The Critical Coupon Code Step

Affiliate marketing is becoming as competitive (and more affordable) as Pay Per Click marketing, Media Buys, email and other methods of marketing online. However, it takes more ingenuity and commitment from the merchants to make their affiliate program successful and profitable.

Those merchants that have stepped up and taken responsibility for their program, and the affiliates in it, have probably hired a fulltime manager and find monitoring, maintaining and scanning for fraud to be a daily job. One thing not to forget is the usefulness and necessity of developing strong tools and high converting offers for your affiliates. If a merchant lacks the expertise and the necessary strong skills required to successfully run an affiliate program, chances are they are missing critical steps, like developing a quality data feed and offering affiliates coupon codes.

Affiliate coupon codes are a key factor in promoting an active quality affiliate program. Merchants use these (or they should be!) coupon codes in many aspects of their marketing strategies (like ezines, newsletters, regular emailings, and other ad campaigns) to offer discounts to their consumers, yet most merchants neglect other revenue generating channels like their affiliate program. Affiliates love these coupons as it creates loyalty, high conversion rates, stickiness for their website, and especially, fresh content for the search engines to lap up!

One thing to remember above all else is that you need to make sure you religiously keep your coupons up to date in your affiliate tracking software. I outlined a solid plan for looking into the future of your coupon campaigns below, but this is pointless unless you follow through with these strategies. Imagine a potential consumer becoming bitter because the coupon code he found online has expired, and he has no alternative. Or, missing a critical shopping time of the year, where coupon codes can mean a conversion rate increase of even 1%. These are only 2 examples and reasons why you need to stay on top of this strategy.

How do you distribute these coupons to your affiliates? The best thing to do is be prepared. Plan ahead and make a promotional calendar for a minimum period of 3 months. This is important to revisit every month and add future weeks/months often. The Goal is to NEVER let your affiliates display a bad coupon code! This promo calendar is a piece of cake to maintain once you get the format developed.

First column: Coupon Code, This is what the consumer has to enter during the checkout process to get the discount.

Second column: Coupon Text, this is the text that describes the offer, for example: “Get $10 off any order over $100 enter coupon code xxx during checkout!”

Third Column: Coupon URL, this is the landing page or URL in which to send affiliate traffic. If you really want to be aggressive with your coupon code marketing you will have specially designed landing pages per coupon code or create your affiliate links with coupon codes embedded in the URL’s!

Fourth Column: Start date, this is the date in which the coupon code starts.

Fifth Column: Expiration Date, this is the date in which the coupon code expires. This is an important step that is usually overlooked; affiliates need this expiration date so they can rotate their “stock” and keep their sites up to date.

Once you have this created, start sharing it with your affiliates. Talk about it in your newsletters, the affiliate marketing communities, you can even make it downloadable from your affiliate interface if your aggregator has that flexibility. Just make sure you update it often, and make sure your coupon codes work and are setup when they need to be. I will often just create the coupon codes within the e-commerce software while I develop the promo calendar; it ensures a 100% uptime.

Affiliates will do creative things with these coupon codes; create a comparison site, a coupon depot or incentive site. CouponCraze.com has done an excellent job incorporating the affiliate coupon codes from hundreds of merchants to offer to their website visitors.

Once you start providing these to your affiliates you will be assured to get a few affiliates requesting an Exclusive coupon code. This is an awesome step for your affiliate program and you should definitely do whatever it takes to make this happen.

Ian Larsen is the owner of http://www.couponfeeder.com, the only distribution solution for aggressively marketing coupon codes to your affiliates. 100% compatible with every affiliate tracking network or software and total assurance your coupons are active! Merchants for a Free 30 day trial enter referral code “NetTraction” when signing up.