Equator and Affiliate Marketing Management
Today’s post is by Fiona MacPherson, Equator’s Senior Affliliate Manager. After completing an honours degree in Marketing, her experience with online advertising and development led her to a position with Equator. At Equator, Fiona became very attached to affiliate marketing, quickly gaining experience across the travel, retail and financial sectors, as an affiliate manager for a variety of programmes. Promoted to Senior Affiliate Manager in early 2008, she now heads up the Equator affiliate team and has the pleasure of overseeing various accounts for clients including Bhs, Peacocks and Ramada Jarvis.
So affiliate marketing. It’s a crazy world out there – it’s not so much what you know (although this is of course important) but it’s who you know. An affiliate programme cannot exist without affiliate partners. It’s just not possible. The benefits of affiliate marketing and a brand having a programme are endless. Not only do you get brand exposure without the costs of expensive CPM rates but you also only have to pay when there is an actual sale. That’s right – affiliate marketing is all about only paying when an affiliate sends someone to your site and they actually buy something. It works. And it works well. But you have to have an affiliate manager who knows exactly how to make it work to make sure your ROI on an affiliate programme is at its maximum – no matter what sector you are in. So why do Equator’s in house affiliate management team beat the rest?
We’ve been doing it for a long time…
Yes we know the internet has been around for some time now. So has affiliate marketing. Most affiliate marketing agencies on the other hand haven’t. There are a few companies out there that only do affiliate marketing management. There are lots of agencies out there who claim to do affiliate marketing management as part of their service. Slightly different approach but what they all have in common is that most actually haven’t been doing it all that long.
Equator has experience. Bags of it. Our team has been working in the industry for years – nearly since it all began. We know what we are doing. We know what makes a programme work and we know exactly how to make your margins work. For that reason we have quality relationships with quality affiliate partners. Because…
Affiliates love us
No really they do. How do we know? Well not only do they talk about us (see Web Affiliate Marketing Blog and also Kieron Donoghue’s blog) and how great we are but we’ve also been nominated for awards. Yes awards! The A4U Awards have been around for a couple of years now and we’ve been nominated, by affiliates, as outstanding achievers in various categories. We’ve been highlighted 2 years running in “Best Agency”. One of our senior affiliate managers was nominated for “Best Account Manager”. Our expertise in retail has also been recognized through the nomination for “Excellence in the Retail Sector”. Plus we managed to get one of our clients on the list for an award for “Best New Merchant”. So how come people like us?
We love our affiliates
No really we do. We make the effort to get to know people. And their businesses. When we understand how they work we know how to make sure our programmes are fulfilling their needs. Making our clients stand out from the crowd is key to making them so successful. It’s all about communication. We are on forums talking about our clients. We are on blogs talking about our clients. We go to events to talk about our clients. And all of our team have MSN, email and are always on the phone to, yes you guessed it, talk about our clients. This gives our affiliates insight into what converts, what the latest is in the sector and what promotions or ideas we have coming up that will help boost their sales levels and thus exposure for our clients brand.
We try to make it as easy as possible for affiliates so that they continue to love us like we love them. We even make it public how much we want to help them help us!
How To Make Agencies Your Sucka and Meet Fiona MacPherson
We know how to work the love from the networks
So onto the networks. They are the ones that do all of our lovely tracking and help us grow our programmes. So why don’t you cut us out and go direct? Well I’m afraid that unless you aren’t in the top merchants for a network you won’t get the service you deserve. We’re sure the networks won’t mind me saying so either – they can find it frustrating working with clients who don’t know anything about affiliate marketing and usually they make little or no profit from smaller accounts. Having an agency on board not only means that you don’t have to deal with a network but our charms, experience and knowledge makes sure that the programme is noticed by the best teams within a network and they do work hard to make sure everything is running properly at their end. Also if you are dual network – what a nightmare trying to work not one but two account teams. We take on all that admin for you and you only have to talk to us.
You know you want to love us too
At Equator, we feel the marriage of solid relationships with the UK’s top affiliates, our experience and objectivity in dealing with the networks, and indeed, our management of both parties, gives us an advantage. Here’s just some of the love you will get from us:
- Your own dedicated Affiliate Manager. You will receive the same service and experience as you would get hiring an in-house Affiliate Manager – but without the salary.
- We are neutral – we can therefore work with as many networks as required for any given programme.
- We understand the bigger picture in terms of online marketing. In addition to affiliate marketing, our online marketing services include search engine optimisation, PPC, online media and email marketing campaigns.
