I asked my staff last week to list out all the most common questions we received from our clients and potential clients this year. They sent me a pretty long list of questions, today’s being one of the most common submitted to me: “What information should I be sending to my affiliates regarding sales/coupons and promotions?” The short answer is usually as much information as you have, but allow me to break it down further for you.
Before you answer this question, you need to remember that your affiliate partners are your extended sales force. When you shift your thinking away from “they are just a group of individuals working in their basements” to “these are professionals selling my product to more and more consumers on a daily basis”, you’ll realize they need as much information as possible.
Sales people and organizations live and die on product knowledge. You need to provide as much information as possible. Here are a few examples directly from our clients’ newsletters that we send as often as needed:
You’ll see in these examples we provide the start date, end date, promo code, promo name and when appropriate, we include any restrictions. We include those items each and every time. You may say to yourself, do I need to include a start date if it started the day before I sent it? Yes, if you don’t, you will most likely receive questions on when it starts.
Should you include an end date if there is none? Yes, you can always extend it, but often affiliates need to enter an end date into their CMS in order to enable the offer to go live.
Ask your affiliates. What do they want/need from you on every offer? Each advertiser is different, so don’t assume you are always sending everything they need, unless you’ve asked them.
