Most marketers nowadays are very data driven. In our current world we have managed to break almost everything down and use analytics to make informed decisions. Sports, like baseball, have become so analytically driven that professional clubs are hiring data scientists left and right to work for them and help them discover the next great hitter or pitcher.
In the e-commerce world, valuable affiliate marketers will always follow the data and promote the merchants that help them maximize the returns from their traffic. While all affiliate marketers operate in different niches and have different traffic, the statistics they use to determine who they want to promote remain the same.
Today we arere going to cover the four types of affiliate program stats that help affiliate marketers and how you can work these statistics into your affiliate newsletters and get them in front of your publisher partners.
Before diving into the stats, let’s break down the standard affiliate newsletter. When we create affiliate newsletters we generally like to lay them out in a specific format:
- Overview – This section serves as your introduction and is where you can take one to two sentences to acknowledge your affiliates and how much you value all the work they do for you.
- News – Right after your overview you want to make sure you cover any new news regarding your affiliate program and/or your website in general.
- Performance Statistics – Several of the helpful stats we’ll talk about today in this post will fall into this section of your newsletter. You can also use this section to shout out any contest winners/top performers if you so desire. Also, remember to refrain from sharing any sensitive information as these newsletters go out to everyone.
- Promo – Use the promo section to highlight any bonuses, contests, and affiliate-geared promos that are new since you deployed your last newsletter.
- Links – It’s always very helpful for affiliates to quickly grab their tracking links right from your newsletters. This is where you include text links and/or banners with the cut-n-paste code beneath them or at least detailed instructions on how they can be retrieved.
- Miscellaneous Tool/Technique – This could be an info packet, helpful article or any tool/technique that your affiliates can easily grab and use to strengthen their content/promotions.
- Conclusion – The closing section serves as a place to reinforce any key information and remind your affiliates that you’re there to support them and help them succeed. This is also the place where you would display your contact information so that they can get ahold of you easily.
We will allude to these sections of the affiliate newsletter when talking about where our helpful stats best fit.
1. Product Performance Stats
If you’re a merchant that sells more than one product then you should absolutely let your affiliates know which products you sell the most. This is a perfect example of a statistic that can be easily forgotten since it seems so obvious to you. You see your numbers everyday and can quickly think that these product performance stats are common knowledge; however, until you share them with your affiliates they will have no idea which products perform the best.
By sharing which products perform best you are giving your affiliates the best opportunity to succeed so they can prioritize their efforts around the products that are moving. Sharing information like this can easily be done within the performance statistics section of your newsletter. It can also be shared within the links section since you can call out these top-performing products by sharing links to them.
2. Overall Website Conversion Rate & EPC
On site conversion rate is probably the single most helpful statistic for an affiliate. It’s a straightforward measurement that communicates to an affiliate how often they should be able to convert sales when they send their traffic to your site. Knowing the conversion rate will also help an affiliate calculate their earnings per click. Earnings per click (EPC) is a statistic that an affiliate can take for one brand and line it up side by side with other brands to determine which brands are going to be the best use of their traffic.
If your site enjoys a healthy conversion rate, we highly recommend sharing this information with your affiliates. It will instantly make your program more attractive to them and give inactive affiliates a reason to give you a closer look. You can include conversion rate and average program earnings per click information in any of the top three sections of your newsletter. In can be worked into the overview as something you mention in every newsletter. It can be worked into the news section as something to quickly grab attention. It can also be featured in the performance statistics section.
3. Creative Statistics
Another great performance statistic to share with your affiliates is which creative is performing the best. You can share several types of creative statistics. Ask yourself these questions to determine which creative info you want to share in your newsletters. Which creative is receiving the most clicks/being used the most? Which creative has the highest conversion rate? Which creative has driven the most number of sales?
These creative statistics fit best within the “Links” section of your newsletter since they can be presented alongside the creatives themselves.
4. Product and Merchant Specific Statistics
The last set of statistics that can help affiliates are any that directly pertain to your specific products or sites. These kind of stats are best presented within the Miscellaneous Tool/Technique section of your newsletter in a digestible format. For example, let’s say you’re a company that sells a health product. What are the health stats that go along with this product? Are there studies you’ve conducted? Placing info and stats like this into an info packet for affiliates can be very helpful when they’re creating their own content to help sell your products.
Good luck with your affiliate program management efforts and feel free to email us or comment below with any ideas or questions.