Here's a tip for affiliate program managers.
Every couple of months, I receive the following email from a program manager in the dating niche with the subject line “Affiliated with ProgramName.com”.
I've changed the real name to ProgramName.com in each case so as not to give unwarranted publicity to this affiliate program.
“To Whom It May Concern,
We have visited your web site and have found it to be of a very high standard. I would like to enquire as to whether you would like to buid a partnership with us?
Is it possible to place our banner or text link on your site? We will pay you $30 commission on each sale you drive to us and link back to you.
For more details, please email me at ProgramName[at]gmail.com or go to the below information link:
ProgramName.com
Thank you for your consideration and I look forward to your reply.
Yours sincerely,
First Name
Affiliate Manager
ProgramName.com”
OK, let's look at this request point-by-point.
- What the heck kind of grammar is ‘Affiliated with ProgramName.com'? Reading this subject line gives a really good indication of the author's lack of professionalism, and a really bad first impression.
- My name is not ‘To Whom it May Concern', it's Rosalind – a fact that is easily discovered if indeed this affiliate program manager had ‘visited your (my) web site' and gone to the ‘About Us' page which is linked from every page on the site.
- Speaking of having ‘visited your (my) web site' — which site exactly did you visit? She should have the courtesy to include the appropriate domain name just in case I am one of those affiliates with hundreds of sites (which I'm not, but they don't know that).
- “We will pay you $30 commission on each sale you drive to us and link back to you“. Huh? Some more weird English… but I got the jist that in addition to paying a set fee per sale, she was also offering to link back to my site. That set off the affiliate alarm bells, so I looked at the site and sure enough, she has a links page. Ugh. (More about that later).
- She includes only her first name in the message which is only a step above signing off with ‘Affiliate Manager” but still appears unprofessional.
What I've found particularly frustrating is that I wrote back to the affiliate manager the first time I received one of her emails, and explained that I would consider their dating service a valuable option for my site visitors, except for the fact that they were linking to other affiliate sites as well as their own merchants directly from the homepage.
I explained why such linking was a deal killer for any super affiliate and mentioned my affiliate marketing credentials (author, speaker and consultant) and offered to help her (at no charge) to make her affiliate program more attractive to all affiliates — and therefore more lucrative.
Not only did she not extend the courtesy of a reply, but despite several requests she has failed to remove my email address from her mailing list which makes her a spammer, which of course is the biggest deal breaker of them all.