18th May 2007

I’m Stuffed : Too Many Promotional Emails

posted in Affiliate Marketing |
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Possibly like any other affiliate, our inbox is continually bombarded with emails from merchants on various topics.

However as an affiliate & within affiliate marketing my time is my most precious commodity, a majority of the information sent through is superfluous to my requirements.

I appreciate that merchants or networks obo of merchants sending out promotional emails is proactive, but when you are signed up to a couple of thousand programs, an affiliates inbox can become overwhelming & time consuming to plough through. Maybe a couple of years ago, we might have been saying that we were not receiving enough, but the pendulum has swung to the other extreme.

Therefore as an affiliate I don’t wish to be automatically opted in to receive emails I am not interested in order to have to opt out, if that is at all possible.

Mandatory emails which should go out are PPC or keyword policy changes, programs opening & closing. Cookie period changes, commission changes or promotional emails should be optional. Thus networks should maybe start categorising emails more i.e. don’t blend a keyword policy change within some promotional email.

However, all in all it’s probably got to a stage where we should now opt into emails & specfically what type of emails these pertain too. Obviously direct communication emails still apply.

I think over the next week or so, we will approach each network with our instructions to ascertain who is accommodating or not & report back, quite possibly some may not even have that facility.

As a side note, internal mail systems should maybe run simultaneously with emails sent out, as proof of delivery is not proof of receipt.

Anyhow, back to my inbox now it’s about 3:41am and I only have another 607 emails to go … now where is that mass delete button, there’s a good film on the box.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 18th, 2007 at 2:41 AM and is filed under Affiliate Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

There are currently 3 responses to “I’m Stuffed : Too Many Promotional Emails”

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  1. 1 On May 18th, 2007, Fraser Edwards said:

    Yeah I have to agree with you here – I’m drowning in email and have no idea how to keep up!

  2. 2 On May 21st, 2007, Pete said:

    Completely agree with you as well Paul and communicating efficiently and effectively with affiliates is a real challenge. I would be very interested to get your thoughts on this topic.

  3. 3 On June 6th, 2007, sanela said:

    here is my opinion as an affiliate manager:

    I get annoyed being asked, in usually a rather arogant way, to stop emailing a certain affiliate our latest updates and that does include promotions too, and just wonder why they subscribed to the program in the first place if they were not planning to promote it.

    On the other hand, I get affiliates who joined us 2 years ago or months back who start doing something on the program only because our regular updates have triggered an interest somewhere.

    If affiliate belongs to one program, merchant must assume that they are there because they want to promote it and way of staying on top of online competition is to make sure your affiliates are kept up to date with your top offers to push. Travel in particular is such a ever evolving industry where seasonality plays a huge part and it is our duty to educate travel affiliates on our program so that they sell it better. Those that do not want that piece information and to be kept up to date, probably are not worth having on the program anyway, that is probably 95% of those that are not performing anyway – how can they when they lack information what can mean competitive advantage.

    So, perhaps, affiliates should make up their mind and join only those merchants that they intend developing partnerships with, rather than joining every single program (and network) available when it is impossible to promote them all. This practice will surely lower amount of promotional emails from 600 to 50 perhaps or even less, which is surely manageable.

    I would rather work with just 30 affiliates that are committed to working with us and develop relationships with them than have 2000+ currently registered who really do not do anything and have no intention of doing anything and are probably complaining that they receive emails and it was them that joined in the first place. Beats me.

    Again, just my opinion.

    Sanela.

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