Affiliate sales on site with contact number

[GuerrillaIM]

I am putting together a marketing plan for a site that will have a telephone number. Part of this plan I am working on now is the affiliate strategy.

I think having contact number on site will scare affiliates off as they might lose commision if someone calls up and orders over the phone.

Can anyone give me some advice on how to make this affiliate friendly? Should I setup a second site just for affiliates without a contact number? It's an ecommerce site so that will be a bit of work.

Not sure how best to handle this.

TIA

[RGallowitz]

Well, you should do what CJ and Market Health is doing. The Affiliate's ID is automatically coded/called into the template next to the phone number. When the customer phones, they HAVE to give the reference number on the page. The default reference number will obviously be our own company (if there was no referral from an affiliate).


Cheers
Reinhardt

[Catalyst eMarketing]

Originally Posted by RGallowitz

Well, you should do what CJ and Market Health is doing. The Affiliate's ID is automatically coded/called into the template next to the phone number. When the customer phones, they HAVE to give the reference number on the page.

Actually on CJ it's up to the individual merchants. Most don't have phone tracking but quite a few do.

GuerrillaIM. good that you are thinking about this as affiliates DO consider phone numbers a commission leak.

It's a fairly complicated process to do the phone tracking that was suggested though. I've consulted for some merchants and told them they needed to implement it.

1) Programming - you need to get someone to code your site so it parses the affiliate ID and shows it next to the phone number as a priority code (or whatever you choose to call it).

2) Phone sales - then the phone sales reps need to remember to ask for and record the ID. (This is the hardest part, to get them to follow through and actually do it.)

3) Manually enter the data - then someone needs to go through all the orders and manually enter the sales amount and affiliate ID to give them credit, entering it manually into your affiliate tracking solution.

So if you can't implement phone tracking, the other option is to send your affiliate traffic to a special landing page that has no phone number.

Hope this helps and best of luck!

[GuerrillaIM]

That is a nice idea with the code, but I can still imagine that a lot of affiliate will click link to see pitch page and will be put off by the number there.

Another issue is that I plan to have a newsletter signup on site, but it will still track affiliate cookies of products bought via email.

My plan was to try and get the site on as many affiliate networks as possible. I'm still unsure what to do to attract the most affiliates.

[iplusgold]

Well you could also easily set it up with PHP so that when an affiliate code is present in the url or in a cookie that it does not display the phone number.

[RGallowitz]

iplusgold that is a good idea, but remember...the reason for the phone number is because a good majority of the population still like to order via phone and not online.

Originally Posted by GuerrillaIM

That is a nice idea with the code, but I can still imagine that a lot of affiliate will click link to see pitch page and will be put off by the number there.

I don't see this happening, unless you scream on the page "you have been referred by an affiliate!". It can be a simple thing as "PROMO CODE: AffiliateID"

Cheers
Reinhardt

[GuerrillaIM]

I guess the best way to handle it would be to have 2 seperate numbers. 1 number would go direct to sales team, the other would go to an automated system that asked for them to enter their promo code before it re-directs them to the sales team.

Sounds pricey to setup though.