- We provide tailored reports as per your requirements.
- We make sure admin is taken care of. Quickly.
- We will represent and promote you at the affiliate events and on the forums scouting out the crème de la crème of affiliates in this sector.
- We will write copy for network newsletters and promote the programme using all possible vehicles.
- We will manage all affiliate relationships and their requirements to promote you
So what are you waiting for? Give us a shout if you want us to give you the lowdown of running an affiliate programme for you!
Fiona MacPherson is the Senior Affiliate Manager with Equator Ltd. Our team of experts help companies accelerate revenues and achieve maximum ROI. For more info, visit www.eqtr.com, email hello@eqtr.com or call 0141 229 1800
This post isn’t about affiliate marketing. Or even about Equator and Affiliate marketing.
I feel it’s very dangerous to use a channel like blogging for what is essentially just a sales message. Many have tried and quickly learned from immediate backlash that the effort in publishing unauthentic messages was misconceived.
What would be appropriate would be a brief talk through on what affiliate marketing actually is, what happens over the lifetime of a campaign, what pitfalls agencies, clients and affiliates have to watch for. Tell stories about what has worked, what hasn’t and what you’ve learned from the experience. Tell about what’s wrong with affiliate marketing and what needs to change.
Could you say for instance, what would be the benefit of using an agency to manage an affiliate scheme over a client using a highly-structured web application similar to adwords that would allow you to upload assets like buttons and widgets and choose which affiliate communities and demographics you’d like to proposition, and track it all in on a dashboard?
Thank you for reading my blog and posting your comment Andy.
I like that you have told me what would be appropriate and that you feel this post is dangerous. It is wonderful that we have this medium to be able to give opinions on any matter and I am glad you found me.
Personally, I wouldn’t want to talk about what affiliate marketing actually is, as I would hope that anyone reading this post would understand it already. Our existing and prospective clients have extensive knowledge about online marketing and I would not want to teach a granny to suck eggs. The reason for Fiona guest blogging here is to highlight what we do at Equator and to show that we do it well (just click the links to our nominations for the A4U awards).
To write all that you ask will take me time and I will blog about some of these issues that you request in the future. More importantly though, I would not want to give away all of our secrets on the successes we have with our clients or we may not get the industry recognition we currently enjoy!
I’m sorry but this blog does exactly as it says it will – talks about equator and affiliate marketing management. and if you’re looking for tips on how to run a good programme, they’re in there if you’re looking hard enough…
Yeah you are absolutely right, blogging is a great way to sound out ideas and benefit from everything that collective intelligence brings to open and frank discussions. It’s great to see that eqtr positively encourages employees to start interesting conversations. I’ve been subscribed to your feed for a while now and I enjoy a great deal of what you post.
I can’t say though that I’d agree that there isn’t any value on discussing the very basics of affiliate marketing, or any other subject. In my own life I find myself reading ‘introduction to’ books on subjects I already understand well, knowing that their will always be something in another thinkers philosophy that will make me rethink things I may take for granted.
It would definitely be interesting to hear more of the nitty-gritty aspects on Fiona’s approach.
I wouldn’t be concerned with giving away secrets of success. Consider the ‘celebrity chef’ business model, they will give away all their best recipes, tips and tricks – without worrying that someone is going to take their ideas, open up a resturant next door and put them out of business. They understand that it’s more important to be known, they know that if they kept everything to themselves the public wouldn’t know anything about them and so it wouldn’t matter how good a cook they were.
Jason from 37Signals talks about the concept in a talk he gave at the IDEA08 conference. Check out the podcast, I think you’ll love it http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/idea-2008
To touch again on authentic conversations, with blogging (among other platforms) I believe you could abstract the chef model into a framework where you can take the founding concepts behind the digital marketing you practice today, discuss them, and use collective intelligence to evolve them, for free, into the practices of tomorrow.
Hi all – great to see this post has started some interesting discussions! That’s one of the reasons we like to do things like this, to find out what people are keen to find out about. This post was just as a starting point to talk about Equator and our approach to affiliate marketing – there are loads of blogs out there that talk about the nitty gritty of it from affiliates and merchants points of view – I didn’t want to go over something that had been done to death before, instead highlight why Equator are recognised for being good at what we do.
Great to know there is still interest out there on finding out more though – if anyone has any suggestions about things they’d like us to cover off in the future then let us know! We’ve got a fantastic project that is about to go live which will hopefully cover some of these things off but we like to make sure.
Thanks for reading,
Fi