggled to ensure pricing and availability information included within their product feed accurately reflects their inventory on a daily basis. The data feed also becomes unwieldy if it includes too many combinations of different products. Inaccurate product information results in a poor consumer experience and damage to the merchant’s brand. It can also have legal implications if the consumer’s complaint is brought to the attention of a trade or regulatory body. Moreover, affiliates don’t want to have to wade through huge volumes of product information. This is especially true for those specialising in the long tail, where many sites are managed on a part-time basis. Data feed technology has therefore evolved, with advanced data extraction and feed creation tools being developed to enable merchants and affiliates to use product-level data across a wide range of applications, drive conversion rates and revenue.


Getting tooled up By harvesting elements such as pricing, availability and product attributes directly from the merchant’s website, it is possible to ensure that the extracted data feed is accurate and includes comprehensive product data. This enables the merchant to deliver all the relvant content its affiliates need. Also, because there is no requirement for technical resource from the merchant, feeds can be generated and deployed quickly and at low-cost, extracting the front-end product-related HTML code from the website, with no requirement for any back-end data. At the same time, affiliates need feed creation and management tools to quickly and accurately convert information carried within a merchant’s product feed into consumer-facing


Direct Commerce Catalogue e-business www.catalog-biz.com


the product feed


By Lee Brignell-Cash


content. They also require controls for ensuring consistency in ad and brand messaging, as well as filtering out and presenting special offers or content relevant to their target audience. Creating interactive and engaging advertising content is just as critical in the conversion of the online consumer. Ad and widget creation tools, for example, can allow affiliates to create dynamic advertising solutions that go beyond the simple “banner advertising” concept and enable consumers to engage and select products within the banner. Facebook commerce (F-commerce) and social-media widgets allow the merchant to soften the brand message and engage customers with interesting, fun and potentially viral media.


Open channels of communication are also vitally important in building the relationship between merchant and affiliates. The provision of an “affiliate hub” by the merchant not only provides easy access to the types of affiliate tools discussed but improves communication and knowledge. This makes it much easier and more attractive for the affiliate to work with the merchant, eliminating the time it takes to wade through product information, minimising the risk of inaccuracies and increasing conversion rates by making consumer-facing content easier to distribute.


Delivering mutual benefit When feeds are combined with easy-to-use tools that enable their customisation and the production of dynamic advertising units, they provide a platform for powering the best online product marketing performance. Once an affiliate starts to generate revenue from the merchant, it can invest further in the functionality of its site, delivering mutual benefit. By making content more engaging and by deep-linking searches to the exact product pages, high-quality data feeds ensure that consumers are able to find what they are searching for and convert better too. Interactive, dynamic advertising content that uses product feeds adds further functionality that enables selected goods to be placed directly into online shopping baskets. After all, a wasted click is wasted potential revenue for both the affiliate and the merchant.


Lee Brignell-Cash is cofounder and chief operating officer at product feed marketing services provider FusePump.


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