This Is How To Stay Away From Email Submit Scrubs

What's a Scrub? Basically in the email submit sector of the industry (actually all over the industry in whole) there is what is called a "scrub". Basically, some advertisers will apply a scrub to not accept a certain level or percentage of traffic. Now from my experience as a publisher and network owner, I've seen 3 types of scrub:

Global Scrubs - Applied to affect the entire offer across every channel of distribution of traffic the offer is receiving.

Network Scrub - Applied from the Advertiser explicitly to a certain network running the offer

Subid Scrub - A subid is a specific number every affiliate of a network is assigned. Some advertisers have the ability to scrub by exact affiliates.

Now the typical cliche to STAY OFF THE SCRUB would be to deliver HIGH QUALITY traffic, but unfortunately no matter what you do as a publisher in your promotion methods to try and deliver this type of traffic, you could in fact still face a scrub. That's because Email Submits are owned by various companies and these companies dont always run their offers and scrubs the same ways. I'm not going into who's who, and who does what around this industry but I will give you some tips here on how to stay on that email submit profitably for a period of longevity.

Tip #1 - Never Use These Two Words:

"Free" and "Official" - Sure it make you look like a legitimate authoritative figure in your ads and the word "free" will probably get you a ton of clicks but to be honest, most advertisers run a registration path on the backend of their offers that either require more information or users to complete other offers to receive the gift they are receiving. Stay away from both of those words on every level of your promotions. From landing pages to ad copy.

Tip #2 - Instead of a scrub, taking a lower rate

This will be between you and your affiliate manager. You AM is the negotiator for you. You find a hot offer with a considerable ROI but are facing a scrub from the advertiser because the quality is making them profitable, then negotiate a lower rate and see if that helps.

Tip #3 - Dont Use Deception - This is simple. Dont say anything that the offers itself doesnt promise. Dont offer something in return for filling out the offer. This will get you nailed quicker than anything. That lead is almost 99% of the time..worthless to the advertiser.

GETTING THE MOST OF YOUR TRAFFIC:

The three simple tips above will help you maintain a higher quality lead validation but sometimes even that isnt enough. Like I said, you have to be creative in this space. Getting the most out of YOUR traffic BEFORE the offer is going to be a deciding factor in the longevity of your campaign as well. Here are a couple of tips regarding that as well:

Capture the data yourself first - First things first. If you run search engine traffic, you are going to have to have a real site with content regarding the offer you want to run. However, you can run traffic to any page you want. Building a small email capture page is ideal. Capture the data yourself first so if you do face a scrub or lower rate, you still have your future mailings to rely on a bigger lifetime value of your leads.

PrePoppable Email Submits - This is pretty simple but a little hard to find. Ask your AM if you can get a pre-poppable version of the offer you are running. Almost always, you are going to run at a lower rate though. The value of a user typing in their email address into an offer is so much greater than a user giving you their info first, then having the form on the offer pre-populated with their email address and hitting submit. However, at a lower rate running a pre-pop you can do some amazing things. You capture the data yourself and you save time for the user not having to type their address twice.

Nothing ground breaking here. Nothing new. Just in a format easily readable so you can get more out of your email submit campaigns. In the end, like always, you are at the mercy of the advertiser. You need to know who your working with and how well they manage campaigns like these. For us, we've identified and cut the advertisers and networks who provide email submits with global scrubs. Those offers are highly brokered everywhere and work the same. You fire up one day at 30% conversion rates only to find in 24-48 hours you are at maybe 5-10%. Stay far away from those.

Second, if you run an offer on network A and face a scrub but split test the offer on Network B and stay steady on conversion rates for a week or longer, most likely network A is facing a network scrub. Not dogging anyone here but the negotiations level regarding these offers at that network is ****. Work with someone who will do the right thing and perform these negotiations versus saying "oh well, it's just an email submit".